New Leader Assimilation: How to Support a New Executive | 120 Seconds to Better Leadership

An Expensive Problem 

Did you know that 40 to 50 percent of executives fail when they take new roles? Usually in the first 18 months. Did you know that that costs the organization about two times their annual salary? It’s an expensive problem. With all this expense—and it’s a problem we’ve been talking about for 15 years—it’s amazing more organizations aren’t doing more to onboard their most expensive talent.

New Executives Need to Move Fast

So, who gets blamed for this? HR, right? Recruiting probably. And, what I can tell you after assimilating 40 executives successfully into new roles, very senior roles, the person doesn’t have to be the perfect fit for the role in order to onboard successfully. But they’ve got to get their charter nailed pretty quickly, they’ve got to do a thorough assessment of their team, they’ve got to assimilate in a culturally-acceptable way, and those are a lot of variables for executives to figure out, so there’s a lot of room for early mistakes that others just can’t get past. This is part of why 360 leadership assessment is important.

Are You Doing Enough?

So, we’ve got an approach to executive on-boarding, happy to talk to you about it, it’s very simple, very straightforward, highly-effective in new leader assimilation. But if nothing else, take away from this that most organizations aren’t doing enough to get talent assimilated once they get them in the door.

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