5 Practical Ways to Protect Your Investment and Position Your Leader for Success
Ramping up new leaders quickly is the best way to ensure early wins and the likelihood of success. Onboarding starts before they walk in the door. Human Resource leaders, managers and mentors play a key role in helping new employees accelerate and enrich their time to productivity and transition smoothly in their new roles and your culture.
Here are 5 Ways to Ensure Your New Executive Hits the Ground Running:
- Develop and Communicate Onboarding Plan – 40% of new executives fail within first 18 months – a consistent stat for the past 15 years. Commit to creating an onboarding process that sets people up for success. During the hiring process, be candid about the political environment, situational context and opportunities and challenges with their team. Engage new leaders BEFORE they walk in the door and look beyond the first 90 days to support their learning. Send a welcome letter immediately after the offer letter is signed to equip new leaders with resources, tools, and key stakeholder(s) to connect with on day one. Create a document with actions, owners, and timeframes to involve HR, Manager, and Mentor. You may also consider arranging a dinner with their immediate supervisor, planning a breakfast for the entire department during the first week, and / or sending a company shirt or a fruit basket to welcome them to the team.
- Communicate Expectations Early and Often – According to The Corporate Education Board, effective onboarding helps leaders reach their potential 9 months faster. Additionally, direct reports are 15% more effective and 21% less prone to attrition when leaders are clear about organizational objectives and what and how the work they do with their team links to these goals. This is not a laundry list of everything to do. It is the 2-3 SMART goals that are communicated and evaluated early and often. Add how you both take in information, make decisions, and get work done. At ClearRock, we believe awareness unlocks potential. Be curious and invest in not only what you will “do” together, but also how you will “be” together … the relationship matters.
- Build Stakeholder Partnerships – Stakeholder Management is an important discipline that successful people use to win support from others. It helps them ensure that their projects succeed where others fail. Stakeholder Analysis is the technique used to identify the key people who have to be won over. Stakeholder Planning is then used to build the support that helps new leaders succeed.
The benefits of using a stakeholder-based approach are:
- Buy-in from key people who can and will influence others because they see the value and benefit of the work you and your team are doing.
- Improved quality of your project by using the opinions of the most powerful stakeholders to shape projects at an early stage.
- Secure more resources by leveraging the support from powerful stakeholders. An early team win with input from key stakeholders makes a great first impression.
- Build Confidence – Studies suggest that the optimal praise to criticism ratio in a healthy relationship is 6 positive comments to 1 critique. Be generous with praise and selective with constructive criticism. Let them know why they were selected among the others in the process. What did others see as their strengths and skills that made them say “yes.” Are there immediate “watch outs” to bring awareness to the new hire that don’t work in your company? The richness of feedback gathered in the interview process can build confidence in your newly hired employee.
- Help Them Get Connected – Outside hires take twice as long to ramp up as a leader promoted from within. Approximately 70% of peers and managers are underprepared and /or unavailable to support new-to-role leaders. For both internal and external hires make sure their office is ready, business cards are in, nameplate is on the door and someone (preferably their manager) is available to meet with them on the first day. Encourage courageous networking (networking outside your immediate sphere of influence) and assign a peer coach/mentor. Set up meetings, lunches and appropriate social events for people to connect with your new leader. Leadership is a relationship and HR and hiring managers play a key role in helping leaders get connected which protects your culture and maximizes your new leaders’ impact.
