[MUSIC] Now that you've finished the first two parts of your personal onboarding plan, the Get Ready phase, and the Get Set phase, now we're ready to talk about how you're going to go on your first day and work. You know, Sophocles said, success is dependent on effort. Your early preparation is complete now, and its time to focus on your first days. This effort and the amount of effort that you expend on that first day on the job and that first week on the job truly will make a difference. You've planned for it, and now you have to do the details to execute it. Now we're ready to launch the piece on goal. This is where we're going to look at the detailed steps you're going to take and confirm the plans you already have in place, so you can make that proper first impression during the first days and the first weeks on your job. Coming onto a new job from outside the company is a strange experience in some ways, because you'll be the junior person in your department. You'll have the least seniority of anyone. And in every organization there's jobs that have to be done and sometimes get allocated to the person that's the least senior. You may have to represent your organization at a trade show, or at a social event. And it may be, not be something that you've thought was going to be in your job description, but it comes with the territories of the least senior person. So just go with it, roll with it, it's temporary and everything will be fine after that. Entering an organization as a millennial presents some special challenges for you. A number of our studies have shown that millennials are a very, very special group of people, and you can be fortunate to be in that group. However, 68% of non-millennials surveyed, believe that millennials are not as motivated on their job. And if you ask millennials the same question, they will say my cohort is the same way. This is about 55% of my people and my cohort are not as motivated as people who are non-millennials. So you can take this negative perception and turn it into a positive by your performance. Continue to work diligently, meet expectations, and people will be surprised that you don't behave like a typical millennial. You know you are your best asset. The things that you demonstrate, the way you reinforce the first impressions on your job, will continue to build, to reinforce how people perceive you and the positive thoughts they have about you on your job. So think about your genuine enthusiasm, come in with a great attitude and a controlled sense of ambition. Ambition is a tricky thing to deal with, because you have to have ambition to be upwardly mobile. On the other hand if you show ambition in the wrong places, people are turned off by it. And when they're turned off by ambition, people have ways to sidetrack you. So be careful how you control your ambition. Do you smile frequently? People will notice. Alicia had been on her job for about a year with a consulting firm. She was going through her very first really deep performance appraisal. And her boss said, Alicia, you've done a great job. You outed, outperformed all the expectations that we had for your work, and the people really like working with you. One of the reasons that people migrate towards you is because you're smiling all the time. You have a great disposition, keep it up. We love people like you in our organization. So here's a smile just being added on to performance and Alicia really believed that her braze, that was better than normal, may have been partially driven by the fact that her disposition was good and she smiled at people. So let's take a look at some other things that might be useful to you in your behaviors. Be confident and be sure and reinforce how people perceive you. You've got the plan put together about how you're going to show up on the first day and the behaviors you're going to use, will you be able to reinforce that over the weeks and months after you show up on the first day? Do you have a habit of saying thank you to people? It should be just second nature to you. So you should find yourself saying thank you as a, as a, really a token of respect for people. And you giving them respect, they will give you respect back. Most people have a pretty good system for remembering names. If you don't have one, you should figure one out. The people who are memory experts tend to use a technique where they associate a name with a picture. A visual of some kind. And they see the person again that visual will pop back in their mind it'll link 'em back to the name of the person who's, who's name they really want to remember. And lastly, there're some techniques for shaking hands. Several ideas here. The first one is, shake hands long enough with someone so that you can see the color of their eyes. Number two, think about the firmness of the grip that you're going to use when you're shaking hands with people. A technique that was brought to me by Mark Horstman, a management consultant who coaches, coaches managers, said, take a normal baseball bat. Hold it by the handle and hold it horizontal to the floor. The firmness of the grip that it takes to hold it horizontal, is the exact grip that you want to have when you shake hands with people. And yes, by the way, women and men should have that same firmness of grip. The last idea is to get people to remember your names. My favorite example of getting people to remember your name, comes out of James Bond movies. Think about when James Bond meets someone. He will reach out to that person with his hand. He'll say, Bond. James Bond. Repetition. Pause. It's very deliberate, so people will remember your name. You give 'em a technique to remember your name as you're going forward. Some years ago, I learned the importance of treating everyone the same. If your style of remembering people is thinking about who's important and who's less important, it gets very complicated. It takes up space in your brain, which is already crowded. If you think that everyone is important, and you treat 'em that way, they love it. People always react positively to being treated as an important person. And you no longer have to remember how they fall on the hierarchy, and more importantly, you won't make a mistake of treating someone as a less important person, who's a very important person. It's a simple way to use your brain and effectively go forward from that. On your first day on the job, you're going to meet a number of new people. These are your colleagues who you've been working with everyday. They'll be additional people from the ones who are suggested to you, by your manager when you had your pre onboarding conversation with her. Your affinity group will begin to grow, it will begin to grow quite rapidly. The negative part about this, is that there's some people in your affinity group that are going to sort of attach