Onboarding: How to Get Your New Employees Up to Speed in Half the Time.
A two-part interview with executive transition consultant and onboarding expert George Bradt
"In general, 40% of executives are pushed out, fail or quit within 18 months of starting a new job. A scary statistic for anyone starting a new job — or hiring manager." George Bradt
 George Bradt Onboarding "is the process of acquiring, accommodating, assimilating and accelerating new team members, whether they come from outside or inside the organization. The prerequisite to successful onboarding is getting your organization aligned around the need and the role."
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From the Inside Flap:
Getting new employees up to speed is one of the toughest jobs hiring managers face. Failure can lead to unfilled needs, unhappy recruits, and, ultimately, the failure to meet vital business goals.
In Onboarding, top executive transition consultants George Bradt and Mary Vonnegut help you recruit great employees, orient them to your business culture and goals, and enable them to start contributing immediately. Even better, the Total Onboarding Program lets you get your new employees on track in half the normal time.
The Total Onboarding Program can dramatically improve the performance, fit, and readiness of every person who takes on a new role in your organization. As a result, onboarding helps build, sustain, and perpetuate high-performing teams and leads to sustained, organization-wide competitive advantage. With deliberate practice and the right tools, you'll succeed at every step of the onboarding process:
Preparing for your new employee's success before you even start to recruit
Finding a powerful slate of potential candidates
Creating a personal onboarding plan with your new employee
Making your new employee ready, eager, and able to do real work on day one
Speeding the development of importantworking relationships
Providing the right resources, support, and follow-through for new employees
Each chapter of Onboarding includes forms, checklists, and other tools to help you make your way through the entire onboarding process with efficiency and effectiveness. You'll have all the resources you need to eliminate hiring mistakes and bad fits, improve employee retention, and align new employees with key business strategies.
For business leaders and hiring managers who want well-trained, responsive, efficient, and effective employees, Onboarding helps you get the very best from every new employee.
George Bradt - Interview Transcript
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In general, 40% of executives are pushed out, fail, or quit within 18 months of starting a new job – a scary statistic for anyone starting a new job or a hiring manager.
Welcome to an inside recruiting channel podcast on Total Picture Radio. This is Peter Clayton reporting.
Joining us today is George Bradt, Founder and Managing Director of PrimeGenesis, a firm focused on senior executive onboarding. Prior to founding PrimeGenesis, George served as Chief Executive Officer of JD Power & Associates' Power Information Network spin off and as general management, marketing and sales of Coca-Cola in Europe and Asia, Proctor & Gamble, and Lever Brothers.
George is the co-author of The New Leaders 100-Day Action Plan: How to Take Charge, Build Your Team, and Get Immediate Results. And his recently published book is titled Onboarding: How to Get Your New Employees Up to Speed in Half the Time.
George, welcome back to Total Picture Radio.
George: Always delighted to talk to you.
Peter: What I've been hearing from a number of recruiters is the following, "it is taking forever to get companies to pull the trigger on a new hire," and I'm assuming that it is for a number of reasons. First of all, it's because they haven't read your book. And secondly, there is a lot of great talent out there and people are just hesitant to pull the trigger right now.
George: You're absolutely right. What happened and what we saw was almost exactly a year ago – September/October of 2008 – everybody froze. People just panicked and they didn't know how things were going to look. So they stopped everything. Recently though, we've seen a lot more activity. And the recruiters I know are suddenly getting calls about people saying hey, maybe we're ready to talk about this.
People I know are suddenly getting more interviews and certainly, our business has picked up. I've got evidence that people are hiring again.
Peter: That's good news. I'd like to talk a little bit about your two latest books because you've been very busy writing books.
The 100-Day Action Plan is a book that's really intended for executives going into organizations and your latest book, Onboarding, is really for hiring managers, is that correct?
George: Absolutely. We keyed off of that 40% failure rate that you quoted, which is very real and still continues, and our work with senior executives, we dropped that failure rate from 40% down to 10% which gets people very excited. A lot of the ideas around how we do that are laid out in the first book, The New Leaders 100-Day Action Plan. But we weren't really happy and aren't happy with that 10% failure rate.
