Page 194 - Successful Onboarding

178 • Successful Onboarding

firm chosen to target? What does the differentiated strategy look like by
segment? What is our relative competitive position within each segment and
why? What other choices do customers have when making a purchasing
decision? What prospect is there for an industry-transformative substitute
emerging for the products our organization sells?
As part of a customer analysis, firms should also clue new hires into key
demand drivers. If you operate in an environment with a channel, you will
need to explain this at multiple levels; what a new hire may think of as a
customer may actually be a channel. What drives behavior at the channel
level and with whom is the firm competing? New hires should also under-
stand the organization’s brands—what do the brands represent? More fun-
damentally, what value proposition does the brand communicate in
customers’ minds, and how does it compare with competitors’ brands?
How should the new hire’s role reflect this brand definition?
Another topic area new hires should know about involves the resources
at the firm’s disposal to meet its objectives. What are the key resources?
What choices have we made to allocate our resources? Is our infrastruc-
ture stable or does it require constant innovation and investment? Do we
own our supply chain or outsource it? Why? What technical competen-
cies (trademarks, knowledge) can we bring to bear? Without this infor-
mation, new hires will prove less equipped to think through issues and
come up with appropriate approaches. More concerning, they will likely
distrust the firm’s actions, when in reality these new hires simply do not
have sufficient perspective to pass judgment. If your goal is to energize
and excite new hires to support company strategy, the last thing you want
is a hire unnecessarily skeptical from the get-go.
As you can see, a full and useful strategic discussion (and this is hardly
an exhaustive list) is potentially quite extensive—a good reason why strate-
gic education should occur progressively throughout the first year rather
than all at once during Week One orientation. In addition to the breadth
of the topics, we have plenty of evidence, as earlier discussed, that new
hires do not have sufficient context to absorb everything in the first week.
You can present strategy during that week, preferably in the form of a
two-way dialogue, but at the very least you need to repeat and extend the
education throughout the first year as new hires develop the proper expe-
riential context to absorb it. By continuing the discussion throughout the