Page 178 - Successful Onboarding

Personal Progress and Prospect: Early Career Support • 165

manager, the corporate HR “coach,” and other senior leaders at corporate
involved in the business plan review. Involvement from such a diverse set
of stakeholders ensures new hires are well prepared for their new finan-
cial advisory careers.

Best Principle #7: Offer a flexible system with multiple safeguards.
Experiences within organizations are often uneven when it comes to
career development. Some managers might be open to working with new
hires on a career development track even if it takes them outside their cur-
rent career, whereas others are not. To account for variations across the
organization, your onboarding system should offer different paths and put
the focus on exploration. Firms should offer supplementary resources,
potentially even independent career counselors like at a high school or
university career center. Should the firm choose an internal resource to
serve as a supplemental resource, this individual should be outside the
new hire’s chain of command and operational role—someone in the tal-
ent management, learning development, or HR functions. That way, new
hires with poor mentors and managers still gain the benefit of a third
option. In many of the companies we have mentioned so far, centralized
online resources can serve this function to some extent, as can content
such as inspirational case studies for how successful career paths at the
organization can unfold. Offering multiple safeguards supports both the
guidance and remediation structural elements of early career support.

Summing Up

Remember Charles, the employee we met in the Introduction whose boss
quit before he arrived? If his company had offered early career support,
Charles would have met with his new manager during the first couple of
weeks of employment. He would have articulated where he wanted to go,
admitted that he had arrived with higher visions of leading the intended
initiative, and informed his manager that he now he felt like a rug had
been pulled out from underneath him.
In the wake of such a conversation and the creation of a personal devel-
opment plan for Charles, his manager might have thought about some new
ways to help him achieve his goal—perhaps helping Charles to network