How to engage your new and promoted Leaders in their first weeks.
The experience someone has during onboarding has a significant impact on how they feel about their new role and whether they become part of the 23% who leave their role within the first 12 months.
Gallup’s research found that of those who ‘strongly agreed’ they’d had an ‘exceptional onboarding experience’, 61% of them felt prepared and fully supported to excel in their new role and 77% said they thought their new job was better than expected. Compare this to when respondents only ‘agreed’ they’d had an exceptional onboarding, the results pretty much halved on both measures.
This means that the experience overall, matters.
A way to achieve this is to recognise that effective engagement of new and promoted leaders doesn’t begin in the first weeks of the job, it starts way before that. It begins during the recruitment phase but kicks in properly from the point that an offer has been verbally accepted.
For your new and promoted leaders to start day 1 engaged, your engagement of them needs to start from the moment they say, “Yes!”
I asked the community of the HR Professional UK LinkedIn Group what they would find most useful to support them in effectively engaging their new and promoted Leaders in their first few weeks, so that they have a brilliant onboarding experience.
Here’s the poll and the results:
There were no additional asked, so for this blog, I’m going to touch on these 4 themes, in order of importance from the poll results. I’ll sign-post to other resources to provide even more support for this important strategic priority.
1. A Great Onboarding Plan
The onboarding plan is central to the overall experience. What needs to be covered, who is doing what and when etc.
To help you out here, I’ve created a Guide to Brilliant Onboarding, and the onboarding plan forms part of this. You can access the guide and the supporting template here.
You can also find some specific tips for Leadership Pre-Onboarding, the bit that happens before day one in this blog: Get your pre-onboarding right for new and promoted leaders.
2. Taking a Personalised Approach
Has this ever happened to you?
You’ve been sent your onboarding schedule or plan and clearly, it’s a copy-and-paste job.
It’s going to make you feel like a number, a task to get off the to-do list. Thinking about your new starter, how excited about starting are they going to feel with this approach? How invested are they going to be in this new start going well?
By taking a personalised approach, we put the individual at the heart of the process and experience. By considering their individual needs and situation, we demonstrate to them that they matter, and we are building a bond with a human rather than a job title.
There will of course be some standard elements to the process e.g. the compliance components but bringing in some personalisation will stand out and make them feel important and seen. This is about an experience that reflects the role, the team and the individual with personal touches that will matter.
Examples here could be:
The standard plan suggests the manager takes them for lunch on day one, but they are going to be working remotely in their first week. Arrange to meet them close to home for lunch or for a lunch delivery to home and share that experience remotely.
There is a vacancy that needs to be advertised in the team that this new leader will lead – rather than completing the job description and paperwork discuss the requirements directly with the new leader. They will probably have a much clearer view of what they need, and this means you can get moving – alternatively, they may have another suggestion of what to do.
This is about building a strong relationship from the start, demonstrating that you care about them starting and having a brilliant onboarding experience. You want them to be successful and you are demonstrating that to them with intent.
Make it feel personal by making it personal.
3. A Leadership Development and Support Plan
Most of the time, when you’ve hired or promoted into Leadership roles, you’re counting down to their start date. This can feel like a long wait where there has been a long notice period or handover process.
You are hopefully excited about what you saw from them in the recruitment process and therefore, you have every faith that they’re going to smash this new role – excellent, you’re right to be excited and hopeful!
But it’s time to be honest about what taking on a new leadership role means to someone, whether it’s at a more senior level or an entirely new organisation. Even if they have demonstrated great levels of capability and leadership behaviour at interview – don’t leave this to chance. Get them to start thinking ahead of when they start, heck, even during the recruitment process, what would they want or need to include on a development and support plan.
By paying attention to the development and support they might need when taking on this new role, you can demonstrate care and investment in their success. They’re great hires, they will get there, but do they have to get there on their own. Do they have to figure it out for themselves? Do you want to risk them struggling with the transition and not staying?
Here's a previous blog about the cost of losing great leaders.
By ensuring that their onboarding experience incorporates a development and support plan that recognises the leadership aspects of their new role, you are setting them up for success.
You can put this together based on your available resources or you can work with external leadership development experts.
4. Giving them Clarity on Expectations.
Starting off clear about what is expected of Leaders in your organisation is a critical way of engaging them and enabling them to be successful.
It may be that your organisation has clearly articulated expectations of leaders or not; either way make time, early on to ensure that they are aware of this or that you can agree on together what is expected. They can then apply this to their own situation and talk to you about any development or support they might need to achieve those expectations.
One of the reasons people start looking for a new job is when they don’t feel their new role is right for them. A key reason for this is they don’t feel they are making progress. With this in mind, alongside the leadership expectations you have of them, you should also define performance expectations.
One of the biggest issues I see here is that performance goals are not set early enough, and the key milestones aren’t identified. You might think you are helping them settle in by putting less pressure on them, but by not doing this, it makes it harder for them to identify how they are making progress. It also makes it harder to have effective performance conversations.
This is really important for someone taking on a leadership role because if you aren’t clear with them about what you need, how can they be clear with their new team.
The guide mentioned above has a section that covers performance goals and how to make use of these to support brilliant onboarding.
I hope you’ve found these ideas around successfully engaging new and promoted leaders useful.
Please use the Guide to Brilliant Onboarding, and if you have any questions about onboarding your leaders, get in touch via LinkedIn DM or email me at anwen@purpleskyconsulting.co.uk.
Getting the onboarding of new leaders right is crucial to their success, and development and support is a key part of that. That’s why, alongside my Free Guide to Brilliant Onboarding, I’ve created Boost.
Boost is a 6-month leadership development and support programme that is delivered 1:1 and is personalised to the needs of the individual leader. Ideally, I start working with the new or promoted Leader before they start so they are engaged, enabled, and empowered before day 1. Boost will accelerate your Leaders to success because they are more confident, capable, and effective quickly.