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Keep strong leaders and improve the bottom line with onboarding

Written by: Cassandra L. Gierden

Article Overview: Savvy organizations have learned that leaders need more than the standard welcome package when they move into a new role. They need proper training. They need a plan for adapting to their new position. And they need support. In short, they need executive onboarding.

Keep strong leaders and improve the bottom line with onboarding

Keep strong leaders and improve the bottom line with onboarding

“…the more positive the overall moods of people in the top management team, the more cooperatively they worked together - and the better the company's business results.”

Daniel Goleman wrote those words in Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence in 2002. This excerpt summarizes the challenge facing businesses today. Good leaders mean strong performance, but finding and keeping these leaders can be difficult. Without sufficient training and support, leaders can have trouble adapting to their new roles and problems can emerge. In the best case, employees may feel alienated and performance may suffer. In the worst case, good employees may leave and the new manager may pay the price by being shown the door.

Savvy organizations have learned that leaders need more than the standard welcome package when they move into a new role. They need proper training. They need a plan for adapting to their new position. And they need support. In short, they need executive onboarding.

Beyond basic orientation

Instead of basic orientation, organizations need a well-defined plan for integrating their new leaders into the culture and environment of their company. Without it, the risk of poor performance and failure is high. Executive onboarding has grown out of traditional orientation to provide a more comprehensive and systematic plan for helping executives transition into their new role.

The term “onboarding” sounds like it applies only to leaders hired from outside of an organization, but it is equally applicable to leaders within an organization who find themselves either transferred between departments or promoted and given new responsibilities. Leaders need to maintain a sense of balance and focus while they adapt to a new corporate culture, become familiar with new decision-making processes and get a handle on the many projects they may be required to manage.

Onboarding reinforces conventional orientation and training programs with highly focused one-to-one leadership coaching, targeted skills development, and timely objective feedback. The goal is twofold: first, ensure that new executives find their footing quickly and avoid costly missteps; second, help them build effective alliances with their direct reports to ensure continuity and cooperation in achieving organizational goals.

Onboarding as smart business strategy

Onboarding may sound like a lot of work – planning, orientation, coaching, training. But when you consider the costs of not doing it, you’ll soon see what a smart business strategy it is.

Kevin P. Coyne of the Harvard Business School conducted a study to learn how changes in a company’s leadership affect the overall business. His research, done between 2002 and 2004, found a turnover rate of 17% in large companies. According to Coyne, a change at the very top can trigger significant turnover among existing executives: up to 22% for organizations that hire new CEOs from outside, and up to 33% for those that promote CEOs from within. The bottom line? High turnover in the executive suite leads to instability and insecurity among existing managers, which will eventually trickle down through the rest of the company.

Companies invest a great deal of time and money in recruiting new executives. When they fail, as the statistics show they often do, the effect on the bottom line is devastating. Some estimates peg the costs at 200 to 250% of an executive’s annual compensation. That figure does not include indirect costs within the organization, in the form of lost productivity and diminished morale.

So how can onboarding turn things around? It gives an organization a planned process to integrate the new executive while maintaining continuity and retaining key team players. It’s like an insurance policy – organizations that invest in onboarding can ensure that they get the results they expect from their new executive.

So, what is onboarding exactly?

Onboarding addresses the critical areas where executives tend to have weaknesses. An effective onboarding program can help new executives:

- identify and strengthen the skills they need most in their new role
- adapt their leadership style with the corporate culture of their new workplace or department
- start building effective relationships with other senior people and direct reports
- get a handle on who makes decisions and how and why decisions are made

Onboarding is a combination of functional performance training, conventional orientation, intensive, highly focused coaching and performance feedback.

How onboarding helps

Think for a moment about how and why new leaders fail. They may lack the knowledge to do their job right, and they may become overwhelmed by the stress of their new position. Onboarding succeeds where conventional orientation fails by using coaching to address these potential pitfalls right from the beginning, easing the transition for the new leader and the business unit as a whole.

Training and retention of knowledge are key parts of any new position. Coaching complements training, ensuring that learning becomes a new behaviour by helping new executives create concrete plans for implementing what they learned, and applying their recently acquired knowledge in their new role.

What all of this means is that coaching supports and reinforces training. As reported in the Training and Development Journal, a study by Xerox showed that without follow-up coaching, 87% of the knowledge gained from skills training is lost. Coaching ensures that learned skills are retained and put to use.

Coaching also addresses issues that orientation and training cannot. Feelings of stress, isolation and frustration can derail even the most seasoned executive when he or she is placed in a new role. Coaching provides objective support for new leaders. Coaches become a sounding board to help leaders deal with the pressure in both their professional and personal lives.

What happens after you’re successfully onboarded?

Many executives find that even after their initial orientation period is over, they appreciate and even depend on the valuable support an executive coach offers. A study in the Manchester Review (Volume 6, Number 1, 2001) on the ROI that executive coaching delivers showed that 93% of those coached would recommend coaching to others, and the ROI averaged nearly 6 times the initial investment in coaching.

HR departments can ensure their leaders start off on the right track with effective onboarding, and stay on the right track with continued coaching and leadership development.

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Article Tags: business results, case employees, corporate culture, daniel goleman, emotional intelligence, good leaders, moods, new leaders, new position, onboarding, poor performance, primal leadership, savvy organizations, sense of balance, support leaders, systematic plan, top management team, traditional orientation, welcome package, worst case



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