As we've been looking at it over the years, we've realized that we can't fix that 10% without fixing the hiring manager. Hence, the second book.
So the first book is exactly as you said, for the new leader, and the second book is for the hiring manger so they can do things to further reduce that rate of failure.
Peter: And I think today, more than ever, George, I mean the companies that are hiring that I see out there that have a need and are filling that need, people who are going into organizations… these are critical hires and they really cannot afford to make mistakes.
George: Absolutely. Because as organizations are hiring less people. Each new hire is that much more important. And, if I'm the hiring manager, and I screw up a hire, it's a bad reflection on me.
So it is in everybody's best interest for these new hires to get up to speed as fast as they can and deliver the best results they can.
Peter: In addition to writing books recently, you've also done a number of things on your website using some new interactive tools and have some new programs that you've initiated on your website to help hiring managers and new executives get onboard.
Before we talk about your new book, let's talk a little bit about some of the things that you're offering on your website. Tell us about NewJobPrep.com.
George: What a great question!
So, what our little company does is we help executives and their team accelerate their progress and we really only do two things; we meet the executives before they start to help them craft their 100-day action plans and then after they start, we come in and work with them and their teams to implement those plans and accelerate their progress.
We had enough individuals coming to us and saying, "Hey, I need help with this preparation," that we started running Friday workshops in the oh-so-elegant PrimeGenesis world headquarters. We run a workshop every Friday from 10:00 to 2:00 for leaders going in new positions. Then a lot of people said, "Hey, I can't get to Connecticut. I'm in Czechoslovakia," or "I'm in Texas," or some place even farther away. "Can you help me?"
So we took the elements of that onboarding preparation workshop and we put them online in this NewJobPrep.com program. So anybody can go to it and we take credit cards and everything. So it's designed for an individual going to a new job and it's this interactive program that helps them craft their 100-day action plan.
Peter: You also have a program that's called the OnboardingProgram.com. Now, who is that intended for?
George: That's for the hiring managers. What we did was we actually put that up last January and it is essentially the onboarding book online, and it's a much more complex program.
NewJobPrep is designed to help people craft 100-day action plan and it takes a few hours to go through it. It's got nine steps but they're relatively discreet.
OnboardingProgram.com is designed for anybody hiring anybody else and it walks them through an entire 21-step program, run recruiting, hiring, and onboarding people starting with let's figure out your company's purpose; let's help you craft your recruiting brief, it's got tools for the recruiting brief; let's help you walk through the interviews; let's help you craft the offer; let's help you close the deal; let's help you do a personal onboarding plan with your new hire; and let's help you accelerate their progress. So it's more complex, designed to be used by a hiring manager over likely a period of months.
Peter: Basically, what this program is it's as if someone was taking your book and sitting down with you and going through your book step by step and having you expand upon all of the principles that you have in your book.
George: I think that's a good way to put it. Each of the 21 steps has a tool and the tools look a lot like the tools in the book. Then it has got a little opening video by me telling you what to do, and then it has got an audiovisual PowerPoint presentation that walks you through the steps and says, "Okay, take your tool. Go write this down. Hit pause. Come back when you're done." So it's almost like having an alter ego on your shoulder pushing you pretty hard.
What's different is if you read the book, you can do it at your own pace and you can pick up what you like. If you go through the program, we're going to push you pretty hard to hit all the steps and do it right.
I really think this program is designed as we've put it together. It's perfect for somebody in a small company that maybe doesn't have full human resource support that is doing it on their own. So if somebody is in a company of 30 or 50 people, needs to hire somebody, this is a great resource for them, and really we're charging… the online program is $495, so it's definitely cheaper than hiring an HR person for the year.
Peter: Tell us a little bit about… You've devised this thing called the Total Onboarding Program, which is basically the essence of your onboarding book. Can you just kind of go through and give us some of the bullet points of what's really essential in an onboarding process?
George: Absolutely. Another great question. The two critical tools - and I don't want to preempt your future question, but as I've thought about it, the two critical tools are the total onboarding program and the personal onboarding plan. And if I could wave my magic wand, no one would ever let anyone else start to recruit for a new position till they had a total onboarding program in place. And it is the 21-step program that a hiring manager should go through to bring in a new employee.
