Page 192 - Successful Onboarding

176 • Successful Onboarding

employer explained the tactics and underlying strategy to you. And if you
were a young hire without industry experience, you would not understand
what you were doing at all (like Mark initially at Häagen-Dazs).
Organizations need to give new hires sufficient context for under-
standing the win plan by offering insight into the operating conditions that
inform this strategy and its execution. Sharing information about com-
petitors, company resources, and decisions associated with allocating those
resources is especially important. Many new hires who have not worked
in an industry before do not know much about the other players serving a
market, including the extent of the competition, how individual com-
petitors behave, and the strengths and weaknesses of each.
One useful approach might be for an onboarding program to break the
competition down according to a widely used and fundamental framework
in the strategy world—management consultant Michael Porter’s Five
Forces framework for industry analysis. New hires could learn about the
threat of substitute offerings competing with the firm’s own; the threat of
new players entering the firm’s market; how intense the rivalry among
competitors is in the industry; information about customer buying power;
and information about the bargaining power of suppliers. Since all of these
affect the formulation and success of an organization’s win plan, commu-
nicating them to new hires goes a long way toward rendering the firm’s
win plan comprehensible in their eyes. Front-line employees especially
need this orientation, as they are typically operating along a single thread
of the overall strategy and have very little opportunity to otherwise gain a
greater perspective.
Let’s consider an example of how a company might communicate
competitive information. For years, Home Depot had enjoyed a largely
uncompetitive landscape, exploiting its scale advantages over smaller local
retailers and providing its customers with discount prices and a broad
selection of common products. Front-line employees were well condi-
tioned to Home Depot’s retail platform and long-term strategy (whether
or not if it was ever explicitly taught to them).
Home Depot added a new element to its strategy about 5 years ago
when, in response to competition from Lowe’s, it decided to differentiate
itself by offering customers unique products they could not find anywhere
else. Home Depot created an in-house product development function and