I had an opportunity to be a guest on Tom Floyd’s Voice America Business radio show, Insight on Coaching, a few weeks ago (http://www.modavox.com/VoiceAmericaBusiness 5/14/07 Coaching and New Employees: Shortening the Onramp to Productivity). The show focused on the onboarding process and how executive coaching is being used to facilitate the process.
Tom first explored what onboarding is and why it is such a hot topic right now. Onboarding is viewed as the set of activities used to support an employee when they start a new position/company. Companies are investing more in onboarding programs primarily because they are becoming more and more challenged with retaining talent and helping people become more productive sooner in their positions. Relative to retention, one statistic sited was that 50% of employees are planning on looking for a new opportunity outside of their companies within the next year (source: BusinessWire). And, some experts believe this could be low. The reasons people are leaving their companies was surprising to me. More and more, employees are leaving not because of their supervisor, but because of the company. Employees are continually challenged with doing more with less and employers concurrently have been able to “get away with” being less nurturing to careers and people.
So, as a component of many retention initiatives, companies are investing in onboarding programs to help employees acclimate to the culture easier and become productive. Studies continue to demonstrate that the better the onboarding process, the higher the level of employee engagement and retention.
While onboarding programs are better and more widely used, it still appears to me that most companies are using a “one size fits all” approach to design their programs. I believe that with a little customization, companies could get a much bigger bang for their investment dollar, especially at the executive leadership level of organizations. To customize the programs for executives, I look at why executives tend to fail in their new jobs. Specifically, executives tend to fail in a new position for three main reasons:
- Lack of clarity around expectations of the new executive and for the position itself.
- Inability to adjust their personal work style to how work gets done in the new organization.
- Inability to use the political acumen already gained in their career.
Executive coaching can help significantly in each of these areas to assure the leader has a good start in the new organization, potentially saving the company millions of dollars and lots of organizational headaches. I believe the most significant time investment is ensuring proper alignment of expectations among the CEO, peers and subordinates of the new executive. Such a simple statement…but not so simple to do. Providing a new leader with insight into how works get done can dramatically impact his/her success – especially in the first 90 days!
-- Sue Schaefer, Partner, JivaroCXO
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