And the critical steps to your point, or to your question, are (1) you've got start with the organization shared purpose. Why are we doing this? Because the only reason to hire anybody, anywhere, anytime, is because with them you can deliver result that you can't deliver without them. And the results only matter if it's in line with the organization's shared purpose. So that's Step 1.
Step 2 is then crafting the role that you're going to put in place to help deliver against that purpose. And this is where the fun starts because you're going to take this Total Onboarding Program which is going to go through the role and then everything around acquiring a new employee, everything around accommodating the new employee, everything around assimilating the new employee, and then everything around accelerating the new employee. But you're going to take that program and before you do anything, you're going to get the critical stakeholders aligned around the role, what you expect out of it and the interdependencies. And one of the aha's is if we get these stakeholders aligned before we start recruiting, the new employee has a better chance of success than if the new employee has to get the stakeholders aligned after the new employee comes in. So that's the overview, those are the main pieces.
The other critical pivot point is this personal onboarding plan – and we can talk more about this depending upon your interest – but that's the handoff between the hiring manager and the new employee.
We've been thinking about the hiring manager's role. Think about producing a show. If you're putting on a show, the hiring manager at different stages plays the role of the producer, the director, and then the stage manager. And as the producer, they're assembling the resources, getting stakeholders aligned, as we just talked about. As the director, that happens once they've picked the new employee, they've closed the deal, they've got the resources assembled, and then they work with the new employee to help them understand what they're going to do and how they're going to do it. That happens with the personal onboarding plan. Once the person onboarding plan is in place, the hiring manager steps back but not out. They're still there as the stage manager working behind the scenes to help accelerate the new employee's progress and his or her team.
Peter: It seems to that taking that kind of approach, your chances of success are much greater than if you just do this hand off and then never follow up.
George: Absolutely. We early on identified the seven risks of onboarding. People coming in, they have an organization risk. If the organization fails, they fail. They have a role risk and if they're going into a role that they can't succeed in, they're going to fail. That's the alignment upfront. They have a personal risk. If they can't do the job, they can't do the job if they don't have the strengths, motivation, or fit. They have a learning risk. They have to get up to speed. The personal onboarding plan helps them identify where they have to get up to speed. They have a relationship risk. And so again, the personal onboarding plan helps them understand which are the critical relationships and helps them think through how to jumpstart those relationships.
They have a delivery risk and this is where the hiring manager can play a role making sure that the new employee has the support tools, resources, he or she needs to be successful.
And finally, there's an adjustment risk, and the antithesis of what we're saying is the old 'sink or swim' approach. And what we're saying is put your new employee in the pool with a lifejacket and watch them. Your mother always told you never swim alone; it works with the new employee as well. Don't let them swim alone and help them adjust to the changing circumstances.
Peter: One of the things that I thought when I was reading the onboarding book was, you know, it wouldn't take much of a leap to switch this 180˚ degrees and take this from a perspective of an executive who was just starting a job search. What are the steps and procedures that that individual should go through in analyzing the market, analyzing the roles that individual is looking to play, the companies that that individual would fit best into, the individuals within those organizations that would have to be part of that process of successfully getting hired into that new organization.
So you could take this book and switch it to the perspective of someone who was just beginning a job search at an executive level and take all of these steps and instead of from the hiring manager's perspective, make it from a job seeker's perspective, and they would have a phenomenal blueprint to go out there and begin a job search.
Peter: You could but I have a better idea. The better idea is in the revised edition of The New Leaders 100-Day Action Plan, we had enough people saying, "Okay, I'm a new leader and before I'm going to start my job, there are things I need to do." So we beefed up some of the upfront sections around job search and in particular, we have this 5-Step Career Guide that's in one of the early chapters of The New Leaders 100-Day Action Plan that I wrote a long time ago. And almost everybody I give this to, I mean, for like 20 years at this point – I give it to them, they go, "Well, George, duh! This is just common sense," and inevitably they come back to me within 6 months and say, "That's one of the most viable tools I've got."
The 5 steps that we suggest which is not any different than what you just said but it's a different way of structuring it, is the first thing you do is you look inside and you understand what you like and what you don't like to do. These are activities, not jobs. This is your raw data for figuring out where you belong.
