Onboarding Coaching for the Key Employee

With the incredibly challenging white-water environment of the new millennium, rapid ramp-up for newly selected key executives has become critical. As a result of the chaotic and transformational business environment of the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, the art and science of management has also been radically transformed. The demand for executives to keep pace with and even ahead of this learning curve has increased dramatically. In response, coaching has become a high-impact solution within most corporate cultures, and certainly in the process of on-boarding a new key hire.

We now actually understand a great deal about what differentiates the successful key performer within an organization from those who are just ordinary performers.

Successful executives and leaders must be aggressive about self-understanding, taking initiative, and demonstrating the ability to inspire and influence others in a highly effective manner. The most successful executives are those who:

Possess a finely-turned capacity for self-reflection and self-awareness
Continually seek feedback and are consistently self-questioning about their successes and misses
Seek a wide variety of experiences, out of both a sense of curiosity and the understanding that stretch experiences are the best medium for self-development
Constantly strive to learn something new and different by searching for comparisons, contrasts, and generalizable insights
Find ways to apply new and old learnings to new situations
Continually hone their emotional intelligence to manage themselves and lead others

These seven bullets above describe the profile of what we now recognize as the Agile Learner.

The bad news is that only about 10% of us are Agile Learners by nature. The good news, though, is that much of what it takes to be an Agile Learner and an accomplished leader is coachable.

While the term “onboarding coaching” is usually used to refer to work with a newly hired key employee, it also applies to individuals who are promoted from within an organization.

Fully 40% of newly hired or promoted key employees fail within two years—in large degree because they do not understand that their success depends on demonstrating finesse in relationships with all those around them.

General reasons for such failures are typically described as a lack of cultural fit, inability to develop effective teams, a lack of political savvy, a lack of an assimilation process, and an unclear understanding of what leadership expects.

Onboarding coaching minimizes the chances of costly terminations and replacements by assisting new key hires in areas that are critical to success and retention. Onboarding coaching ensures that a key hire understands the essence of the new culture and then develops new behavioral strategies for harmonizing with the culture and, thereby, hits the ground running.