Page 84 - Successful Onboarding

The State of the Art: Essentials of Strategic Onboarding • 73

understand their responsibilities, expectations, measures of success, and
the broader impact of their contribution. Without a clear direction, your
program will prove disorganized at best and dysfunctional at worst. High
performance programs clearly specify the identities of all onboarding pro-
gram delivery participants as well as their specific roles and tasks. They
then provide them with the materials and tools necessary to succeed. Over-
all, successful onboarding resembles a manufacturing line in which every-
one knows their clear role, does their job, and produces a great product
item after item.

Spotlight: Bank of America

Today, more organizations offer systemic, integrated onboarding programs
for executive hires than for front-line or lower-level hires. It is a practical
place to start if a company has limited resources. Bank of America onboards
its new executive hires in a process that lasts between 12 and 18 months.
Executives gain strategic insight into specific businesses and customers, learn
Bank of America’s unwritten cultural rules as well as performance values for
people in leadership roles, and develop an understanding of social networks
and stakeholders at the company. The company assumes that successful
onboarding goes beyond hiring managers and includes “the fullest possible
spectrum of stakeholders.” Individual executives receive peer coaches as well
as senior advisors, they are placed into a cohort group with other new hires,
and they meet with the CEO, the executive team, and “other executives pre-
viously hired into the Bank from outside.” HR generalists and leadership
development specialists also participate in the new executive hire’s onboard-
ing process. Overall results: Among the almost 200 executives recruited exter-
nally by Bank of America between 2001 and 2006, only 12% were ultimately
terminated—much lower than the 40% turnover rate experienced with exec-
utive hires at some large corporations. As we argue in this book, it’s time
to take a systemic approach and extend it as much as possible to the entire
population of new hires.

Source: Jay A. Conver and Brian Fishel. Accelerating Leadership Performance at the Top:
Lessons from the Bank of America’s Executive On-Boarding Process. Human Resource
Management Review, 17 (2007), 442–454.