ON-THE-JOB SPECIAL..How to Survive Being the New Person at Work

How to Survive Being the New Person at Work

1.     The first thing you have to do at your new job—and this applies to everyone, from the new boss to the summer intern—is learn people’s names. A former editor of mine once told me a story about meeting Bill Clinton back when he was governor of Arkansas and then running into him years later, after he’d become the president (I had no idea it was possible to ‘run into’ a president). Clinton is so adept at networking that he not only recalled my editor’s name but also the name of his wife, how they first met, and what they both did for a living. I, on the other hand, worked for six months with someone I knew only as “the tiny woman with freckles.”
“You have to keep a list,” says manners expert Thomas P Farley. “You’ll be meeting 50 or 60 people on your first day at work, and you can’t be expected to remember everyone. When you’re back at your desk, jot a few notes down.”

2.     Next you have to figure out what they’re like. Are they fitness freaks? Scifi nerds? Do they socialise together after work? Eat lunch in the break room together? This is a more difficult task, one that requires you to gauge people’s personalities and infiltrate their social groups accordingly.

“The first week of this job was really difficult for me,” says Debbie Hadley, who works with autistic children in Pennsylvania. “I was thrown in a classroom with five other teachers. When I showed up they all reacted differently.” One co-worker was friendly from the start, Hadley says, but the others kept to themselves until they got to know her. One of them refused to speak to her at all. “I’d walk in the door and smile, and she wouldn’t say a word,” says Hadley. “It was weird. It made me wonder if I’d done something wrong.” Did the woman hate her? Was she jealous of something? Then one day the co-worker started talking about her day, “like she’d been normal and nice the whole time,” she says. Hadley has never asked her why she made herself unapproachable in the beginning. “That’s the secret to being the new person,” she says.
People will eventually open up.
CLAIRE SUDDATH Bloomberg BusinessWeek