Congratulations on Your Promotion! Now What?

Congratulations on your promotion! Do yourself (and your team) a favor, and start your new job off on the right foot.

Make a 90-day plan.

Hopefully, your new boss will help you with this, but there’s no reason you can’t make an onboarding plan for yourself, too (or instead).

Your plan should include meetings with the people you’ll have key working relationships with. A starter list would be: your boss, direct reports, peers, customers or clients, plus anyone who you work with on a regular basis or receive work product from. Think “key stakeholders.” These meetings are great for collecting insights about what’s working and not working, and they’ll help you understand the people, processes, and tools important to your new role.

You’ll also want to clearly understand the goals and expected outcomes for yourself and your team for the coming year as well as any projects that are in progress.

Integrate yourself with your team.

If you manage people, the practice of new leader integration can speed up onboarding and avoid awkward surprises & misunderstanding. New leader integration is a facilitated process where a leader helps the new team understand their style, preferences, and expectations, and the team members do the same. (If you’re curious about how new leader integration works, just ask!)

You’ll also want to have a team meeting to discuss things like how performance reviews will work, how frequently to have one-on-one and group meetings, and how to give and get feedback.

Make a “stupid list.”

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got about starting a new job was to keep a “stupid list.” In your first month on the job, make a list of everything you think is stupid or weird. Don’t immediately try to fix it (unless it’s illegal!); just be curious.

Then, put your list away, and after six months, take it out again (okay, I sometimes peek early!). When you reread your list, cross out all the things that make sense, given all that you’ve learned. You might be surprised by what’s actually not stupid, given the whole context.

Anything left on the list should go onto a new list – “stuff I’m going to change!”

Set new boundaries.

A new job means a new chance to set boundaries. If you’ve allowed work to creep into your evenings and weekends or you find you’re on call every vacation, it’s the perfect time to set some new expectations. For yourself as well as for your team.

When leaders and teammates model behaviors that show positive work-life balance (or integration, or whatever you like to think of it as), they’re putting their money where their mouths are.

Don’t forget to celebrate.

Getting a promotion is a big deal! Celebrate it! And not just because it’s fun, but because it helps create neural pathways that will help you get your next promotion. And your next!

What’s your best tip for someone who just got a promotion? Tell us in the comments below.