Arriving With Three Questions Written Down

Why they disappear

Not because they get answered. Because they stop seeming like questions.

In week one it is obvious to you that two products do the same thing and nobody can say which to use. By week six that has become how things are, you have developed a working habit around it, and the oddity has dissolved into the background in exactly the way it has for everybody else.

This happens quickly and it happens without being noticed. It is the single most reliable thing about joining an organisation.

The three worth writing

What does this place actually sell, in one sentence? You will be surprised how often there is no agreed answer, and the disagreement between the answers you get is more informative than any of them.

Who decides what I work on? The org chart will say one thing. The honest answer is usually a combination of two or three people and a process, and the gap between the two is the shape of the organisation.

What does good work look like here? Ask three people. If the answers agree, you have joined somewhere unusual. If nobody has a ready answer, that is not a failing of theirs; it is a fact about the place, and it tells you that your performance will be assessed on something nobody has articulated.

How to ask them

Not all at once, and not in week one, where they sound like an interview conducted in the wrong direction.

One at a time, in a conversation that was happening anyway, with the framing that makes them easy to answer:

Can I ask you something I am still working out — who actually decides what the team picks up next? I can see the process but I am not sure I have the real version.

"I am still working out" and "the real version" both give the other person permission to be candid, and both are true.

Keeping the list

The document matters more than the three questions.

Everything that puzzles you goes in it, dated, as it occurs. No effort at tidiness. By the end of the first month it will have thirty or forty lines, and perhaps six of them will still look strange to you — those six are worth something.

What this is for later

Two things, and the second is the one that pays.

The obvious use is as your question list: most of it gets answered in the first month, cheaply, by asking.

The other use arrives in month three, when somebody asks how your onboarding went, or what should be improved for the next person. You will have nothing to say, because the difficulties will have ceased to exist for you. The document will have thirty dated lines, and it is the only honest answer anybody will get.

The question you will not ask

In the panel above one question went unasked: what everybody complains about.

It is the single most useful question a new person can ask and there is a window of about ten days in which it can be asked without sounding like an invitation to disloyalty. After that you are one of the people who would be complaining, and asking turns into participating.

If you want the answer, ask it early, of one person, privately, and then do nothing with it for a month.

Where to keep it

Somewhere you will actually open, and not in the company's systems.

This is a document about an organisation, written by somebody who has been there two weeks, and parts of it will be unflattering and wrong. It belongs in your own notes, on your own account, for the same reason a diary does.

That is not secrecy. Nothing in it is improper. It is that a private record stays honest, and a record that might be read becomes a performance within about a fortnight — which would remove the one quality that makes it worth keeping.

If something in it turns out to be worth saying to somebody, say it in your own words at the right moment, in the way the note on the closing window describes. Do not hand over the document.