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I’m a weird person, and I have weird thoughts as I walk down the street, and yesterday was no different. It was slightly after work and I was going to meet my wife for a meeting. Completely based on nothing, here’s what entered my head:
Companies spend a ton of money on hiring and recruiting. What happens to that employee on Day 3 of actual employment, especially if his/her manager is bad?
Ah, yes. Onboarding. (Or “on-boarding”). I don’t work in Human Resources, so you may assume — via the silo’ed culture of American business — that I don’t have thoughts on this topic. You’d be wrong. To wit:
That’s some of the stuff I’ve written before. Here’s a new approach.
Fix Your Onboarding Program: Your First Steps
Start with three basic assumptions if you can (more on that in one second):
The only truly sustainable competitive advantage is your culture.
Poor fit with the culture is the №1 cause of new hire failure, far and away.
Effective onboarding is the way you reduce the risk of bad hires and assimilate people into your culture.
From the above, №1 is the hardest for people to understand — especially old-school, Type-A male managers. “Culture” isn’t on a balance sheet, so you can’t sit in meetings and breathlessly discuss it. Most people assume their greatest competitive advantage is:
Their products
Their services
Their business plan
Their margins
Their KPIs/data
Almost everyone who rises up in a company tends to list those things ahead of things like:
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