Podcast EP 134 | Onboarded - What is onboarding debt, and how can you calculate your onboarding debt?

When peo­ple don’t under­stand how to suc­ceed in a new role, they do what they think is right. But that might not be the right thing. They won’t under­stand the cul­ture, the tech­ni­cal and process expec­ta­tions and your expec­ta­tions as their manager.

Onboard­ing debt is the lia­bil­i­ty you car­ry with each new hire. More onboard­ing debt means a less suc­cess­ful team.

We talk about Brad’s new book Onboard­ed and how every new hire you employ car­ries a lia­bil­i­ty from what they don’t under­stand, known as onboard­ing debt.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Kevin Lawrence 00:12

Wel­come to the growth whis­pers pod­cast where every­thing that Kevin and Brad talk about is to do with build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies because we like to see com­pa­nies con­tin­ue to grow and thrive over time get­ting bet­ter and smarter and hav­ing a big­ger impact on their team and the cul­ture or the cul­ture, the con­stituents that they serve in their com­mu­ni­ty or their busi­ness, what­ev­er it hap­pens to be. Great to be here today, Brad. How you doing? And what’s kind of the what’s the kind of word or phrase that’s on your mind or con­cept that’s on your mind today?

Brad Giles 00:45

I’m bet­ter than I was before? Because I just heard you refer to your­self in the third per­son. So that was enter­tain­ing so I’m

Kevin Lawrence 00:54

glad I’m glad I could pro­vide you a lit­tle joy.

Brad Giles 00:57

Yeah, I’m good word of frozen day. Debt. Now, this episode today is about onboard­ing debt. But yeah, it’s inter­est­ing. I saw some­one say, talk­ing about this ser­vice­abil­i­ty of their mort­gage, how it’s gone, how it’s pret­ty much dou­bled in the last year and a half to two years. And, yeah, how that’s hav­ing the intend­ed con­se­quences through the economy.

Kevin Lawrence 01:27

Awe­some. Well, mine is per­spec­tive. You know, I just spent close to a week, 10 days in the Mid­dle East, in Dubai and work­ing with some com­pa­nies. And, you know, I’ve spent, like I said, before this, I’ve done 54 trips to Dubai. I went there every quar­ter for 13 years. Yeah, it’s like my sec­ond home. And I love that place. And I’ve got a lot of amaz­ing friends and col­leagues there. And but when I went there, it’s the per­spec­tive shift that Dubai gives me. There’s a lot of stuff that’s the same, but many more things that’s dif­fer­ent. They think big­ger. They move faster.Tthe coun­try moves fast. But it was the it was the per­spec­tive. And that’s what I love about trav­el. And being dif­fer­ent places. It’s even bet­ter when you know, peo­ple there and you get to spend time with peo­ple who live there. But it’s per­spec­tive how dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives can give you very, very dif­fer­ent thoughts and beliefs. And and how obvi­ous­ly, trav­el is a great, a great cat­a­lyst for that. So per­spec­tive and debt, and you could rack up a lot of debt, gain­ing those per­spec­tives by trav­el­ing. If you don’t have the cash to do it, it can get very expen­sive. But yeah, that’s, that’s the thought. So let’s dig into today’s show. Brad, what are we what are we dig­ging into?

Brad Giles 02:43

So this is episode three of four about my new book called on board­ed, how to bring new hires to the point where they are effec­tive faster. So one part of that is this con­cept that I bring called onboard­ing debt. Okay, so we’ve all heard about sleep debt, right. So we know that sleep that we’re sup­posed to prob­a­bly, on aver­age, get sev­en to eight hours sleep a night, but if you last night did­n’t get sev­en or eight, you got five, let’s say, for only one night and then revert­ed back, you’d prob­a­bly be okay, you could prob­a­bly even sus­tain that for a few days. But you might, you know, get a bit grumpy. Cer­tain­ly, if your kids might get a bit grumpy, let’s just say, but what about over a few weeks or a few months or over the long term, right? So you can have, you can car­ry a lit­tle bit of sleep debt for a cou­ple of days. But the accu­mu­lat­ed debt that you get with not enough sleep can have sec­ond order con­se­quences, real tan­gi­ble effects to your body that, you know, like seri­ous dis­ease prob­lems. And so the that’s the anal­o­gy to onboard­ing debt. So if you don’t onboard well, and peo­ple don’t under­stand how to suc­ceed in the role. Does­n’t mat­ter if the ABC play­ers, what­ev­er it is, if peo­ple don’t under­stand that mis­un­der­stand­ing, can become a real prob­lem, or that lack of under­stand­ing because peo­ple are doing the things that they think right. But those things may not be the right things. And they can cause lots and lots of tiny lit­tle things that can add up such as peo­ple may resign, ulti­mate­ly, they may go I can’t real­ly suc­ceed here. Or peo­ple, they may make mis­takes, or there could be pro­duc­tiv­i­ty issues, they may not be doing it the most effi­cient way. So we’re talk­ing about what is the cost? What is the cost of onboard­ing debt? What is it?

