Page 166 - Successful Onboarding

Personal Progress and Prospect: Early Career Support • 153

productivity is created: The more effectively individuals perform, the more
they develop reputations as stars, which leads in turn to still better per-
formance. For younger and more experienced hires alike, greater self-
awareness about minor behavioral tendencies that are having a negative
impact, such as doing work out of order from a well-established and proven
process, or a tendency to use certain language repetitively and to excess,
could prove pivotal. Younger hires often do not know the finer points about
how best to act, while older hires might retain ingrained habits or skills
that do not work in their new organization’s culture. Organizations can
get employees working most productively by offering early career support
that identifies both progress and career-limiting behaviors, intervenes
when these behaviors come up, supports employee efforts to transform
their behavior, and recognizes positive change when it occurs. Most
importantly, firms can help hires work productively by crafting how work
is initially “set up” for them—the assignments, the support structures, and
the guidance.
Early career support affects attrition by creating an opportunity to turn
around new hires who might otherwise have left out of frustration with
their current job situation, and also by helping identify lower performers
sooner so that they can establish remediation paths. By learning about how
they can best develop in the future, new hires can gain a sense of purpose
and become excited again about the company. Our own firm hired a high-
performing young consultant who had previously worked for another bou-
tique consulting firm. This person performed exceptionally well soon after
arrival, so as part of the routine mentoring discussions that occurred, we
began having serious conversations with him about his future at the firm.
We outlined the timing of different promotions, the compensation rewards
he could expect to achieve over time, and the possibility that our firm
would pay for his enrollment in an MBA program. Because of his excep-
tional performance, this employee became a manager in only 6 months.
Around the one-year mark, he was so driven that he was already thinking
about getting an MBA and was willing to leave the organization to do it.
Through our ongoing mentoring process and other early career support
initiatives, we were able to reassure this new hire that we would likely spon-
sor his MBA sooner rather than later. The result: Our go-getter remained
happy in his job and has stayed with us. While this is just one person, the