Onboarding for a New Leader

Process Introduction
An onboarding process ensures leadership effectiveness, productivity and long-term retention. 64% of new executives hired from outside won’t make it in their current role. 40% will fail within the first 18 months. The acquisition costs range from $100,000 to more than $400,000. Contractual pay-off can be multi-million dollar agreements.

Why do new executives fail? Research leads us to two major factors: 1. Companies fail to build a systematic onboarding process. 2. New leaders misread and misjudge the dynamics, expectations and requirements of their new role(s). New managers seem to:
• Fail to understand before they act.
• Fail to build the right relationships fast enough.
• Try to do too much, too soon.
• Misread or don’t leverage the company culture.
• Lack key support for major changes.
• Misunderstand the business and act with incomplete information.
• Mismanage personal transitioning of family into a new community.

The following describes a comprehensive process that ensures success and the return on the company’s investment. The critical ingredient in an effective process is coaching.

Onboarding Coaching Process

Purpose: The purpose of using coaching to assist new hires is to lead them to be productive faster (6-9 months instead of 9-18 months). The process also provides a formula for success that ensures the return on investment, retains the employee and drives the business to accomplish the objectives.

New Leader: The new manager, leader or executive can use help that the immediate boss rarely has time to properly educate. The new employee needs to thoroughly understand their role(s), locate the help and guidance to learn, sort out the organization and build important relationships quickly. These tasks are daunting. Life is also more complex if the new employee is relocating the family. The new hire could become disillusioned, flounder and be slow in becoming effective and productive.

Boss: The immediate boss always has good intentions. He or she must rely on others to provide a good orientation for the new hire. Human Resources usually provides the formal orientations. Management team members, key functional people and possibly mentors or sponsors continue the orientation of the structure, functions, customers and general business. The boss is usually ill-equipped to integrate these resources into a fast moving and thorough learning process. Within 1 or 2 months everyone assumes that the new person is up to speed, but that is seldom true if they are left to their own initiatives.

Coach: Coaching is at the center of the process. The coach integrates the learning process and leads the new hire to initiate actions that will get him or her productive quickly. The new leader needs to focus on priorities, understand the strategy and expectations and build a results-oriented team. The vision, objectives, culture, resources, environment and available talent must be assimilated in order to execute a successful business plan. The coach assures that this information is collected, sorted, evaluated and used properly. The coach will also help the new leader assess their talents and build self-directed development and learning plans. Coaching also helps clarify the leaders roles, locate internal mentors and assure effective self-management.

The new leader must build relationships quickly, use appropriate communications channels and learn the operations and how work gets done. The coach must collaborate with Human Resources, the immediate boss, the management team and key leaders in the organization. The coach accelerates the new leaders learning, development and productivity over 3 months while working on the job.

All interview, reference, background and assessment data is used to establish the basic new hire profile.

© Roth Consulting Group, LLC 06/01/03

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