Leading Age - January/February 2011 - 32

Strategies for Successful Onboarding: Derailment or Success?
b y Ma r k S teel e a n d S y l v a L e du c

An important but too-often neglected part of succession planning is executive onboarding—the process of integrating a new CEO or other executive-level manager into an organization in a way that brings out the new leader’s best ideas and abilities while ensuring buy-in from staff. These authors present recommendations for how best to onboard a new leader, and share their research into onboarding practices that identifed five important stages in the process. The research on executive derailment is stunning: • 30 percent to 50 percent of new CEOs fail within the first 18 months of being hired; • 21 percent of executives promoted from within a company fail; • According to Korn/Ferry, only 30 percent of global executives were satisfied with their onboarding process for new hires.

In all, 20 executive leaders of multisite and single-site organizations across the country participated in this study to identify the common principles of successful onboarding. We included CEOs, executive directors, vice presidents and administrators. Grounded theory provided the research methodology. It is an inductive method developed in the 1960s by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss and described in their book, The Discovery of Grounded Theory. The method is a means to discover theory as it emerges from data found in interviews about real experience. Participants shared with us their journeys in becoming new leaders, how they became accepted as leaders, lessons learned and their own onboarding best practices. We compiled their answers and compared/contrasted the data to develop our theory of what worked for these executives as they started their new positions and successfully became leaders in their organizations. Five distinct phases of the onboarding process emerged: dancing, committing, transitioning, accepting and producing. Phase 1 – Dancing: The first phase of successful onboarding transpires before the hiring decision is made. Among the CEOs in our study, 45 percent of the interviewees were hired externally through search firm-type processes. The other 55 percent were hired from within through internal interview processes. At the non-CEO level, the majority of the leaders were promoted from within or recruited through networking. While each executive’s story was different, the path was usually determined by whether the candidates came from inside or outside the organization. Our findings suggest that those aspiring to advance should network inside and outside the organization and let people know about their career goals. For those looking to move into a CEO position, building relationships with prominent search firms, peers and vendors is important. For companies that want to hire from within, building a strong leader bench is essential. Programs like the LeadingAge

nboarding is the process of helping new employees become productive members of an organization. More than an orientation, it’s a strategic process. In general, it can be defined as the process of acquiring, accommodating, assimilating and accelerating new users into a system, culture or methodology. Onboarding emphasizes the importance of making the most of the “honeymoon” stage of a hire, which has been described as the first 90-100 days, or up to the full first year.

Executive Onboarding in Aging Services None of the executive onboarding literature is specific to not-for-profits, retirement housing services or health care. Naturally, we became curious about whether strategic onboarding is being used more broadly in aging services. To merge our combined onboarding experiences with executives’ success stories, we launched a research project and shared the results at the 2010 AAHSA Annual Meeting in Los Angeles.
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LeadingAge magazine | January/February 2011

Leading Age - January/February 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Leading Age - January/February 2011