David Lee On the Emotional Side

"If your new employee is not, in your heart of hearts, unequivocally, absolutely your right hire, stop; do not pass Go; rescind the offer. Or find some way to make the individual you chose absolutely the right hire for some modified role. A hiring manager's certainty and commitment is requisite to successful employee onboarding." Onboarding, p. 175

David Lee

Welcome to a special Inside Recruiting Channel edition of Total Picture Radio, with Peter Clayton reporting. When George Bradt and Mary Vonnegut set out to write Onboarding: How to Get Your New Employees Up to Speed in Half the Time (affiliate link to Amazon.com), they invited a select group of experts to share their knowledge in the onboarding process. In this special series here on Total Picture Radio, we'll be interviewing, in depth, the individuals chosen by the authors to contribute their experience, expertise, and perspective.

The Experts Series -- Onboarding is sponsored by PrimeGenesis. Founded in 2002, PrimeGenesis' mission is singular: use executive onboarding and facilitated transition acceleration to help new leaders and their teams deliver sustainable, Better Results Faster. Based in Stamford, Ct. PrimeGenesis is led by senior operating executives and organizational development specialists with deep and varied business experience.

David Lee is the founder of Human Nature At Work. He is an internationally recognized authority on organizational and managerial practices that optimize employee performance. David has written extensively about the emotional side of onboarding. He preaches the importance new leaders feeling welcomed, comfortable, secure, proud, excited, inspired, and confident. David contributed to chapter 10 of Onboarding, titled Make Positive Impressions.

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Questions for David Lee

That is a nice string of adjectives I used in your introduction. Isn’t getting a new job in this economy reward enough?
Your guest expert segment in Onboarding is titled “David Lee on the Emotional Side.” To paraphrase Tina Turner “What does emotion got to do with it?” when it comes to executive onboarding?
You presented some of your thoughts, based on what you’ve heard from a couple of good companies including Ritz Carlton and Southwest Airlines - can you share some of those, and perhaps expand a little bit?
One piece of advice you give is “ask your new employees for feedback on what you can do to create a more emotionally engaging onboarding experience. Perhaps you’ll get an honest appraisal from a very senior level executive - but can you really expect that from a mid-level manager?

About HumanNature@Work
HumanNature@Work bridges the world of leading edge research and theory with the world of real life organizational and employee challenges. We bring together facts and leading edge theories about human nature that leaders and managers are unlikely to find anywhere else, and translate them into practical strategies for bringing out the best in employees.

Our work draws from a wide spectrum of disciplines, including organizational development, neuroscience, stress research, accelerated learning, marketing, psychology, anthropology, and peak performance technologies.

From this wide spectrum of disciplines, we synthesize and distill out key principles and practices that can be applied to any issue involving people - whether it is helping individuals perform at their best, helping management bring out the best in their workforce, or helping organization's create exceptional organization-wide customer service.

Download David Lee's articles on onboarding from HumanNature@Work

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