Kevin Lawrence 04:47

And some­times these peo­ple even go tox­ic and start to drag down the oth­er peo­ple on the team who were hap­py before­hand. You know, think about this, and I’m think­ing about so many exam­ples and as I’ve shared In an ear­li­er episodes, I get very pas­sion­ate with CEOs when they’re hir­ing new peo­ple on mak­ing sure they onboard them prop­er­ly. Because basi­cal­ly, the default intent of a new exec­u­tive is to come in and show what they can do. And to do it their way and prove their val­ue and all of this key stuff, and it becomes real­ly, real­ly messy real­ly fast. You know, just with a client last week, and they have a new­er HR per­son who went on and made some changes, and to their per­for­mance review process, which I’ve been to this movie a few times. Some­one who’s new to the com­pa­ny, may or may not have been the right per­son to make the choice, tweaks their per­for­mance of your process, and peo­ple are talk­ing about how it’s long, and cum­ber­some and com­pli­cat­ed. And all the ener­gy goes into admin­is­tra­tion ver­sus the con­ver­sa­tion. And at the end of the day, it’s, you know, this per­son was­n’t brought up to speed. One of the things in this com­pa­ny is every­thing’s meant to be sim­ple. Right? Their oper­a­tors did­n’t want to make it so not a bad per­son. And I don’t even know that, it may have that was like­ly a bad deci­sion. But they were doing the best they could from what they knew. They just did­n’t know enough to do it in a way that would have been effec­tive for the whole organization.

Brad Giles 06:19

Yeah, yeah. Last week, we spoke about good fit and bad fit, right? And the prob­lem, when we look at a per­son who’s been hired on reflec­tion has been good or bad fit. Like, what hap­pens is that we can think, well, there were always going to be a good or bad fit, there was noth­ing that we could do, there was no point. Instead, we’re think­ing about peo­ple along a spec­trum from will fit to def­i­nite­ly won’t fit, every­body falls with­in there. And, and so our job is to cause them to be a suc­cess­ful fit or an unsuc­cess­ful fit by way of the process. Now, this comes about by three areas. Okay, first of all, it’s the cul­tur­al expec­ta­tions. So what are the cul­tur­al expec­ta­tions that we’ve got a that a per­son has got to under­stand about our team, we do things dif­fer­ent­ly to oth­er peo­ple’s that’s core val­ues and behav­iours and all that stuff? They’ve got to under­stand what’s right, and what’s wrong and what grinds our gears, per­haps. Sec­ond is the tech­ni­cal and process expec­ta­tions. We do things slight­ly dif­fer­ent to every­one else. And then third, is the man­agers expec­ta­tions. Who does that new hire report to? And how do they define suc­cess in their role and what has to hap­pen as a result of that? So if they no one will under­stand on their first day, all of those things? No one, it’s just sim­ply not pos­si­ble. And so that gap is what we call onboard­ing debt.

