Know Your Focus: Sustain, Improve, or Disrupt

When stepping into a new role, it's critical to understand critical is to understand the boundaries/priorities of your new role. It's ideal to determine this during the interview to find out if the focus of this role is something you're excited about. This sounds obvious, but many people tend to make broad assumptions of either "I should just keep doing whatever the previous person was doing" or "I'm here to blow everything up and make it all new and bettter" -- either of these extremes may be right, but it's so critical that you invest in trying to decipher what success looks like. Some of that is simple tactics, like asking your boss early in your transition what success would look like, or more tactical questions like "For my next performance review, what accomplishments would lead you to give me a 5 out of 5?"

But there's also the nuanced context clues from everyone you talk to in the organization about the organizational, team, and supervisor expectations regarding continuity/stability vs. disruption.

For example, a CIO coming into an organization as an outside hire (and not a promotion from within) needs to navigate if the CEO and board is looking for someone to "keep the trains running on time", and maybe slim some costs, or maybe they're looking for some substantial cost cutting or capability improvements, or maybe they're looking for massive disruption ("wipe the slate clean" and rebuild the employee's technology experience). It feels obvious to determine this early on, but many employees make assumptions based on their previous roles and their preferences.

The book The First 90 Days discusses many other relevant priorities for someone stepping into a new role -- it's well worth your time to read this, or review a summary of it from a service like Blinkist.