4 Ways to Successfully Onboard a New Executive | Gartner
source link: https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/4-ways-to-ensure-a-new-executive-benefits-your-organization-immediately
Go to the source link to view the article. You can view the picture content, updated content and better typesetting reading experience. If the link is broken, please click the button below to view the snapshot at that time.
No. 1: Tailor your support based on the situation
You must account for the situation that your transitioning colleague faces. Are they replacing an icon or following a trainwreck? Is this a newly created role? As you welcome your new peer, shape your support around the circumstances.
- In 35% of all executive transition situations, the previous leader’s performance was solid, but not outstanding, and the organization needs to quickly move in a different direction because of a strategy change or the broader economic environment. When this is the case, help your new colleague focus on quickly understanding the industry, organization and team dynamics.
About one-quarter of executives are in transition at any given time. Of those executives, about 40% are underperforming.
Source: Gartner
No. 2: Shift responsibility from the individual leader to the community
Prepare a group of key stakeholders — the CEO, C-suite peers and direct reports — with whom the new executive will work by providing them resources and tools to interact with and support the new leader.
Each person or group has a role to play:
The CEO provides business perspective and feedback on strategy.
C-suite peers share ideas and information, as well as guide a new leader through the company culture and politics.
Direct reports offer candid information about the team’s strengths, weaknesses and challenges.
The average large organization has 70 senior executives and replaces 12% of them annually, resulting in eight leadership transitions each year.
Source: Gartner
No. 3: Create a structured, repeatable process
Most executive leadership teams approach leadership transitions as one-off events, making them unsystematized and unrepeatable. This unsystematic approach often leaves new executives to self-manage their transition.
Partner with HR to create a structured, repeatable transition support process, complete with resources, tools and approaches to assist any new-to-role executive with a set of high-impact transition activities.
No. 4: Provide support well beyond the first 90 days
The first 90 days of an executive leader’s tenure is make-or-break for their future in the organization. Because of this, most companies limit their transition support to this period.
However, there’s often a plateau in performance at the six-to-nine-month mark. Provide your colleague with support well beyond the first 90 days, with a longer-term focus on helping them implement changes and execute new or updated priorities.
The story behind the research
From the desk of Blakeley Hartfelder, Gartner Senior Director, Research
“Executive leadership transitions are driven not just by the actions and abilities of executive leaders, but also by a carefully engineered, situation-specific combination and sequence of activities, competencies and support from their organizations. This differentiated approach can reduce the ramp to full productivity for the transitioning leader by up to nine months and has significant benefits for the broader organization.”
3 things to tell your peers
Poorly executed executive transitions pose great risks to organizations. To guard against this, fellow leaders need a proactive approach to support a new colleague.
Executive transitions are not only a personal effort. Enlisting the entire C-suite to be an active support community can accelerate new leaders’ effectiveness.
The window for transition has decreased from 100 to 90 days. Still, executive leaders should receive support well beyond this period.
Blakeley Hartfelder develops resources HR executives can use to effectively and efficiently attract, engage and manage the talent they need to drive their businesses forward. Specifically, in her role, she creates and manages others to produce research studies and whitepapers, identifies best practices in HR functional management and partners directly with HR leaders from across the globe to help them grow their careers and their businesses. Her current work focuses on helping CHROs understand how to create strategies, operating models and budgets to drive business results effectively and efficiently.
Recommend
About Joyk
Aggregate valuable and interesting links.
Joyk means Joy of geeK