Bringing a new hire onto your Board or Senior Leadership Team is a pivotal moment for your business. New senior hires can be transformative, bringing the fresh ideas and insight you need to solve critical issues and keep growing your business.
A high degree of autonomy and ownership isn’t an unrealistic ask of your new senior team member but even successful organisations falter if they don’t put a clear structure in place to support the transition period of these critical hires. This creates a crucial operating risk.
But you can mitigate these risks by making the transition and onboarding period of your new senior leader a strategic priority. Here’s how your Board and SLT can get this right and set your new leadership hires up to succeed.
The unseen risks of bringing in a new leader without a plan
Expectations of new senior hires are often high. After a considered hiring process and thorough vetting for credibility, fit, and experience you’re putting your trust in this person to deliver on promises made during those early discussions.
But get the first few months of a leadership tenure wrong and you risk having to replace your new hire within 18 months – research shows that 38 to 50% of executives fail within this short time period.
Poor onboarding and unclear expectations are significant factors in many of these departures. Communication problems and a lack of agreement or clarity within the Board and reporting teams are also cited as reasons why experienced leaders struggle to take the reins and drive forward beyond 18 months.
But it’s not just that.
This 18-month window exposes the sensitivities in your organisation and someone coming fresh-faced into your business will see these more clearly than those already entrenched in the day-to-day. This can be an opportunity to improve and realign on your goals and how you deliver on them.
Or it can be a risk factor. If your new hire isn’t supported as they navigate these sensitivities and seek to find their place in them, performance and productivity could take a hit. Without your backing and alignment on expectations, the problems felt by a leader trickle down into their team who also waver on what is expected of them. They may struggle to build credibility and forge relationships with other key stakeholders if they haven’t been immersed in the values of your brand from day one.
If you expect a new hire to deliver fast and solve problems, you need to take steps to mitigate these risks and set them up to succeed. That starts by taking ownership of their onboarding.
The value of a positive onboarding experience for new leaders
Businesses with high retention and productivity place a high value on onboarding activities, no matter how senior the role. In fact, research by an onboarding specialist found that 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for at least 3 years if their onboarding experience was positive.
A strong onboarding experience tells a new hire everything they need to know about your company: it demonstrates your culture, your purpose, your commitment. It introduces them to who they need to know and gives them access to all the tools they need without them having to ask.
It’s vital that the steps you take communicate that you’re setting them up to succeed. At this point, you’re still building buy-in from an experienced peer and reaffirming they’ve made the right choice to join you.
Onboarding a new executive effectively also allows you to keep momentum. Fail to get the right steps in place and you risk stalling your progress and damaging a relationship that is in its infancy. Without a strategic approach in place – one agreed by the SLT – you risk introducing friction and misalignment at a delicate transitional time.
Here are a few practical points to consider for the onboarding period:
Conversations and discussions had before they start – be upfront and ask what tools they need and who they want to talk with
Introduce them to the right people and make sure they have time cleared in their diaries – warm these people up to the new hire and allay any concerns for their own roles
Check in on progress with systems set up to avoid snags and delays
Align initial priority asks and expectations with your fellow SLT members
Agree a feedback process
After onboarding: Challenges for newly created leadership roles
You can expect a proper onboarding and embedding period to take two to three months. This gives your new hire a good amount of time to assimilate, familiarise with business practices and culture, and start defining their own actions. It gives them breathing space to be sure the strategic input they begin to bring to the table is tailored to your business and your workforce.
But there will still be challenges to overcome. And the pressures your new executives face will differ not only due to their specific role and job title, but also whether the role is newly created or was previously held by someone else.
New roles on Boards and C-suites are common in growing SMEs who are scaling up. It’s a big move to expand this way and these additions need to be thought through. Even after onboarding, those who have taken on a newly created role will still be defining their purpose - it’s one thing to draw up a job title on an org chart and expect it to solve problems, it is another thing entirely to make that a reality.
To support executives taking on this challenge, existing SLT members need to clearly define the responsibilities of the new role so ownership of tasks, teams, and output is clear. There may be pressure within these new roles to exert influence within the Board so they can differentiate themselves and push the agenda of their purview forward. Expect this, listen to this, and you’ll avoid friction. Don’t be surprised if there’s some overlap with existing roles but interrogate the thinking and come up with a clear agreement on who owns the work going forward and where cross-functional collaboration is needed.
As for those who have stepped into a pre-existing leadership role, they face a common challenge: Stepping into someone else’s shoes. There will be expectations from the functional teams and the Board as to exactly what this person should deliver and how they’ll go about it. It’s important to be open-minded to change and evolution with this kind of hire – and it may be exactly what your business needs.
Whether they’re stepping into a new role or taking on the mantle previously worn by someone else, here’s some pragmatic advice to help your new executive get up to speed faster:
Stakeholder relationships – start the conversations, highlight priorities and interests
Alignment with fellow board members – why have you brought this person in, what are their strategic priorities and how do they need to work with each of you?
Set clear expectations and feedback windows and be open to constructive criticism within this – this is a chance for your business to improve too, after all
Establish some short-term KPIs and signs of success
Get outside insight for faster ROI
The brands that get the quickest ROI from the executive search process bring in external support to de-risk these early months of leadership transition.
A business coach can act as an effective sounding board for your new hire and members of your Board. Looking to their own experience and with no agenda within your organisation, they can advise and ask difficult questions that might be overlooked internally. A coach can be a great guide for a new executive; someone they can bounce ideas off without any worry of judgment or shifting of key relationship dynamics.
Coaching works at an individual and a group level. Your growing Board needs to be able to communicate effectively and understand the way each other thinks, so taking a day or two to get out of your usual environment and onto a teambuilding retreat or strategic workshop is one means of fast-tracking this knowledge of one another.
Invest in these extra steps beyond the initial onboarding process and you can help your Board progress more effectively towards better defined goals.
De-risking critical hires starts with choosing a reliable executive search partner
We’ve considered how to get our critical leadership hires up to speed faster from their first day in their business but there’s more ROI to be gained if you work with a trusted executive search partner from the first conversations about the need to hire a leader.
An executive search partner who comes into your early conversations about a potential new executive can help you shape the role itself. They can help you understand whether you’re ready for this hire, how it fits into your long-term strategic goals, and develop a custom search strategy that’s right for your business. With this robust analysis as a starting point for your hire, they’ll be well-placed to thoroughly analyse potential candidates and get you the best-fit talent who are ready to take on the challenge you’re offering.
That’s what we do at Olive Search. We act as a true partner to de-risk these critical leadership hiring decisions and deliver certainty so your next executive placement starts to make an impact sooner.
If you’d like to get more out of your next executive hire sooner, let’s start talking today.