themselves to you. You'll be perceived as a high potential person, someone who's going to rise through the organization very rapidly, and they're going to want to ride along in your coat tails. They're going to want to be your friend. And so the way they're going to do that, is they're going to invite you to coffee frequently, they're going to take you to lunch many days during the week. And so you're going to have to resist this to be sure that you keep a wide variety of friends in your finite group. In that wide variety of friends, you also want to have people that are outside your company. People you've known for years, maybe some old time classmates, could be relatives, could be friends of relatives, but they should be people in different areas. Maybe it's someone in accounting, or maybe in consulting, or maybe a lawyer. I've had good friends that are in the military, I had friends that are in the religious orders, and my favorite friend is someone who writes musicals on Broadway. Very different perceptions of the world that make my life richer, make my view of my job richer, and make me a better employee. So think about that affinity group, affinity group and how you can grow this to go forward. Professor Fred Luthens at the University of Nebraska, conducted a study several years ago, to try and determine why certain people were promoted and others were not promoted. During this study he asked about 400 managers to keep track of how they spend their time. He asked them to put in four buckets or four categories. The first one was just simply administrative work. The second was how they, the time they spent communicating motivating, coordinating with people. The third one was their human resources area. Recruiting and coaching people, and the fourth was how much time they spent networking, sharing information and getting information from other people. Years later when he went back to see who was promoted and where they spent their time, it turned out that people who was highly promoted spent the bulk of their time, the most of their time in networking. To better understand the implications of the Lutheran study, I was able to locate a study by our favorite professor Robert Kelly, who you heard about in the previous segment. Kelly had studied people who were employed by Lucent Technologies. The old AT&T company, in New Jersey. His goal was trying to find out who are the star managers, and why were they star managers? In interviewing these people, he was, he found this interesting trend, and they were the people that were offering advice. They were offering to help other people in other departments and offering information to other people. And in return for that, people liked them, they returned their phone calls, they returned their emails faster than they did most other people. If you put these two studies together, you'll find there's a link. The link is the people who are the good networkers, with the ones who were sharing information. So it turns out that networking, the positive part of networking, is sharing. It's sharing first, and in return for that, you may get something back. Now the corollary of this, is you can't do sharing with people with the idea that they owe you. So if you're going to provide information to somebody, and you say, okay you owe me for giving you this. It will not work. You have to be giving that information to them because you think it'll improve them in their job, or maybe the department, or maybe the project that they're working on. So think about networking as giving, rather than receiving. Let's take a look at some ideas that will help you expand your network and make it more effective. Number one, be conscious about expanding your network. It never can be too large. Every opportunity you have to add someone to your network, take it. Number two, networking is about giving. It's not about receiving. Ultimately you may receive something back, but the best networking is like servant leadership. It's providing something of value to someone else with no expectation that they're going to give you anything back. Number three, volunteer to be on task forces. These are places where you're going to meet new people. People from different parts of the company that you've never seen before. Choose learning opportunities for your new job. As you're looking at opportunities to move ahead in a job beyond the one you're just starting, what priorities will you use for your selection? Will it be prestige or money? Will it be the opportunity to build a larger network and learn a lot more as you go forward? And then last, be sure you understand and look for and be familiar with the people in your organization who are the connectors. These are the nodes, these are the folks that know different people in lots of different segments. They will be very helpful to you, and they will be glad to have you as one of the links to what they're doing in the organization. In most any new job, on the first weeks or two weeks, you're going to find something that's going to be disappointing to you. It's not exactly what you imagined when you were thinking about your dream job. You were thinking about the exciting part. But, most work is just the routine part of getting the work done, keeping the trains running on time, as they say. And you have to accept that. The fun parts will come, they'll be along with the job. As you see the disappointing parts and you're a little bit upset about it, relax. It's probably just temporary. If after a few weeks you still feel that way, then you will need to talk to a trusted adviser and see what you can do about changing the mix of your job. But small disappointments should not bother you at all. And most important, if you're talking to your friends about it, your colleagues, don't whine. Don't be a whiner in anyway. No one likes to work with a whiner, and certainly you don't want to work with a whiner. So work your way through these minor disappointments, and they'll be just fine for you. As we're wrapping up this section, let's take a look at the tips and takeaways that may be useful to you. Success starts with a good first impression. You've planned it, now execute it. While you're working on your job the first few weeks, be sure you don't forget the larger perspective. It'd be so easy to be wrapped up in the day-to-day work, be sure you have the balance between the short term and the long term. Remember to say thank you. Look in people's eyes when you're shaking hands, and smile as much as you can. Continue to refine your social habits, and use them just, unconsciously, so they're just part of your make up. And last, continue to build this network. This network is rich. Your new affinities will be special to you, and you'll never know in the future when one of them will come back and be very, very helpful to you when you least expect it.