The second step is you think through your long term career goals. Define it any way you want… three years out, five years out, by the time you retire, what do you want to get done? What do you want to be? What do you want look like long term?
Then you lay out your ideal job criterion, and this goes to exactly what you're talking about – what are the type of people I like to work with, what type of company do I want to work with, where do I want to be? And so now I've got my objectives.
Step 4, and actually I've modified Step 4 even since we wrote that draft. Step 4 used to say create options, and the idea is you go out and explore and uncover options around the world. And what I'm now thinking is you really do need to create options. Part of that is uncovering options and doing all the networking that you suggest and talk about in your various interviews and the people that talk to you talk about. Part of it is uncovering options but the other part is actually creating options, where you go out and look at organizations and look at industries and leverage your industry expertise to say there's a need there; this company needs somebody to do whatever… and then you create that option either as a project or a job or maybe even a new business. And some of these conversations are going to be more interesting if you go to people and say, "I've got a solution to a problem that you don't even know you have" because then you're not competing with others, you're just competing with inertia. So that's Step 4 which is create the options.
Step 5, when you've got ideally a slate of options, just as in the onboarding book, we're suggesting strongly that companies create a slate of candidates. We suggest that new leaders or people in transition have a slate of options because then what you can do is, you can evaluate your options back against your ideal job criteria and your long term goals. So that's Step 5.
Now, there's a hidden Step 6, and the hidden Step 6 is the gut check.
So once you've completed the 5 steps and you've:
- understood your own,
- what you like and don't like,
- laid out your long term goal, laid out your ideal job criteria,
- created options by uncovering them and creating them,
- and then evaluated the options against your criteria…
the suggestion is write down your choice and go to sleep. And if you wake up in the morning and you look at your choice and go "Yeah, this is great! That's the job I should take!" then you should do it. If you wake up in the morning and your gut is screaming at you, "Ugh!" you lied to yourself. And where you lied to yourself was on the relative weighting you assigned to the different ideal job criteria.
For example, if one of my criteria is I have to earn $100,000 a year and one of my criteria is I don't want to move, and somebody offers me a job for $200,000 a year but I have to move to Wichita, Kansas and I decide to take the job and I wake up in the morning screaming at myself because I don't really want to move to Wichita, Kansas; I inadvertently weighted money higher than not moving and my gut is saying, "No, no, the money is less important to you than not moving. Go find a job earning less money, closer to home." So the gut check is a way to do that.
That was a rather long answer but we actually do look at this from the perspective of somebody in transition and the first part of The New Leaders 100-Day Action Plan, some people have said is a pretty good shorthand for job searching.
Peter: Again, I think it's really important because it does give you a blueprint. And one of the things that happens so often with senior executives who are in transition; they've never gone through this before. They've always been recruited. They've always had a headhunter call them and put them in their next position and all of a sudden they're out there and it's overwhelming.
So to have a structure that you can have in front of you so you can put a plan in place, so you're not out there just reacting but you are proactive in how you're approaching this, I think, is far, far more productive.
George: Absolutely. I completely agree and there are a lot of people that are more expert in the job search process than I am.
The one thing that we've become expert on is reducing the risk of failure and what we tell people in transition is yeah, go through the 5 steps and all that's designed to get you the job, and we tell people you have to get the job before you turn it down. You can never turn down a job you haven't been offered. So get the job. But once you've gotten the job, do a real due diligence and dig back into, in particular, the organization, role, and personal risks and make sure that you can mitigate those risks before you accept the job.
Now, here's an interesting thing, if I'm allowed to flip back and forth, we feel so strongly about this due diligence – get the job, do your due diligence before you accept the job and we've seen the value of that impact so much that in the onboarding book, we're pushing the hiring managers in the same direction. And what we're suggesting is that no hiring manager should ever let anybody accept a job that they've offered to them until they've done their due diligence.
Play this out. A lot of people think we're crazy, and we've got some executive search firms that say "are you nuts, George! We'd never let somebody be offered a job until we're sure they're going to accept it." But play this out. I would argue there are two scenarios.
