19
votes
New job advice
I recently started a new job and have realized I'm not entirely sure what the scope of work is. I applied to a role that I was very well suited for and had a very clear objective. I went through like 8 rounds of interviews for them to decide that the team I applied for was CET and I am PT, which likely wouldn't work. So they made me a position with a team on the US west coast, be it a very different one. The salary is still wild so I took it, particularly in this job market, but now I'm having a hard time sussing out what the extents of my position actually are.
Has anyone been in this position before or have advice on how to narrow the scope of your work if it's a bit amorphous? Cheers!
Ambiguity is likely to invite specification, or at least tasking. The one who specifies the tasking is liable to select the scopes of work that will be maximally advantageous to them personally. The more tasking that you allow others to create for you, the less likely it is that your tasking will be advantageous and/or enjoyable to you.
Instead, you have to find ways to fill the void with that which you will find meaningful. To do this you have to create consensus around your desired scopes of work with colleagues, supervisors, and the people who will be customers of your work product.
Many people do not get the opportunity to define their own roles, having been accustomed to their freedom and agency being tightly constrained by their employer. If you find that these constraints have not yet been applied to you, ensure that others do not casually or accidentally (re)define your role in ways that you would find unpleasant.
The worst is when people, out of a sense of obligation, take on duties that they do not enjoy out of a sense that they should. Failure is far better than success, in these cases, as success will doom them to a heavy set of golden handcuffs attached to the thing that they never wanted to do in the first place.
At the other end of the spectrum, choosing for yourself the things you enjoy and, due to your skill and great enjoyment, delivering high-quality work products to others with whom you enjoy working guarantees that, while your situation holds, you will find it rewarding and enjoyable. The good feeling will have a contagion effect to those who work closest to you, and they will feel happier for having had the opportunity to work with you.
You will spend an enormous portion of your life working. The more enjoyable you can make it for yourself, the happier you will be and the more energy you will have for other important aspects of life.
So many times this! I was in this exact situation a couple years ago, with an instructor position that only (on paper) made demands of me for a few weeks of the first year I was to be there. I asked what else I was to do, and got the vague response that I would work on curriculum (but I didn't yet know anything that I could make changes to) and support the sales team.
I took it upon myself to listen to people around me, and when I heard someone say "someone really ought to just ___", I would write that down. Then, when one of those things either appealed to me or felt like something that I could easily accomplish, I would just go ahead and do that thing. When someone said (or I just noticed) that something sucked, I would brainstorm with coworkers about how to fix it and then fix it if I could.
I turned that first year with little to do into a very productive time where I established myself as the guy with a lot of decent ideas that was happy to help anyone. The ideas I had have led to me developing several successful product lines that we now sell, and (crucially) I now always have a back pocket excuse for any time I am lagging on a project that doesn't excite me, i.e. that I am working on a new product.
All of that to say: set your own goals (within the bounds of what provides value to decision makers and what you find interesting, satisfying or fun) anytime you get the chance. It's very freeing, and when done right makes everyone's lives better.
Thanks I will definitely go into this week with this mindset. I'm really happy I posted, these have been great answers.
Network immediately.
Over delivery early and often.
Your first impression is long lasting.
Good luck 🍀
If you're able to share a job title (or generic equivalent if company-specific), and potentially the industry, it would help with specifics.
Generally, I would start out slowly. It is easy to expand your scope and expectations, while nearly impossible to contract or reset boundaries. Is this a completely new position made just for you? As in, did they create a totally new {Title/Scope} for you that did not exist anywhere in the company before? If that's the case, likely nobody really knows what your scope is yet. Either way, check in with your direct boss first to find out what their and the company's expectations are for you, even in nebulous terms. Look at what people talk about for {Title} online, ideally from the same or a similar industry. And again, start out slowly. Start with just the clearest core set of responsibilities while you get settled in, have at it, and see how that goes for a while. Check in with your boss regularly to see if they're happy with where you're focusing. If you're sailing through it and twiddling your thumbs to the point where it's a problem, see what's the next step beyond that core that you could add, only a little at a time. Take a default stance strongly against scope creep unless it's obviously justified or part of a clear promotion path. Eventually you'll find your balance or the company will figure out what exactly they want from you.
