What exactly is Onboarding?

A: Generally it is the process by which newly hired employees at all levels — entry-level thru CEO — get “assimilated” (i.e. transition and integrate) to the new position and organization.  It is NOT just a new term for an orientation, which is actually a subset of an onboarding process. Onboarding is by design much more comprehensive than an “orientation”, has a different focus, and is typically for an extended time period.  Orientations are usually during the first few DAYS and are primarily to inform the new employee about ‘things’.  Onboarding is primarily about providing support for 3-6 MONTHS. The goal is to integrate the new employee into the organization and have them feel part of the team as soon as possible.  For newly placed managers and leaders the process involves even greater support because of the added complexity of those roles and the organizational value proposition involved.

Beyond “assimilation” an onboarding process should focus on accelerating the new person’s contribution and impact.  My Onboarding Process is for (both recruited and promoted managers and leaders) and is designed to provide four months or more of support and the leadership skills to help the new leader effectively navigate the organizational hazards and challenges that are common to all onboarding situations.  In other words, it provides a roadmap for rapid and successful assimilation. It has a performance focus that tracks targeted objectives and a leadership development focus that assures the new leader uses best practice approaches and well-developed ‘emotional intelligence’ in achieving those objectives.

Does all that extra work really matter?

A:  It really isn’t “extra work”.  Rather, it is just following the research-identified best practice approaches of how successful leaders onboard. But until recently no one was teaching these best practices. (Now the Harvard Business School actually offers a seminar for new executives called “Taking Charge”).  Every new leader follows some process for getting up to speed. Most of these processes are idiosyncratic approaches that may or may not be best practices. As a result, these self-taught processes may be inefficient and/or ineffective. They may actually cause problems that then require management time to fix and may result in severe costs for the organization. (E.g., business mistakes, turnover of key staff, lost market opportunities, damaged image of the company, and, often, failure of the leader who was promoted or recruited with all the costs associated with that situation, etc.)

Using effective leadership techniques that avoid the common missteps and mistakes actually saves time.

But these are experienced people—- do they really need a structured orientation program?

A: As stated it’s NOT an orientation program, but is a structured extended support process.  Often it is the “experienced” manager or leader who needs it most. A first-time leader is usually willing to admit that he/she doesn’t know it all and is open to help.  A seasoned executive, who has made a number of transitions during his/her career, often has a different more ego-involved sense of the ‘need’. This often causes them to believe the approaches that have served them before will work for them now.  The reality is that their approaches may have fit another situation but would fail in the new situation because of culture and leadership-style differences, different role than before (technical expert versus general management), and new business challenges.

What are the missteps that generally cause a new leader to have a slow start or worse, to “derail”?

Most leaders believe that onboarding is merely about using ‘common sense’.  And because THEY HAVE common sense, there is no problem to address. The fact is that the onboarding missteps and mistakes usually result from executives who believed what they were doing made ‘common sense’. E.g, trying to do too much too soon makes perfect sense to someone who has just been given a new leadership position. They have high expectations of themselves and their new boss and new organization also have high expectations of what the new leader will do.  –“I need to show them why I was hired/promoted!” So, the onboarding coaching advice of going slow, learning before acting, and focusing on only a few early successes is counter-intuitive for most  new leaders and is anything but common sense to them. Yet, this particular onboarding advice is one of the single most important success factors for new leaders.

What type of coaching does the emerging leader get from the Onboarding process?

A:  I offer two different Onboarding Process delivery approaches. One is the executive version and that is coaching-intensive with on-site meetings every month and off-site phone sessions in between. Busy senior executives, who may have the issues, described in #3 above, need the discipline of a coach to assure a high priority and maintain focus on the Process.

For mid-level managers (i.e., Emerging Leaders) the online Onboarding University has been developed to have most of the ‘coaching’ content in the nine courses (see attached list of course topics) and to have their new “boss” assume more of the coaching role. Each course has related Action Assignments (not homework, but real-work issues and challenges) that the enrollee seeks his boss’s assistance with tackling. This is a foundation principle of the University, forging a true partnership between the new employee and his/her boss versus the more typical “I’m-here-if-you-need-me” approach from a boss.

What is your success rate as far as implementing the Onboarding process in credit unions’?

A:  If you mean are CUs open to the need for it?  The answer is YES.  Almost every CU I’ve discussed my Process with has implemented one or both versions –executive and emerging leader. Some clients who had a one-off need and licensed the university for that situation (e.g. A newly recruited manager) have now ‘institutionalized’ the University to make it available to their entire management team – as onboarding support for all newly promoted and recruited managers and as a leadership development tool for their identified promotable talent in the organization.

Note: if you are asking about the success rate of onboarded leaders, which is hard to measure.  Onboarding does NOT make a bad hire or a wrong promotion decision suddenly have a happy ending.  Onboarding helps good hires and the right people promoted to avoid avoidable problems and helps them increase and accelerate their success. For sure it has prevented failures, but that’s a little like trying to prove a negative.

What can happen if recent hires do not go through the process?

A: The world as we know it will cease to exist!  OK, somewhat less severe but the potential consequences are the list of the common mistakes (#4 above) and the associated costs (#2 above).  That’s only part of the issue.  See #8 below.

If Onboarding is not applied, will credit unions experience the same level of senior executive failure Fortune 500 corporations have experienced lately?

A:  It’s not so much about ‘failure avoidance’ as is it about accelerated success.  With the challenges facing CUs today– the increased complexity and risk of new products and services, the difficulty of managing growth and expenses, achieving ROA targets, and the need to react faster to business challenges and opportunities — the issue is will the industry have the talented managers and leaders to be successful.  And if so, how valuable would it be for them to have accelerated success?

The negative side of your question is also valid — will some of those newly promoted and recruited managers and leaders stumble … and fall?  For sure more CU managers and leaders will fail than ever before.  That will be the result of the challenges cited above. The pressure to perform in a publicly traded corporation will always put their managers and leaders in a more vulnerable position and lead to a higher failure rate.  Does the failure rate in the CU industry need to match what the Fortune 500 has experienced for it to be a significant problem?  I don’t think so.

As far as credit union Onboarding success stories, can you give us one?

A:  Could give you many.  One is: a CFO recruited from outside the industry was struggling to “fit in”.  Her for-profit, aggressive-for-results approach was alienating her peers, which in turn caused problems for the CEO with the rest of his senior leadership team.  She, in fact, experienced most of the onboarding missteps and mistakes in #4 above.  After only a few months of her being in the new organization, it had gotten to an “either she’s gone or the rest of us are leaving” situation.  Although an onboarding process is supposed to be proactive, in this case the reactive support and onboarding counsel worked.  None of the senior team quit; the CFO also stayed and became a valued member of the CEO’s team. The CEO agreed that her onboarding could have been much less stressful and more effective sooner if the support process had been put in place proactively.

Have you yourself ever experienced Onboarding, or wish you had?

A: Throughout my career I, too, was a victim of the commonly-held belief that the ‘sink-or-swim’ approach to starting a new job is character building.  As I think back on more than a dozen different onboarding situations in my career, I can only wish that I had a more structured, skilled, and effective approach.  I can only imagine how much better I would have done in those roles and what that would have meant to the organizations that hired and promoted me. That personal realization is what lead me to research and then use onboarding best practices. There is a comment that gets said my leaders in my client organizations when they see the onboarding support new leaders are receiving. –“Where was this support when I started?!”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 8:19 am and is filed under Point, CounterPoint . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.