Page 173 - Successful Onboarding

160 • Successful Onboarding

with the idea of co-leading a semi-monthly growth planning meeting. The
leader gave him the opportunity, and as a result his profile improved and
his career at Kaiser was in far better shape than it otherwise might have been.
The initiative that this individual helped spearhead now has new energy and
is experiencing progress where it had stalled before. We are realizing the
Onboarding Margin in this one instance alone.
This story is a great example of an inexpensive investment making a
real difference. All that the onboarding change agent really needs to do
here is:

1. Talk to hiring managers about the opportunity and their
responsibility to play a special role for new hires; and
2. Modify their company’s assessment process to take special
consideration and provide special direction for new employees
(as compared with tenured employees).

Best Principle #2: Systematizing is no substitute for authenticity.
Even as you take steps to systematize program elements that might already
exist informally, make sure not to efface the authentic feel of these ele-
ments. Mentorship, for instance, should not be routinized to the extent
that mentees lose a sense of their mentors’ genuine engagement. It is far
better to have a genuine experience than a centralized one that is rote and
uninspired. We want all managers to know what to do and when, but if it
becomes a perfunctory exercise, all a firm is doing is adding expense with-
out realizing a significant benefit. And given that you are working on a sys-
tem here for the entire company’s benefit, you cannot rely on the goodwill
of mentors to take their jobs seriously. For onboarding to be systemic, men-
tors should have their responsibilities written into their job descriptions,
and their performance as mentors should factor into their broader annual
assessments. If mentors are held accountable for their performance, they
will care about doing a great job.
To understand the tangible difference authenticity makes, consider the
case of Robert, a recently hired junior sales associate at a pharmaceutical
company. Robert participates in a monthly meeting with his firm-selected
mentor to discuss his career development. But because the mentor pro-
gram is so rigidly specified, the meetings are meaningless. The mentor