Hiring manager turn to you… I'm offering you a job, and I turn to you and I say, you can't accept it until you spend a couple of days doing due diligence. In fact, I'm going to help you. I'm going to put you in touch with the person that had the job before, some people that left the company, I want you to meet with all your new direct reports, and I want you to meet with your peers, I want to give you all the information you've got, I want to give you a copy of this great book, Onboarding, so that it will help you think it through, but I want you to do a real due diligence.
Two scenarios.
You come back at the end of two or three days and you say "Thanks, and I've thought about it and it really is not the right job for me." That's a win.
Peter: You just saved that company a few hundred thousand dollars.
George: You saved the company a few hundred thousand dollars and if the first choice candidate turns down the job two to three days in, the second choice candidate never knows they were second choice because they've got a slate.
Whereas if the first choice candidate blows off two to three months later, because if the first choice candidate figures it out in two to three days, they're going to figure out it in two to three months without the due diligence, then you've got the couple hundred thousand dollars and that second choice candidate is gone. That's scenario 1.
Scenario 2 is the person goes away, does the due diligence, comes back and accepts the job. What happens here is the hiring manager and the new employee have started their relationship very differently. Instead of the hiring manager trying to sell the new employee on a job, the hiring manager has partnered with the new employee and they start their relationship as partners and it makes a huge difference.
Peter: And also, that individual then is coming into that organization almost like they had been working there for a couple of years because they met all of the key players that they're going to be working with and they've already established those very, very important relationships that can be so critical when you first go into a new job.
George: Yes, but … and the but is those relationships actually get established over time and there is a set of questions and there is a dynamic that goes on when somebody meets that person during the interview process. There is sort of a whole power thing – people being interviewed… it's a little weird.
It's different in the due diligence section because people open up more and the roles reverse. But what we then push people to do is have another conversation with the most critical stakeholders, between the moment when they accept the job and when they start.
The classic story is somebody coming to a new job and they've got a peer that they need to work with. They show up on day 1 and do whatever and they get dragged into meetings or orientation or whatever. Day 2, day 3, they sit down with that peer and they say "it seems that you and I need to work well together. Can we have lunch, I really want to get to know you and build a relationship." That's good.
Contrast it, if you would, with the person calling that peer the day after they've been announced and two weeks before they start the job, calling up and saying "listen, it seems to me that my working with you and your working with me is going to be just critical to us being successful together. It really seems like it is in your best interest and my best interest and the organization's best interest for us to really invest in this relationship. It's so important to me, that I am not prepared to show up on day 1 until you and I get to know each other. I don't start for two weeks. I will meet you anywhere in the world, any time you want over the next two weeks; let's spend some good time together and get to know each other before day 1." That's a different game.
Peter: That really is a different game.
And that is the end of part 1 of our interview with George Bradt. Please stay tuned for part 2.
George Bradt, Biography
George Bradt has a unique perspective on helping leaders accelerate transitions based on his combined senior line management and consulting experience. He’s worked in sales, marketing and general management at companies including Lever Brothers, Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola – literally around the world. Now he is Managing Director of PrimeGenesis, the executive onboarding and transition acceleration group he founded in 2002. George and PrimeGenesis have been able to reduce the risk of failure fourfold for executives they have worked with - from 40% to 10% by helping them and their teams deliver better results faster. George has a Harvard A.B., a Wharton MBA and dual U.S./European Union citizenship.
He is the author of:
The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan (Wiley, 2006, 2009), Onboarding: How to Get Your New Employees Up to Speed in Half the Time (Wiley 2009), The Total Onboarding Program: An Integrated Approach to Recruiting, Hiring and Accelerating Talent (Pfeiffer, 2010), Back-To-School Chats - Advice from Fathers to Their Sons (Durban House, 2006), and Back-To-School Chats - Advice from Mothers to Their Daughters (Lulu, 2009).
Resources:
Total Picture Radio interview with George about The New Leader's 100 Day Action Plan
PrimeGenesis
NewJobPrep.com
The Onboarding Program
Onboarding: How to Get Your New Employees Up to Speed in Half the Time.
The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan: How to Take Charge, Build Your Team, and Get Immediate Results Technorati Tags:
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