Fueled by heightened pressure to ensure that executives deliver immediate results, more organizations are throwing out old ideas about newcomer orientation— especially with manager-level hires.
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Adjusting to social and performance aspects of new jobs may come with various names—onboarding, alignment, assimilation, or integration are a few—but today’s approaches are lightning-focused on smoothing the new leader’s transition quickly and successfully.
Driving the trend: In Fortune 500 companies alone, about 500,000 managers take on new roles each year. In the midst of all these transitions, however, at least 40 percent of all senior-level outside hires fail within 18 months in a new position, contends Michael D. Watkins, PhD, author of the bestselling book, The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, and a former associate professor of business management at Harvard Business School.
New managers especially are vulnerable early on because they lack detailed knowledge of the challenges they will face, and they don’t have a network of relationships to sustain them, Watkins says. Failure to create momentum and give needed support during those first few months on the job can guarantee an uphill battle for the rest of their tenure.
“Everyone is straining to take the leader’s measure and people are forming opinions based on very little information,” says Watkins, who also is founder of the Newton, MA-based leadership strategy consultancy Genesis Advisers LLC, which recently launched a 2016 online e-learning tool, The First 90 Days Online: Leader Edition. “It’s a bit like starting high school; those early impressions—right or wrong—can really stick.”
Ultimately, management-level onboarding “should not be just about failure prevention,” he says, “but also about how to reduce the time to real performance.”
Indeed, Watkins’ research estimates it takes midlevel managers an average of 6.2 months to reach the point when their contributions to their organizations begin to surpass the costs of bringing them on board. So anything your organization can do to shave transition time is going to make a difference. “The value of reducing that ramp-up by even one month can mean a bundle,” he says.
Case in point: After studying less-than-stellar retention rates of recently hired executives, Bristol-Myers Squibb in New York changed its orientation plan. The global pharmaceutical giant began providing an intense focus during new hires’ first 30 to 60 days on the job—giving clear guidelines, clarifying roles, setting up meetings with influential colleagues and fostering a quick and accurate understanding of the company’s culture. Those moves led to a dramatic improvement in the retention rate for new leaders—and saved the organization about $500,000 in costs to replace each failed hire within the executive ranks.
The good news is that there are systematic methods to both lessen the likelihood of failure and reach the break-even point faster, Watkins advises. Today, Leadership Daily Advisor takes a look at the first three of six practices to help guide your management hires up the path to fast-track success:
Accelerate learning speed. Everyone, but especially managers, need to climb the learning curve as fast as possible in a new organization. This means understanding its markets, products, technologies, systems, and structures, as well as its culture and politics. Your onboarding program shouldn’t feel like what Watkins calls “trying to drink from a fire hose.” Instead, be very focused about deciding what is absolutely necessary to learn and how the new hire can learn it most efficiently.
Match strategy to situation. Different types of situations require making significant adjustments in how you plan for and execute a transition. Start-ups, for instance—of a new product, process or business unit—present challenges quite different from those faced while turning around a product, process, or business unit in serious trouble. Says Watkins: “A clear diagnosis of the situation is an essential prerequisite for developing an action plan” for the new manager to follow.
Secure early wins. It’s a fact: Early wins build anyone’s credibility and create momentum. When you bring new leaders on board, you want them—and those around them with whom they work—to feel that good things are happening. In the first few weeks, you need to help identify opportunities to build that personal credibility, Watkins says. In the first 90 days, make sure the new manager also can identify ways to create value and improve business results that truly matter.
In tomorrow’s Advisor, we will present more ways to rescue new managers from onboarding traps.