Onboarding Is Not a Transition Strategy

What do you do for your new managers in the first few days and weeks of their new role? Is it any different than how you onboard other employees? Even if you have a great new employee onboarding program (see It’s called onboarding, not on-boring) management roles are a bit more complex than individual contributor roles and they need a little more support.

The Journal of Managerial issues reports that roughly half of managers are “rated ineffective or derail in their first two years.” A major contributing factor to that failure is lack of organizational support. Good onboarding programs help all new employees adapt to the organizational culture, build positive relationships, and scale up performance. Leadership transitions need to add another layer, helping new leaders shape team culture, navigate complex relationships of authority, and balance personal and team performance. Even a good onboarding program will struggle to address those complexities. New managers need a bit more help.

There are a few aspects of a managerial role that make it more complex.

Identity Shift

Whether the new manager is being promoted from within or hired from the outside, their identity and relationships will drastically change.

If they are promoted to lead their team, they have to shift perspective from an individual contributor doing work to a manager coordinating and leading the work of others. Many managers struggle with this, staying too involved in the execution of work and being labeled a micromanager. They can also become too hands-off and losing touch with the work or be viewed as ignoring the team.

If they are coming in from the outside, they can err by trying to make the new team like their old team without fully understanding the culture and context of the new organization. They can also yield to “the way we do things around here” and miss opportunities to make things better for the team.

Good onboarding programs generally help provide individual role clarity but seldom address the management style and change orientation of the company. New managers need coaching and leadership transition support to navigate this role change and manage the tensions between individual work and managing and driving change and assimilating to team culture.

Relationships

In the “peer today, boss tomorrow” situation, a newly promoted manager faces a mine-field of relationship issues. If they remain too friendly with their former colleagues, they may have accountability issues or be accused of playing favorites. If they try to quickly shift into “boss mode” they may lose trust and damage the morale of the team.

The outsider manager needs to develop new, complex relationships quickly. They need to establish their leadership style with a team of strangers and walk the line of dual advocacy, sharing their bosses directions to the team and advocating for the team to management.

Good onboarding programs often provide structure for establishing key relationships but typically leave the nuanced aspects of manager to team and manager to boss up to the new manager alone. A facilitated leadership transition process can help the new manager better understand the needs of their employees and management and establish those relationships quickly and effectively.

Ambiguous Expectations

Organizations typically do a good job of defining individual contributor expectations. They may even be able to accurately formulate team objectives and metrics. A good onboarding program will define successful performance and provide an individual contributor with milestones to achieve that over a period of time until they can independently meet expectations. It is much harder to set those expectations for managers.

You might ask these questions:

• How are the managers contributions measured and evaluated?

• Are they responsible for team outcomes? Are they responsible for the output of each individual contributor?

• Do they have their own workload in addition to leading the team?

Unless the organization has clear managerial standards and a customized onboarding program to ramp up those responsibilities, the manager may be very unclear on what is expected of them. Managers are often just given high-level team goals and are expected to figure out how to drive team success and track their own performance.

A structured leadership transition process can help define key performance indicators for management behaviors, not just team output. It can also provide clarity to the manager, their boss, and their team about what the manager’s role is and how success will be measured.

Here are a few parting thoughts. This analysis is based on organizations that do have solid, structure onboarding programs. If your organization doesn’t have that, it is a good place to start.

Even if you do have a fantastic onboarding program, it may not be enough to help new managers deal with the complexity of their roles. A facilitated leadership transition process can provide structure and clarity to address potential blind spots. It can also help a new manager navigate the often messy relationship aspects of stepping into a new leadership role. You don’t have to only rely on your standard onboarding program or put it all on the new manager who is trying to figure out everything at once.