New job blues

[Orangeeiknarf]

I started a new job at the start of June and felt really optimistic. The team I am managing have quite old fashioned ways of doing a lot of their work so I was really looking forward to gradually bring it more efficient and introduce more streamlined and simple ways of working.

Now I feel deflated and like I've fallen at the first hurdle. It is becoming increasingly apparent that a lot of them don't have a good grasp on the every day processes let alone the anomalies which often come up. This is making it really difficult for me to learn their role and honestly I don't really know where to start. My line manager hasn't been much help. I wondered if anyone had experienced something similar and how best to approach this.

Any ideas? I'm at the pathetic sobbing in the loo stage of the day.

Take your time, don't try to change things overnight.

Sounds like a good starting point might be helpful to map out the processes that people are following at the moment, both to clarify your (and their!) understanding of their current roles, and then to identify how things can be improved.

I was always somebody who looked to wrk efficiently in the earlier part of my career and when I became Head of Department, I always looked to improve processes and make efficiencies wherever possible.

In my most recent job, where I came in as Head of Finance, I set up meetings with team members, had them walk me through there processes and I identified the ones that I thought were most clumsy / time consuming / error prone and worked on those, one by one. I have done similar a few times and you know once the team see that their lives are going to be made easier, they generally have got on board and start to make suggestions themselves too.

Back to basics and patience.
If they don't understand their jobs, that's a huge issue!

Don't expect this to be fixed over night.

You’ve only been there 2 weeks.
Go back to basics, learn the job from those already there, see how they do it, even it’s it’s wrong. Learn your teams strengths and weaknesses. Work out all the nuances of how people learn, interact, missing knowledge bases, missing processes and equipment. Then sit down and draw up an improvement plan and tackle things slowly in small bits, otherwise you will risk alienating everyone and stressing yourself out even more. Slow and steady change is better than a messy sledgehammer approach.