Feel Out of Depth in Your New Role?

Taking a new role, especially in a new company, is hard. From matching names to faces, fitting into the culture, to where the bathrooms are, it can be overwhelming.

You don’t even know where the gaps in your understanding are — you truly are at the deep end with no footing to help you

Having moved companies five times in seven years, I am no stranger to the feelings of uncertainty, inadequacy and insecurity when starting a new job.

The Day 1 Experience

I first ventured into the business world as a finance grad in an automotive manufacturing company.

I walked into the manufacturing plant two weeks after my finals, and I was on a massive come-down from the peak of examination adrenaline and boy I was not ready for what was about to hit me — the working world.

I did a joint degree with economics and had not taken any accounting modules on the course, so here I was heading into a finance role where I didn’t know my debits from my credits.

The finance department was a team of 15 led by a no-nonsense, high energy and skillful manager. The team included Management Accountants, Financial Accountants, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Treasury and me.

My prior knowledge of accountancy was wholly based on conversations with career advisors who would say things like “Accountants go through a rigorous recruitment and qualification process, and this is reflected in their high professional status” — Target Jobs Website (Actual Quote)

I saw the management accountant waving his hands in the middle of an animated telephone call to the plant manager. He explained that the high scrap cost in the month was due to parts from newly launched products that were more expensive compared to parts scrapped last month. He was flipping product designs on his desk covered with his notes as he was calling out individual components, the issues and the current improvement plans in place.

What? Is this what an accountant does? I have no engineering knowledge? Why and how did he know all this? Where were the VAT and expense claims conversations?

I could not compute. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Acknowledge that you Know Nothing

I was struggling to match names and job titles. I didn’t know what the departments were and what they did, I clearly didn’t understand what Finance does, I didn’t know who the customers were, I didn’t know what an engineer does — the list just kept going. And it got scary.

I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.

If you don’t know where the gaps are in your knowledge, you cannot make a plan to achieve a complete understanding

I needed to capture this endless enquiry within a framework. I needed to determine the boundary of my questions. And I eventually settled on this simple and straightforward question to guide me:

“What don’t I know?”

All my questions seemed to fit under this umbrella question; it provided an anchor for what I was trying to do.

I could now focus my learning in the attempt of answering this question. I now had a way of looking at this business operation to make everything fit.

Slowly, the function of the Finance department started to make sense. Then the Quality Department, Maintenance, Engineering, Logistics operations all started to take their place within this model and I began to see the scope of what I had to learn.

“What don’t I know?” became the guiding question that I’d work on every day.

Just like studying for an exam, I would focus on this question. And over the coming weeks and months, I felt like I’d started school again with the sheer amount of knowledge and experience I gained through active learning.

A year and a half later after that first step into the plant, I remember catching myself speaking in our regular Monday team meeting. “There’s an issue with the new design — two of our suppliers haven’t been able to produce to the required standard and it’s led to defected parts on the production line. These parts have broken some of our tooling and also created a high amount of scrap last week. The engineers are working to resolve it, in the meantime, our guys are manually reworking the defective parts, so we don’t stop the line. Our overtime is also going to increase this month as a result.”

Knowing the areas where I am lacking in knowledge and understanding has undoubtedly helped me in each one of my roles.

It provides a set of goals to work towards

It provides a structure to the sensory and informational overload in the first 12 months of starting a new role

It turns your job into a game where you can level up through knowledge

If you’re feeling out of depth, it’s because you don’t have a stable footing. In a job, that footing is your knowledge and understanding.

“What don’t I know?” is the lifejacket you use until you create that footing yourself.

So, what don’t you know?