Nathan was relieved he had finally filled the VP opening. Carlene was scheduled to start on Monday. That was a good day because she would get to meet the other VP’s. The team had all worked together for well over eight years, some of them twelve years. They didn’t really know how to welcome Carlene. They couldn’t remember what it was like to be new. In fact Carlene was the third VP they had hired in the last eight months in that role. The others just weren’t the right fit.
Integrating a newly hired leader is a necessary leadership competency. Often leaders think of their technical, or functional area of expertise as their main job: whether it’s sales, finance , IT, or research. While that is their primary role, and a minimum requirement for success, at a leadership level other key competencies are necessary for a team to be vibrant and to flourish. Delegation, performance reviews, engagement, and expanding the management team are just a few.
Offering a Warm Welcome
Here we will focus on the welcome. What does it take to give Carlene an inviting welcome? For starters, the balance of the team is unaware of how they have developed a rapport, jargon and even the use of phrases in a way that have become insular, cliquish or a kind of code. These could be innocent enough, whether it’s “band width” or “we’ll eat their lunch” or “empower others” or “compare and contrast.” Teams who have been together a long time fall into language patterns that are outside of their awareness. For them, as with a family, it becomes a short-cut way of communicating that may be very efficient – even playful. But without awareness, it can alienate a new member of the team. That’s not even considering the exclusionary use of company-specific acronyms.
The second challenge is that over a long period of time a team develops a shared understanding of what is known or not known by each member. That means there are huge assumptions that are made, many of which may be quite accurate, but again are outside of awareness. This leaves a new executive inadvertently out of the loop.
What Happens?
There’s a shared corporate history that can also go unspoken. Remember the time we scored that new account? Remember the time we were snowed in at the airport for 23 hours? Remember the time Sam forgot the report? Remember the year we had a huge loss?
It’s a little like watching a friend reunite with a long lost cousin: they have characters and stories in their life that have no meaning to others, yet animate them a lot. Noticing you’re not a part of the connection, feeling left out, is the natural result.
If all of this sounds a little too emotional, think of it in terms of competence. Every leader (everyone) wants to feel competent . Lacking information, jargon, vocabulary, or history can leave a new leader unnecessarily out of the loop or worse, hesitant to participate due to lacking information.
This becomes especially critical if an outside executive is brought in as a successor to a leader who is retiring or moving.
What to Do:
1. Introduce yourselves several times over the first week to get clear on names.
2. Review the acronyms and jargon that you use; help each other bring that into awareness.
3. Provide background and context when referencing something in the past
4. Show where documentation is stored and how to access it
5. Schedule an orientation so he/she can meet individually with peers
6. Invite comments and observations from the new leader
New hires are eager to make a contribution. Their fresh perspective and clarifying questions are potentially a valuable source of reflection and awareness. It may prompt a useful reflection, “yeah– why do we do it that way?” Even seasoned executives are amateurs in their first few months, in terms of the company and culture, and should be encouraged to bring curiosity, not told “that’s how we do it here.”
Note to New Hires:
Don’t go overboard in referencing “how we did it” at your old company. Once or twice is the limit. Resist the temptation to be too expert, and embrace the new-hire learning role. After all, amateur comes from the root word to love something.
What has worked well when you’ve been a newly hired leader?
Janet Britcher, MBA is President of Transformation Management, LLC and a Certified Executive Coach for leaders and managers. She has extensive experience as a leader and, prior to starting her own company in 2002, as head of Human Resources. Since 2002, she has provided one-on-one executive coaching, especially for managers recently promoted or destined for promotion, and offers leadership workshops to transform leadership effectiveness.