The Complete Guide to Executive Onboarding 

The search is over, you’ve finally found your ideal candidate.

You’ve sifted through resumes, considered your options from inside and outside your organization, and extensively interviewed a wide range of candidates. You’re confident found the right team member to lead a significant division of the organization.

Congratulations on a job well done!

…Now what? Where do you and your new leader go from here?

Give Your New Exec the Best Start Possible

Whether you’re hiring from outside or promoting from within, there is a great risk to your organization with any leadership transition.

Statistics show that 50 percent of all new executives fail, and that failure always costs organizations—in severance pay, stalled business results, damaged morale and repeated recruitment fees.

Many companies and non-profits make the mistake of assuming that when they move someone up from the inside, they avoid all risk of a cultural mismatch. While success is statistically more likely in this case, failure is still a significant possibility—30 percent on the low end of predictions.

The truth is, transitions are hard—both for the man brought in from another organization and for the woman who worked her way up to a new echelon of leadership with her employer. 

Our mission is to help your new leaders assimilate into the corporate culture around them so that they can gain the trust of those they are leading and meet every goal set by themselves and the organization.

And our mission is made easier if we start when your new executive starts. Assimilation starts with a strong executive onboarding process.

Q&A

Got questions about executive onboarding and how it relates to the other things we do (executive assimilation, coaching and assessments)? We’ve got your answers right here.

But if we haven’t anticipated your exact question,

What is executive onboarding?

Executive onboarding is the start of the process we call executive assimilation. It occurs after hiring process and begins the executive’s integration into the new role. We believe it is absolutely essential to the assimilation process, and when done right, prevents so many of the problems that we usually get hired to fix after the fact. 

At its essence, executive onboarding is a formal program that introduces the newly hired or promoted leader into the role and the culture that comes with it. 

Traditionally this looks like a mere exchange of information between the new leader and the organization: an info dump of policy documents and wiki files, with a perfunctory lunch on the first day. But there is a better way than that. A much better way! 

We start integrating your new executive with the culture of the role as soon as the hiring process finishes. We do that by means of facilitating the right discussions that have to happen early on. We’ll help you communicate with your new leader the specific expectations that a broad list of stakeholders have of them, and we’ll help them ask all the questions that must be asked to clarify their charter ongoing.

Why is executive onboarding important?

There’s much we could say to answer this question (so much that Emily wrote a book on it!) but the simple answer is this:

Executive failure is becoming far too common. Studies agree that 40–70 percent of new executives fail—meaning they quit, get fired, flail, get reassigned, or transition out in frustration—within the first 18 months of the role.

Executive assimilation successfully turns this around. And executive onboarding is the crucial first step that ensures a successful assimilation.  Executive onboarding starts the assimilation process on the right foot so that remedial coaching is never necessary.  We prevent the problems which will be harder to solve, if allowed to fester for months and months.

Successful onboarding will: 

  • Provide the new exec with clarity of purpose

  • Help keep team morale up

  • Prepare the team for new leadership

  • Reduce turnover

How long does executive onboarding take?

The answer to this question varies. Although a large number of companies take just a couple of weeks, there is a growing consensus among HR professionals that the process should take between 6-12.

What many call onboarding, we call assimilation. Our executive assimilation process starts with onboarding and typically extends out to a year, with ongoing coaching tailored to that particular leader, the organization, and the challenges he or she is facing.

The onboarding is just our first step of a process that has a 98 percent success rate.

Who is in charge of onboarding?

This is going to vary depending on the role. While many stakeholders are involved in the process, the direct manager is most involved with the ongoing feedback; with HR playing an important internal partner role. 

The good news about this question is that it isn’t terribly difficult to answer, especially when you hire a coach to help with the onboarding. We’ll come alongside you, help you choose the perfect onboarding point-person, and share the load with them.

You shouldn’t have to go it alone.

What is essential to a successful executive onboarding experience?

The number one thing you need to do for a solid executive onboarding experience is to align expectations of the team with their new leader.

This means setting clear expectations. It needs to be documented, for sure. But we also believe in keeping things as human as possible. So we facilitate meaningful and practical discussions between new leaders and their teams to help this information come up organically. We shape the discussion and help them ask the right questions of each other—the ones that will form bonds between colleagues, cement strong relationships, and build trust in new leaders from the get-go.  Better alignment is always a strong outcome.  

And there should be a check-in process built into the onboarding experience that gives the new leader the opportunity to ask the questions down the line they didn’t know to ask in their first week.

A good executive coach will tailor a standard executive onboarding process to your team’s unique needs and challenges.

What must a new executive learn during onboarding?

