Page 208 - Successful Onboarding

192 • Successful Onboarding

succeed if they don’t have a good strategy, and a good strategy will not
emerge if companies don’t have employees adept at plotting strategy.
In a knowledge economy, workers’ intellectual skills become more
prized assets than the durable goods companies produce. As Peter
Drucker noted in his book The Effective Executive, knowledge workers
produce with their heads, not their hands, creating ideas, knowledge, and
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information. Organizations are already investing in their human capital
by offering more robust training and development programs. Teaching
your new hires strategy and strategic thinking as a skill that will enable
employees to produce ideas is another way a company can support the
new hire’s development.
It is a clear win-win: The organization is preparing its people (or assets)
to “produce” more of what is needed by the company to succeed in the
future, and the individual gains a valuable skill that makes him or her
more marketable when changing companies or simply more successful
within the same company. Yet companies need to articulate this to new
hires. That way, new hires will possess a stronger sense of participating in
and benefiting from a new employer-employee compact.

Best Principle #8: Clue new hires into your strategic priorities.
Not all parts of the strategy are as fixed as others, and not all are prioritized
as highly. Part of our firm’s strategy is to have a congenial workplace where
young people can learn a lot and work hard. We decided to locate our
office in the heart of downtown because we thought new hires would find
this neighborhood more attractive. If our lease comes up for renewal and
our rent doubles, we might be willing move our offices to an alternative
location, even though being downtown is part of our people strategy. We
might compromise because a greater strategic priority might be to improve
our profits. To understand our company, new hires need to understand
how our firm thinks through these issues and how we make decisions that
befit our strategy. This nuanced discussion empowers new hires to begin
to become a more effective steward and activist of the company’s strategy,
as they are equipped to think and act in harmony with the enterprise’s
intended path.
Companies need to articulate what their strategic priorities are. That
way, they can organize their own efforts to support the firm’s more