The first ninety days

New starters arrive under an unstated pressure to demonstrate that the hiring decision was correct. The usual response is to look for something to fix and fix it fast. This produces a recognisable pattern: a visible early improvement, followed by three months of quiet friction with people whose reasons for the old arrangement were never asked about.

The alternative is not passivity. It is spending the period when your questions are free — and they are only free for about six weeks — acquiring the information that makes later decisions correct. For a new starter, how to be more proactive at work gives practical context on showing initiative without acting before understanding the team.

Weeks one to three: gather

Your single advantage in this period is that you can ask anything without it reflecting badly on you. That expires. Use it deliberately. Harvard Business Review provides additional management and career context.

• Meet everyone your work touches, including the people two steps away — the team that receives your output, the team that supplies your inputs, and whoever handles the exceptions.
• Ask each of them three questions: what do you need from this role, what went wrong last time, and what should I not change without talking to you first.
• Write down every process as it is actually done, not as documented. The gap between the two is the most valuable thing you will learn all year.
• Find out who is genuinely consulted before decisions. It is rarely identical to the organisation chart.
• Learn the vocabulary. Every organisation has terms, abbreviations, and named systems, and using them wrongly for six months quietly marks you as an outsider.

Weeks four to eight: agree what success is

By the end of the first month you should have an explicit, written agreement with your manager about what good looks like at six months. Not the job description — a short list of the specific things that, if achieved, would make this a clearly successful hire.

Most managers have not written this down and will be glad you asked. Propose a draft rather than requesting one: bring four or five items and ask what is missing and what is wrong. That conversation is worth more than any early win, because it aligns your effort with the thing you will actually be assessed on.

Ask directly how you will be measured, when the first formal review is, and whether the probationary period has criteria attached. If there are criteria, get them in writing.

The early win, done properly

There is a real case for delivering something visible in the first two months, and the case is about credibility rather than achievement: people extend more latitude to someone who has demonstrably finished something.

Choose it carefully. The right early win is small, entirely within your control, solves a problem someone else has named, and does not require anyone to change their habits. A report that people were assembling by hand. A recurring question you can answer once in writing. A backlog nobody owns.

The wrong early win is a redesign of something that has political history, chosen because it is the most obviously broken thing. There is usually a reason it is still broken, and finding out what that reason is after you have announced the fix is an expensive way to learn.

Managing upward

• Establish a regular one-to-one in the first week if one does not exist, and bring an agenda to each.
• Ask early how your manager prefers to receive information: written, verbal, detailed, headline first. Adapting to this is cheap and disproportionately effective.
• Report problems early and with a proposed option. The thing that damages new starters is not a problem, it is a manager learning about it from somebody else.
• Ask for feedback at week four rather than waiting for a review. "What would you adjust about how I have started?" gets a real answer while adjustment is still easy.

If it is going wrong

Sometimes the job is not what was described — the scope has shifted, the resource is not there, the manager has changed. The instinct is to wait it out and hope, and that is usually the wrong call, because the window in which a new starter can renegotiate scope is early.

Raise it plainly, factually, and with a proposed adjustment rather than a complaint. "When we talked about this role it included the reporting line for the two analysts. That has not happened and it affects what I can commit to on the migration. Can we agree which of the two versions I am doing?" Early, specific, and solvable. The same conversation at month seven is a grievance.