Page 195 - Successful Onboarding

“Limited Upside in Flying Blind”: Driving Strategic Insight • 179

first year and involving company leadership, you get the double impact of
not only teaching but also reiterating the company’s commitment to the
strategy. This can have an enormous effect, raising new hires’ confidence
and exciting their work ethics, given that they obviously have come to work
for a competent and directed team. Given how poorly most companies
engage employees around their strategic win plans, you have a very good
chance of standing out in stark and welcome contrast to your new hires’
last employer.
With understanding and development of a common view as the ultimate
goals, strategic education needs to focus not only on short-term strategies,
but also the longer-term vision. Companies should take care to reveal in
depth what the organization aspires to in the broadest sense and how the
company’s business plan will help them get there. The onboarding system
needs to make clear to new hires what the firm is doing right now to pur-
sue the strategy, including where the firm is making investments; where
the weak points are; what the firm is doing to address them; and what kind
of pressures the firm is under, both short and long term, to realize its strate-
gies. With this perspective in hand, your new hires will be more inspired,
have a greater understanding of your company’s actions and inactions, and
become more confident in their choice of employer and more excited
about their future. Most importantly for your stakeholders, the new hires
will become far more effective in helping the enterprise deliver against its
intended strategy.

Aha Moments and Motivation
It is difficult to present hard data about strategy education’s impact on
the organization’s goals, since too few firms have invested materially in
orienting employees (much less new hires) to the strategy in any sub-
stantive or formal way beyond the senior ranks. However, we know from
our experience working with winning and struggling companies alike on
business improvement initiatives that strategy conversations radically
improve the chance that the group will have an “Aha moment” and
either form the critical operational insight or come to support an insight
that a group member has already advanced. Both outcomes offer huge
advantages.