Executive Onboarding: The Key to Accelerating Success and Reducing Risk in a New Job

By Mary Vonnegut

The most effective executive onboarding includes:

Getting a head start

1.      Managing the message

2.      Building the team

Failures in new roles almost always come back to either poor fit, not getting done what needed to get done, or something changing. Everyone involved tends to blame someone else.

Failed executives say, “They turned out to be different,” or“They didn’t give me the resources I needed,” or “Theychanged.” Conversely, the bosses of the failed executive say he or she, “Wasn’t what we expected,” or “Didn’t get done what we needed,” or “They changed.”

Writing for Fortune, Anne Fisher points out in her article New Job? Get a Head Start Now on February 17, 2012 that

About 40% of executives who change jobs or get promoted fail in the first 18 months.

She goes on to note that research shows that failure rate has “stood at about 40% for at least 15 years now.”

Whose fault is it really when a new executive fails? It’s everyone’s fault. If everyone paid attention to the basics of executive onboarding, there would be far fewer failures.

Get a Head Start

As football coach Vince Lombardi put it, “The will to win is not nearly as important as the will to prepare to win.” Getting a head start begins with crafting anew leader’s 100-day action plan. If you don’t have a plan, you’re relying on the kindness of others for your success. Your career is too important to leave it up to that.

Then, take advantage of the “fuzzy front end,” which is the period between accepting a job and actually starting. Use this time to begin implementing your plan to get ahead of the curve on set up, learning, and most importantly, jump-starting relationships with some pre-start conversations keeping in mind the power of vulnerability.

Obvious candidates for these conversations include your boss, team members and direct reports, but leaders often forget to speak with:

· Your boss’s assistant

· Key clients and customers (external and internal)

· Key founders or “shadow” board members who may not have a significant role in the day-to-day operations, but still wield significant influence

Determining who these people are will be difficult, but generally speaking there will be a human resource contact and/or internal mentor who can help identify them.

Good examples of this include Larry Page getting a head start before assuming the CEO role at Google, and Ajay Banga easing into the CEO role at MasterCard.

Manage the Message

Everything communicates. Everything you say and do and don’t say and don’t do communicates. If you haven’t clarified your message, you’ll be reacting in the moment and improvising on the fly. This works for some. For most, it’s far more effective to have thought it through in advance.

Also, keep in mind these common mistakes that leaders make on day one:

· Don’t tell anything but the mildest joke.

· Don’t decorate your office.

· Don’t say anything (good or bad) about your former company.

· Don’t say anything negative about anybody in your new company.

· Don’t use a PowerPoint presentation to introduce yourself.

· Don’t tell too much information about your personal life