Thanks for the advice. It's a very specific title and I'm not sure what the generic would be, Director of Wildfire Solutions and Partnerships, and broadly in the assessment and verification of natural resources space. Specifically for power utilities. Lord help me if anyone there is on here as it's a very niche field.
The position was made for me and it come with like 3 roles: 1. Leading partnerships with other companies in the space (read, competitors), 2. Defining strategy for the product rollout and GTM, and 3. being the interface between customers and product team (a la the guy from Office Space). I ran a company that developed a very similar product but got hit hard by funding changes with the Trump administration during his initial blitz. We closed shop and now I'm here.
I think they just saw my experience and decided they wanted me for the expanding team in the American West, so they've kind of cobbled the holes in their current capacity together into this job. They literally made the job description after making me the offer, which was very weird.
I'm meeting with our COO 3 times a week to make sure I'm getting where I need to be, but it's clear most folks aren't sure what to do with me and many have made moves to try and offload some of their workload onto me (expected, but trying to manage volume). I'm still one day in and mostly just trying to be the fly on the wall.
Given the wildly different fields and roles I have very little to add except for maybe one thing.
@carsonc already gave excellent advice about you being able to define the role for yourself. Being a fly on the wall can help a great deal there. Signalling you are in the process of on-boarding and defining your role could actually be part of this. One thing that to me always has been a green flag for people in new leadership positions is when they take the first period doing very little other than sitting in meetings, listening, maybe asking some questions. Specifically meetings where they aren't likely to join in the future but are relevant in understanding how a company functions. In your case likely various product teams.
Shadowing the company as a whole so to speak instead to get a good understanding of all the moving parts. As I said, to me that sort of behavior always was a good signal and I think it also does help you identify all the points in the company where you can make an impact.
Totally new position, definitely follow the advice for scoping what you want from @carsonc. At only one day in, you can buy some time before accepting or rejecting offloaded work from people by telling them you're still getting up to speed on the current operations (which is also true). If your COO is open to it, I think focusing discussions on more high-level organization direction possibilities will be useful to see where you can add value and in a way that suits you.
Yeah, day 2 really helped me get a better bearing on the role. Like night and day from day 1. I was able to identify who is looking for help and who is just offloading work, and find some allies here. I think by the end of the week I should have a much better grasp of how I want to frame and narrow my scope.
How long has it been since you started? They might be giving you a chance to read up on the documentation and get used to the way the company does things before they ramp up your workload.
I naturally look for things that could be improved--you could spend the extra time doing that and building PoCs for alternative process flows to pull in if you ever get tasked to work on something related to those side projects. Or mention one morning that you had an idea and spent a few hours on it (even though it has been slowly cooking over the last few months) [but even if the thing you made is really cool and better than the current way of doing things it doesn't always mean that it will actually be seen as useful to the wider org]
Today was day 2. Day one was a bit of a mindfuck, I got dropped into meetings with no onboarding and at one point was told that they "hoped I brought my parachute" as they were just dropping me in. At no point were things clarified and internal documentation is pretty disorganized. I schedule some one on ones today that were massively helpful and met some pretty great folks. I learned that there has been a good amount of legwork done on the product that I'm taking to market, but that pretty much the reason for my hire is the lack of structure for it. There is also a ton of siloing between teams. No one uses the same anything and teams don't understand the other teams workflows or doc management. It's been pretty wild today. Soooo yeah, pretty much going to spend the month working with the teams to understand why their processes look how they do (I'm sure there is logic here somewhere), why things have been ducktaped together the way they have (I'm sure there are good reasons, maybe comms or resourcing issues?), validating if the current iteration meets the needs for our clients, and then get all the teams to co-develop a workflow that at least bridges between styles. It's wild to see a 100 person team with less structure than our old little 10 person team.
Wow, I have no advice to give but I just wanted to say that this sounds like a very big challenge, but also very exciting, and I'm happy for you that you get to tackle it! You seem to be going in with a good mindset. You got this!
You just started, uncertainty and confusion is normal. Ask for guidance if you're unsure, I'm sure your manager will be able to help.
I kind of tried, but my manager is 4 months in and from a completely different industry so I believe there is some assumption that I'll be the one filling in the knowledge gaps. I did chat with some of the leads from other teams today though and they were great and very insightful.