We’re glad you’re asking this question, because we’ve built our whole assimilation process around it. The answer has three points:

1.The Charter

Your charter is what your organization expects you to accomplish in your new role. We believe you must put your charter into your own words, incorporating all the things you’re learning from those above you and who report to you, the official things and the unofficial things. 

Our coaches help the new leader take the information they’re receiving, put it in their own words, set goals, and build an actionable plan around them.

2.The Culture

This one is a bit more intangible. The culture is the ways things are done in your organization and the attitudes and emotions around it. It usually has less to do with policies and procedures and more to do with the manner in which people interact. It will be your job to fit into this culture before you are able to change it—and you may not need to.

3.The Team

This definition is straightforward: Your team is the group of people under your leadership. You need to get to know each person, at least to a degree in which you can interact safely with each other without the risk of being misunderstood. Our executive onboarding process facilitates these relationships organically. 

There are all sorts of ways to handle the onboarding process. Each executive firm has its their own formula, but the best will tailor their plans to your specific needs. Bermes Associates has over 20 years of experience, and we make it a habit to learn from every successful assimilation and onboarding we do to improve our process and increase your likelihood of success.

What makes an executive onboarding experience fail?

In our experience, it is an omission of two key things and commission of 7 executive onboarding mistakes, that makes an executive onboarding go bad. And those two things are:

Omission 1: Leaving People Out

For an incoming leader seeking to inspire trust among their people, no team member is dispensable. Yes, down the line certain team members may need to be let go or reassigned, but during the onboarding stage, no one should be overlooked. The new leader must be given the opportunity to learn from everyone who reports to them, because they may have vital cultural information to contribute.

To skip over someone is to risk appearing calloused or uncaring. You don’t want that reputation in your first month.

Omission 2: Lack of follow through

Anyone can pull an onboarding plan off the Internet and complete a checklist for two weeks. But scheduling the necessary people meetings and checking in further into the process as the everyday work piles up—that can be a challenge to anyone. This is why hiring an executive coach can be so advantageous. It’s their job to keep you on track and make sure the whole process, onboarding through assimilation, results in a successful marriage between executive and organization, leader and team.

Check our article here for the full rundown of the missteps most new-to-role executives make.

What does an executive onboarding failure look like?

­­An onboarding failure occurs before the executive fails. We’ve already established that 50 percent of new-to-role executives will fail—that is, leave their role without accomplishing their personal or organizational goals—within 18 months. 

But in a high percentage of cases, the executive failed because of a failure in the onboarding experience. Which means that if executive onboarding fails, it fails pretty early on.

We’ve perfected our process over time so that we now have a 98 percent success rate. Why don’t you give us a call?

Of course we’re biased, but the statistics don’t lie. We have a 98-percent success rate at integrating executives into their new roles.

We call it executive assimilation, and it starts with onboarding and lasts well beyond the common first-quarter time frame. We come alongside your leaders with ongoing coaching that starts with creating a charter that expresses their own goals and their goals as set by the organization, all as part of a plan to carry out these goals in a manner true to themselves. We don’t leave your executives until we have tangible evidence that they are succeeding in the new role.

2. Cowen Partners

Boasting a six-week average candidate placement time, Cowen Partners is likely the first firm you’ll see on a Google search for executive onboarding firms. We applaud their effectiveness as executive search professionals, but we find very little on their website about their onboarding process.

Our recommendation is to try an experienced executive coaching firm for onboarding, rather than merely taking an add-on from an executive search firm.

3. Talent Keepers

Talent Keepers rely on their onboarding survey to get feedback from current employees with the intention of learning what keeps employees engaged. Then they use that information to emphasize the best parts of the role during the onboarding process.

4. AllenComm

Boasting increased productivity scores and reduced training times, this firm comes highly rated and reviewed for its efficiency. If you’re seeking a fast onboarding process, we recommend AllenComm.

But if you want an effective executive onboarding experience which will serve to integrate your leaders with the larger team, our opinion is that AllenComm’s reduced turnover score of 7 percent is not high enough. Bermes Associates has a 98-percent success rate at keeping new executives in their seats.

 5. MSI Global Talent Solutions

Like Talent Keepers, MSI works with their clients to tailor an onboarding plan. Also like Talent Keepers (and other firms on this list), they stop short of full executive assimilation. They specialize in remote work though, so if your organization is especially focused on this model, they could be a strong secondary choice for your executive onboarding needs.

6. Onboarding Software

What we find when we look for other executive onboarding firms is that most of them are faceless software companies. In some cases, such as Refresh, the software is excellent; but human resources shouldn’t lack humanity. At Bermes Associates we always put people first, and we have a 98-percent success rate.

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