Kevin Lawrence 07:42

Yeah. And the hard part about it is it cre­ates the debt that both the com­pa­ny and they have to pay, because of their frus­tra­tion, with not know­ing enough, and it’s hard­er for them to suc­ceed. In many ways, it’s kind of like they’re run­ning in mud and they can’t get trac­tion, and every­thing takes way more ener­gy than it should. And then for the team, they’re get­ting frus­trat­ed of why are they doing it? Right? Why are they doing it weird? Why, you know, it’s just unnec­es­sary bur­den for them. And the orga­ni­za­tion I think about so many exam­ples, like I should say, before, I know, one I remem­ber a com­pa­ny, we were hav­ing our retreat annu­al plan­ning retreat in Mex­i­co. And there was this new exec that had joined. And, you know, this, this team is like a fam­i­ly like it’s tight. So they invite him out, you know, to the din­ners after the events and things like that. He nev­er went to any of the din­ners after the events or any­thing, because he just did his job and went home. Because in the com­pa­ny he was work­ing with that’s what you did. Well, in this, it’s kind of like invit­ing you to Grand­ma’s 95^th birth­day and you don’t attend. It’s a prob­lem. But nobody knew. So we were down in Mex­i­co. And on the first night, you know, some­one said, Hey, why don’t you come join us in a hot tub. And he just went in ear­ly and went to bed ear­ly. And what he did­n’t real­ize is that the invite was like a rhetor­i­cal invite. It was­n’t Do you want to it’s when are you going to. And even the woman on the team like that this is a team. It’s a young team and the woman don’t want to be sit­ting in a hot tub with eight guys. No, but they sit on the edge of the hot tub and have con­ver­sa­tion and are con­nect­ed. They’re not going to you know, and that’s their choice whether they get it and get an entre­pre­neur, this isn’t the point. The point is, they are not there’s not some­thing they want to be doing. But they but they go because it’s con­nec­tion time. It’s like fam­i­ly time.

Brad Giles 09:43

It’s a cul­tur­al expec­ta­tion. That’s all it is.

Kevin Lawrence 09:46

It is a cul­tur­al expec­ta­tion that you are after din­ner hang­ing out, con­ver­sa­tion, hot tub, what­ev­er it hap­pens to be. So we told this guy I pulled them aside and said, just so you know, when they invite you to the hot tub, it’s rhetor­i­cal. It’s actu­al­ly you got to be there and not being there is like insult­ing them. It’s like what’s wrong? You think you’re bet­ter than we are or what Oh, who knows what the sto­ry is, it’s actu­al­ly not accept­able in this com­pa­ny. One goes to the hot tub, we’ll go to the hot tub. So I explained it to him. He’s in the hot tub. Every­thing’s all good. He just in one place, he worked before you did your job, and he went home. And this is more like a fam­i­ly. That’s not how it hap­pens. And again, you know, if some­one does­n’t tell you, how do you get upset with a person?

Brad Giles 10:39

Well, you can’t. And that’s the point. There’s so many, many, many tiny things that define suc­cess in a role across these three areas. Now, if that per­son was­n’t for­tu­nate enough to have a Kevin whis­per in his ear, then when would he have picked that up? He could have ulti­mate­ly just get forced out of the team. Okay, but his thing, it’s not Kev­in’s responsibility.

Kevin Lawrence 11:07

And let me clar­i­fy why, by the way, because we did 360s. And we were going to give the feed­back and he got some hor­ri­ble feed­back. I was giv­ing him a heads up to pre­pare him, because that’s nor­mal­ly not my job any­ways. But it should­n’t have to come to that. It should be explained what the cul­tur­al norms are up front. So it does­n’t need to be to that point. Yeah,

Brad Giles 11:26

it is the new hires man­ager’s job to get them to under­stand. To get them to under­stand all of those things. And that’s the whole pur­pose of onboard­ing. I’m advo­cat­ing a 90 day onboard­ing process. But this is an exam­ple of best prac­tice, right? You do you. Yeah. Okay. We cer­tain­ly don’t want it to align with the legal, statu­to­ry com­pli­ances of your part of the world so that if they’re an unsuc­cess­ful fit, you can exit them with­out recrim­i­na­tion with­out issue? Yep. Why we’ve got those pro­ba­tion peri­ods all around the world built into law.

Kevin Lawrence 12:01

Yeah. It’s almost like they need a pro­ba­tion peri­od the oth­er way around. You know, for the cus­tomer the extra is because some peo­ple quit. But you know, is the com­pa­ny actu­al­ly doing their job? To help peo­ple be suc­cess­ful? are they hold­ing up their end of the bargain?

