There’s No Such Thing as Hitting the Ground Running
When I began my role as Chief Talent Officer at Cleveland Metropolitan School District, I knew that my initial approach would significantly impact my ability to create and implement a strong people strategy. I had been successful at Teach For America for over a decade, but I wasn’t sure how my skills would translate into a very different culture. So I picked up The First 90 Days, and asked for a coach. Yet, even with my self awareness about my limitations and the resources provided to me, I still stumbled through my onboarding. I made lots of assumptions about how others perceived my leadership; I prioritized the wrong things (namely projects over relationships); and I thought my experience would be readily seen and appreciated by my team and colleagues. In retrospect, the rough road seems somewhat inevitable, which has me thinking about a better way to onboard executive leaders, particularly your Chief People Officer (CPO).
As HBR article Onboarding Isn’t Enough suggests, the goal should not be onboarding but integration, defined as “Doing what it takes to make the new person a fully functioning member of the team as quickly and smoothly as possible.” And even though we know how important this is, it is hard to determine a reasonable timeline and the necessary actions to get there. Investing in a CPO that struggles, or worse, fails, could create more challenges for your organization than you had prior to bringing on a CPO in the first place. And, knowing that everyone wants to succeed in their new job, letting someone flounder doesn’t align with what most companies would suggest are their values. Given the stakes of doing this well, here are some recommendations for integrating a new senior team member.
Give your new team member time. Everyone wants to hire someone who can “hit the ground running” but that isn’t realistic. Even someone with years of experience as a CPO needs to learn your organizational culture and norms and build trusting relationships. Assume this process will take longer than 90 days.
Let your new hire know where you think they will excel, why you offered them the role, and where they are going to need to be more vigilant. This sets the stage for a relationship where feedback is the norm, and you are letting them know what competencies to lean on and which ones may need some work.
Help them identify some quick wins. Getting some quick wins will build credibility for your new CPO. This could be something that their team has been complaining about or something that other colleagues are going to be eager to see. Maybe not the quickest, but when I got to the school district there was no recruitment strategy. We quickly created a marketing and recruitment strategy that the team and principals could rally around. No one was interested in talking about retention with our team if we couldn’t get them some candidates in the spring.
Set them up to manage their team effectively. Let them know who else was up for the position, who has been a strong performer and potentially a retention risk, and the way folks like to communicate in a briefing early on. This will give them the context to quickly show interest in the tactical pieces of the work the team is doing.
Schedule key stakeholder meetings. Provide context on who is on the list and share why the order was intentional.
Schedule manager meetings every couple of days for the first couple of weeks. Create time and space to hear your new executives' reflections and support their sense making.
Ultimately, you hired this person because they are going to be strategic about building relationships and getting up to speed. They should spend the first month working on developing their priorities and goals and then getting lots of feedback about the plan over the next couple of months. And while you, as the manager, will be their first coach, they are going to need more support, so offer a coach who will do a 360 after the first 90 days. Our coLeaguers support organizations as coaches and advisors to new and transitioning CPOs because we know how important those first few months can be.
This takes time and resources, and after spending 6 months finding your perfect person, it may feel like you have already crossed the finish line. However, if you don’t invest now, you may very well end up doing another search way too soon, and nobody wants that.
