In-House Transition: Three Key Questions to Ask During Your First 30 Days

You might spend your first week at your new in-house gig just getting through the administrative side of entering a new workplace. Especially now, with COVID-19 requiring work-from-home in many cases, it can be a challenge just to meet your new coworkers.

But when you go in-house, you have to hit the ground running in order to learn the business you've just joined. Sure, you were hired for your superior subject matter expertise and lengthy experience, but now you're going to be asked to use that expertise and experience to guide the business, not just provide options.

Your first 30 days in your new role are critical to assuring your success going forward. Here are three key questions you should be asking (and getting meaningful answers to) in order to assure you'll be seen as a strategic business partner in no time flat.

1. What Is The Enterprise's Strategy?

Before you know anything, you've got to understand where the business is now and where it is (hopefully) headed. How does the business measure success? Who are the key stakeholders? How does the business want to change or evolve its customer base, its services, or its market position? Unless you clearly understand the enterprise's short and long-term goals, strategic advice will be impossible to give.

If your enterprise has a written strategic plan, ask for a copy review it and speak to the stakeholders responsible for reporting on progress. Understand where the business is in meeting the goals stated in the plan and understand whether circumstances have changed. Remember that the enterprise may have responded to unanticipated market conditions, an economic shift, regulatory changes or even a disruption since the date of the written plan, so get a current understanding of where the business stands versus what the plan anticipated or hoped for.

If your enterprise doesn't have a written plan, meet with as many internal stakeholders as you can to understand whether there is buy-in to a single strategy or whether many points of view co-exist. Where many points of view remain, try to distill areas of agreement and check out your assumptions with each stakeholder and ask probative questions to better understand areas of disagreement.

2.What Is The Business Model and How Can My Expertise Make the Model Even Better?

First and foremost, you have to understand how the business makes money. What are the service or product lines? Who are its customers? What other stakeholders affect the bottom line? Once you understand the business model, you can better understand which areas you can assist in to streamline processes and ease strategic pain points to better facilitate growth.

Process upgrades are usually easy to spot, but you'll need to get buy-in from other key stakeholders before making a play to change the systems already in place. As an attorney you may recognize a choke point that holds up contracts in review for weeks or months that could be easily resolved with a few process changes. As an accountant, you may be able to suggest software to streamline a startup's expense accounting to free up time for billable employees. An HR professional may recognize a deficiency in onboarding that could ease team dynamics over the long haul.

Strategic upgrades are the most valuable way you'll contribute to the organization. These are ideas that assist the business in getting where it wants to go through problem solving and practical application of your expertise. If, for example, your company's leadership wants to make a transformational acquisition, your job is to find ways you can assist in making that a reality, not throwing water on the deal. Wherever you can use your talent to help grease the proverbial skids or identify new strategic opportunities.

3. What Is The Enterprise's Appetite For Risk?

This question is crucial for all in-house professionals who will be giving business advice to the enterprise. Your job as a strategic business partner will be to combine your subject matter expertise, judgment and experience with your knowledge of the business, its strategy and business model to give advice consistent with the enterprise's appetite for risk.

It's a simple formula, but a delicate one to execute well and one that absolutely cannot be executed without a timely and accurate understanding of how the enterprise views risk right now. The risk threshold of your company may surprise you, so make sure you are having a variety of conversations with as many different stakeholders as possible to get the most accurate understanding of this metric.

While startups and PE-backed firms are generally thought to have a strong bias for high-risk-high-reward strategy, unless you've actually investigated the current landscape, you can't have a complete understanding of where the business stands today. Also, even if you're joining a company typically thought of as conservative, it's always possible a recent market shakeup or disruption has made leadership reconsider its position regarding strategic risk.

Once you understand the current appetite for risk, you'll be able to give more relevant and useful advice to the business and, as you learn more about the complexities of the business model and strategy, may also start to understand the nuances of when it might make sense to make a more or less conservative recommendation, even if that recommendation isn't strictly in line with the company's risk threshold.