Brad Giles 12:14

Yeah. But that’s, that’s cap­i­tal­ism. Like, that’s the mar­ket will, you will suf­fer onboard­ing debt, okay. And you’ll have to ser­vice that debt, just like you need to serve as finan­cial debt, right, with a month­ly repay­ment through low­er pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, worse, attri­tion and cul­tur­al chal­lenges. You know, I remem­ber there was a, there was a guy, David, who I worked with. And he report­ed to a CEO on a team that I worked with. He’d been with the com­pa­ny for sev­en years, okay. And after sev­en years, this was becom­ing a bit of a prob­lem. And I asked the CEO, so how well David under­stand how to suc­ceed in the role on a score of one to 10? Okay, and he see a rat­ed 4.5 After sev­en years, okay. And this is not uncom­mon. If you’ve got a prob­lem, you ask that ques­tion, how what do they under­stand how to suc­ceed in the role? And that’s real­ly what this book is born on that ques­tion, right? So. So if he’s rat­ed 4.5, you know, it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly David’s fault?

Kevin Lawrence 13:25

It’s absolute­ly not. Unless the man­ag­er and man­agers fail at these all kinds of things, giv­ing feed­back, telling peo­ple what they need to improve telling peo­ple what they need to do, like peo­ple can’t read your damn mind. So ide­al­ly, you have process­es upfront to bring peo­ple on board. Now, maybe David did­n’t have the cog­ni­tive abil­i­ty to absorb or the desire to do it. But gen­er­al­ly, peo­ple don’t give enough direc­tion. And you know, there’s a chap­ter in my book, your oxy­gen mask first. It says, teach peo­ple to meet your expec­ta­tions. Yeah, you know, and there’s this belief out there that CEOs and exec­u­tives are hard ass­es and tough and demand­ing. And although they do have high expec­ta­tions, they often don’t give enough it’s com­mon for them not to give enough feed­back. Some are great at it. But giv­ing feed­back and because peo­ple just want to do great work, but they got to know what you want.

Brad Giles 14:18

Here’s the thing about Dave, Dave had a team of like, 16 — 17 peo­ple. So if Dave had an under­stand­ing of 4.5, what was the onboard­ing debt? That was car­ried, right? Because there’s no oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn. It’s we think that peo­ple are going to learn by osmo­sis after onboarding.

Kevin Lawrence 14:36

But how you be in your job if you only have that lev­el of under­stand­ing of how to do your job? Like it seems illog­i­cal? Like, how is it possible?

Brad Giles 14:48

Well let me reframe that ques­tion. How well does David under­stand how to suc­ceed in the role to the to your def­i­n­i­tion of suc­cess Mr. or Mrs. CEO? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s not but that’s but that’s how we end­ed up hav­ing to fire peo­ple. That’s how we have peo­ple hav­ing to leave.

Kevin Lawrence 15:10

And that CEO is doing a hor­ri­ble job if they allowed that.

Brad Giles 15:16

Yeah, yeah. Pos­si­bly or that CEO had a won­der­ful oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn and grow.

Kevin Lawrence 15:26

While you’re so nice.

Brad Giles 15:30

So yeah, anoth­er sto­ry. I remem­ber there was anoth­er CEO, or, you know, when I did the inter­views for this book, here’s a quick one. There was one per­son I remem­ber who shall remain name­less, and and this per­son said, here’s the thing, I tell them once. And if they don’t pay any atten­tion, I’m not going to tell them again, I’m too busy, I don’t have the time for that. If they’re good, then they’ll take it. And they’ll remem­ber and they’ll do it the right way. But that per­son would have incurred mas­sive, mas­sive onboard­ing debt. There was anoth­er per­son that I remem­ber, and that per­son want­ed to get new hires work­ing as quick­ly as pos­si­ble, right. And that’s the sub­ti­tle to the book, right? We want to get them work­ing more effec­tive faster. So he did an on a per­ma­nent induc­tion, right, which was, you know, a day or two, a cou­ple of days where, oh, this is how you do this, this, but very much like train­ing, induc­tion, but no onboard­ing, okay, so peo­ple did­n’t under­stand how to suc­ceed in their role. And what that meant to is that every month when I’d meet with the CEO, he was always clean­ing up peo­ple’s prob­lems. And he was always spend­ing all of his time solv­ing this prob­lem solv­ing that one, oh, why can I get good peo­ple to work? For me? That’s like, the sub­text is all they don’t under­stand how to suc­ceed. Yeah,

