- PowerStart has many action steps the new leader completes during the 4-month onboarding process. Does all that extra work really matter?
- Using PowerStart may seem like extra work, but it really isn’t. Rather, it is just following research-identified onboarding best practices. The best practices used by highly successful leaders in their onboarding.Every new leader follows some onboarding process for getting up to speed. Most of these processes are idiosyncratic approaches that may or may not reflect onboarding best practices. As a result, these self-taught processes may be inefficient, ineffective, or worse, disastrous.
Those approaches too often cause problems that then require management time to fix and involve significant cost to the business. (E.g., Business mistakes, turnover of key staff, lost market opportunities, damaged company image, and failure of the leader who was recruited or promoted.) All are common problems caused by inadequate onboarding.
Using leadership best practices and skilled approaches avoids the common missteps and really saves time.
- Do experienced leaders really need a structured onboarding program?
- The experienced manager or leader is often the one who needs a structured, extended support process the most. A less-experienced leader is usually willing to admit that they don’t know it all and are open to help. A seasoned executive who has made several transitions during their career often has a different, more ego-involved sense of the need.
This often results in the belief that the approaches that have served them well in the past will do so now as well. The reality is that these approaches may have fit another situation but may fail in the new situation because of culture and leadership style differences, role differences (e.g., general management versus technical expert; strategic versus tactical leadership), and new business challenges.
- What are the missteps that generally cause a new leader to have a slow start or—worse—to derail?
- Onboarding missteps and mistakes usually result from executives believing that what they were doing was simply using their common sense. For instance, trying to do too much too soon makes perfect sense to someone who has just been given a new leadership position.
The new leader has high expectations for themself, and the boss and new organization share those high expectations for how the leader will perform. This results in a mind-set of “I need to show them why I was hired or promoted,” and the too-much, too-soon actions follow.
So, the onboarding advice of going slow, learning before acting, and focusing on only a few small, early successes is counterintuitive for most new leaders and is anything but common sense to them. Yet, following this specific onboarding advice is one of the most important success factors for new leaders.
- Does PowerStart Onboarding fit all types of business situations?
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Whether the newly placed executive is responsible for leading a turnaround, sustaining a high-performing business unit, or taking charge of a startup, PowerStart Onboarding will help shorten the time it takes to address the transition challenges and achieve expected results.
The situations differ in their details, but all leadership transitions have many important commonalities—imperatives as well as obstacles and pitfalls. PowerStart Onboarding helps the new leader focus on the proven must-do actions, while anticipating and effectively managing the predictable challenges.