Week 0 (thoughts on onboarding)

There’s a strong culture of weeknotes in government and I’ve been reading Frankie and Mike‘s on an off for years. Mine tend to be a mixture of magpieing and professional reflections so let’s see if I feel the need to shape them differently moving forward. To get me in the mood, here’s what I hope I get from my onboarding conversations next week:

Draw me an org chart For whatever reason (I blame Microsoft), org charts are hard to get a hold of and tend to hide in HR tools. But as someone who often thinks through diagrams, drawing and visuals, I find them useful. I was sent a couple of docs last week so made one up. It looks like I’ll be working as part of a function that is a little bit bigger than TPXimpact when I joined them back in 2023. I can wrap my head around that. I have no idea what my own team looks like yet but I think it might be around 20-40 people. I can also wrap my head around that as it’s the size of a busy classroom. I’m not a teacher and this isn’t school, it’s just a useful spatial analogy. I’ve always suffered from a little bit of face-name associative memory problems so having an org chart helps me make longer lasting visual connections too.

How fast are we going? Speed is relative. For some organisations ‘move fast and break things’ is de rigueur, for others, reducing attrition/lawsuits/bad leavers is best. I’ve worked in both kinds of environments and I can adjust up or down, but it’s nice to get a sense of that quickly. The KPIs might hint at this but I find they don’t tell the full story. I also get a feeling for this from the values/mission statements, the Sharepoint folders, the Slack structure or the handover notes. Everything is a weak signal that over time adds up to a more complete picture of how fast I’m expected to go.

Where is the fire? There is always a fire somewhere. I don’t need to know why it’s there to begin with, and I don’t even need to put it out, but it’s useful to know its location relative to me, my team, my function. It’s also helpful to know what firefighting culture might exist, but that takes time and I don’t expect to glean that in my first weeks.

I intend to be in the Canary Wharf office every day of the week. I hope people will come say hi if they spot me. I’ll probably be wearing big earrings.