Kevin Lawrence 16:54

help them help them to win. Yeah. I think anoth­er exam­ple, I was think­ing about, like, we had a meet­ing, the awe­some client, I’m work­ing with their health tech com­pa­ny do an amaz­ing work. And we did our quar­ter­ly tal­ent review. And there’s a man­ag­er that’s been on the team for nine months. And I think we did­n’t get cov­er it. We did­n’t cov­er it last quar­ter. But he’s been on teams, awe­some leader. And we’re going through the tal­ent review on his key team mem­bers. And he did­n’t under­stand the doc­u­ment. Like this is a core doc­u­ment that we use to help us to clar­i­fy, you know, how our peo­ple are doing and how we can help them to per­form bet­ter and also to make our peo­ple deci­sions. But as we went through it, I’m like, damn it. He’s a new guy that joined the team. No one explained that to him. And a real­i­ty. Even as the is the coach and kind of advis­er to the team, I prob­a­bly should have done a mini ses­sion with him to teach them the doc­u­ment and how it works. It’s a it’s one of our most impor­tant doc­u­ments for tal­ent man­age­ment. It is our most impor­tant doc­u­ment for tal­ent man­age­ment. But he did­n’t even under­stand some of the ques­tions. And I was like, That’s a fail. That’s, that’s on us. That’s a fail­ure of us for not train­ing and teach­ing them how to do it.

Brad Giles 18:14

You know, in the in the book, one of the things I talk about is assess­ing a per­son who’s com­plet­ed their onboard­ing process and ask­ing three ques­tions. How well does New Hire under­stand the cul­ture on a scale of one to 10? How well does the new hire under­stand the tech­ni­cal and process­es and how well do they under­stand their man­agers expec­ta­tions? And the exam­ple that I give, it’s a six, a six and a sev­en that the per­son gives hypo­thet­i­cal­ly, which equals an aver­age of 6.3 or 63%. Right? And then we go back, and we say, so they don’t under­stand 37% of the role at that point. Okay. And so if you were to buy a map that did­n’t show you 37% of the roads in a city, you’d take it back, right? Yep. Or you get lost, but you get lost, and that would be expen­sive. And that’s onboard­ing debt.

Kevin Lawrence 19:16

So that’s the sum­ma­ry of what we’re talk­ing about here is that if you tru­ly don’t onboard peo­ple prop­er­ly, you incur debt, and the com­pa­ny builds a debt, which they got to pay inter­est on that debt. The indi­vid­ual feels that debt, and they got to put addi­tion­al ener­gy and labor into try­ing to do their job and redo­ing things and deal­ing with a lot of frus­tra­tion, nobody wins. And it can be solved by spend­ing a bit more strate­gic time upfront, to map out what’s required to be suc­cess­ful. And now you’re not going to cov­er every­thing. But you could prob­a­bly cov­er a heck of a lot more. Not only will you get more, a high­er per­cent­age of the peo­ple that you bring on being suc­cess­ful, most like­ly, unless your hir­ing prac­tices per­son worked, but more like­ly you’ll help more peo­ple be suc­cess­ful and soon­er, which is a ben­e­fit to you ben­e­fit to them. And it’s just a mat­ter of being con­scious about how you do it. And that’s not leav­ing it up to luck.

Brad Giles 20:12

Yeah, Indeed, indeed. All right, good chat. So avoid onboard­ing debt by doing an effec­tive onboard­ing process. The finan­cials out­stand­ing. That’s for sure. So, next week, we’re going to be trans­fer­ring from onboard­ing debt into what do we actu­al­ly do about this? We’ve spent three episodes, talk­ing about what it is and how it works and why it’s an issue. Now, next week, we’re going to be talk­ing about how you actu­al­ly effec­tive­ly do that and draw­ing from the book. Good chat today. So this has been the growth whis­pers pod­cast. My name is Brad Giles. Again, we’ve spo­ken about the new book onboard­ed today, and my co-host, Kevin Lawrence, you can find him at Lawrence​and​co​.com, he has a very inter­est­ing newslet­ter every week. You may or may not be inter­est­ed in prob­a­bly May. And myself, Brad Giles. I do a week­ly newslet­ter as well. And you can find me at evo​lu​tion​part​ners​.com​.au Hope you’ve enjoyed this episode about onboard­ing debt. I look for­ward to chat­ting again next week. Have a great week.