Podcast EP 135 | What tools do you need to use for an effective onboarding process?

First, you must doc­u­ment what suc­cess looks like in the role after the onboard­ing. Sec­ond, you must build a plan to ensure the new hire under­stands how to suc­ceed in the role.

The role score­card should include the job pur­pose, respon­si­bil­i­ties, mea­sur­able met­rics and expec­ta­tions of the new hire. The onboard­ing sprint plan should be a detailed week­ly list of agen­da items over per­haps 13 weeks which incor­po­rates all the aspects of the role scorecard. 

This week, in part 4 of 4, we talk about the two tools from Brad’s new book Onboard­ed, the role score­card and the onboard­ing sprint plan.

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.

Brad Giles 00:13

Hi, and wel­come to the growth whis­pers where every­thing we talk about is build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies. My name is Brad Giles. And as always, today, I’m joined by Kevin Lawrence. Kevin in Van­cou­ver, Cana­da, how I things today?

Kevin Lawrence 00:25

Things are great, they usu­al­ly are like, life is good. Putting these pod­casts togeth­er as always inter­est­ing because it real­ly gets us to think about a top­ic in depth share a com­mon expe­ri­ence and per­spec­tive. So yeah, I’m real­ly look­ing for­ward to today’s episode.

Brad Giles 00:41

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, we it was born of us, going to the Unit­ed States togeth­er, and hav­ing inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions. And learn­ing and chal­leng­ing and yeah, hav­ing dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences. So that’s where we kind of, that’s where we come from. So today, we’re talk­ing about episode four of four, the role score­card an onboard­ing sprint plan, but before we do that, I always like to start with a word or phrase of the day, any­thing on your mind, Kev?

Kevin Lawrence 01:13

Yeah, what is the main thing in my mind? I think it’s, the word is joy. And the con­text is con­ta­gious. And so it’s just how when peo­ple are hap­py, and hav­ing a great time, that it’s incred­i­bly con­ta­gious. And and when peo­ple are not, it’s also incred­i­bly con­ta­gious. And I’m, you know, I feel very for­tu­nate that most of the peo­ple I spend time with are enjoy­ing their lives, and it radi­ates out of them. Comes out in con­ver­sa­tions. And of course, there’s rough patch­es and every­thing else. But that con­ta­gious joy spreads. And even some­times, when you talk about strug­gles, some­times there’s some joy for the strug­gle. And you know, as I’ve just think back over the last three, four months, all the amaz­ing peo­ple have had chances to con­nect with. And by nature, 90% of the time, I come away feel­ing bet­ter, because I’m pick­ing up on their ener­gy and their joy. And how I real­ize that’s a bit of a gift that’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly com­mon for all human beings. And in my very appre­cia­tive of that, and just, you know, how you’re how basi­cal­ly how your hap­pi­ness and how the, how much you’re enjoy­ing your life and your work spreads and how that can be a won­der­ful thing. And I’m real­ly, yeah, so that’s it, con­ta­gious joy.

Brad Giles 02:39

I love it when one is the oppo­site. So mine is a relent­less focus on the bor­ing basics, some­thing that we talk about all the time. You know, in the last week, twice, I’ve engaged peo­ple to do some­thing. One was a doc­tor for a doc­tor’s appoint­ment, and the oth­er was per­son to detail my car, and they did­n’t turn up. Ah, so it’s like, a relent­less focus on the bor­ing basics, like, It’s the sim­ple things, just do the sim­ple things might be a good start. Any­way, that’s all.

Kevin Lawrence 03:15

That’s good. Well, you know, fun­ny sto­ry. I had a call the oth­er morn­ing, and I missed a meet­ing. And long sto­ry short, I can make a whole bunch of excus­es and rea­sons. But I missed the call. And it was with four exec­u­tives and CEO and four exec­u­tives and one of the com­pa­nies that work with Yeah. And I spoke to one of the execs he goes, Kevin nev­er miss­es a call. And I said, Well, you can’t say that any­more. What we talked about it like, I hold myself to insane­ly high expec­ta­tion. On time 100% of the time. Whether it’s in per­son in Van­cou­ver around the world, I mean, you know, was recent­ly was in the Mid­dle East and you know, head­ing to Cal­i­for­nia tomor­row and it’s like on time all the time with­out fail like a Swiss watch. You know, it’s kin­da like are there there’s a say­ing for a Timex, you know, takes a lick­ing and keeps on tick­ing was a was a phrase. I remem­ber a slo­gan I remem­ber from as being a kid.

Brad Giles 04:18

All right, so now we’ve got to stitch these two togeth­er, joy, joy, and what was it relent­less focus on the bor­ing basics. I don’t know how you stitch those togeth­er. Yeah,

Kevin Lawrence 04:29

yeah. There’s the joy of the basics, the joy of the basics, and then when you mess up, cut your­self some slack.

Brad Giles 04:36

It’s the first time in 100 episodes I’ve tried to stitch them togeth­er. Nev­er again. Yeah. So when all of that let’s talk about this, this is episode four and four of this new book that I’ve put out called Onboard­ed about the onboard­ing process, why it mat­ters, why it could poten­tial­ly be one of the biggest issues in busi­ness today. And oppor­tu­ni­ties real­ly, and you know, the bru­tal real­i­ty is that most peo­ple have a bad onboard­ing sto­ry. And most com­pa­nies do a ter­ri­ble job of onboard­ing. So it’s a great oppor­tu­ni­ty that we could all learn from. And it’s, it’s sim­ple. That’s the thing. It’s sim­ple. And if we focus on effort in the right area, like we can have some real­ly tan­gi­ble, amaz­ing results.

Kevin Lawrence 05:23

It’s kind of like hav­ing air in your tires in your car. If you did­n’t know it was impor­tant. At some point, you would quick­ly find out how impor­tant it is. It’s a basic obvi­ous thing. And most peo­ple just don’t even think about it that much.

Brad Giles 05:36

Yeah. So we start­ed off, we start­ed off by say­ing, what is onboard­ing and why does it mat­ter? That was episode one of four, we then went to the prob­lem when we believe that new hires are a good fit, right? Good, fit, bad fit. We’re try­ing to change that lan­guage to be suc­cess­ful fit an unsuc­cess­ful fit. Then we spoke about last time last week, episode three, what is onboard­ing debt? It’s the lia­bil­i­ty that you car­ry. And why does that mat­ter? And so this week is about what do we do about like, how do we resolve this issue? Right? And what can you do, obvi­ous­ly, there are two tools that we’re talk­ing about here. The first is the roll score­card. And the sec­ond is the onboard­ing sprint plan. And this is how we build an effec­tive process. But this is quite pre­scrip­tive. And I’m going to frame it at the begin­ning by say­ing, this is an exam­ple of best prac­tice, the job of the lis­ten­er is to inter­pret that best prac­tice. And then to fig­ure out how to make this prac­tice work best in their orga­ni­za­tion or your organization.

Kevin Lawrence 06:44

Yeah, and at the end of the day, and talk about those, those two tools, one is a tool that you would be hav­ing clear­ly defined when you’re hir­ing the per­son, all the expec­ta­tions of the role and what they need to suc­ceed. And tak­ing account, you know, that extra sec­tion that I saw you added there Brad, which was great, and about clar­i­fy­ing the expec­ta­tions of you know, what does it What does win­ning look like from the per­spec­tive of the cul­ture, the man­ag­er, and then there was a third one, what was the third one bread, tech­ni­cal and process, tech­ni­cal and process, right, so just real­ly clar­i­fy­ing what and Brad’s got a great exam­ple in the book, which was made it real­ly sim­ple and clear to under­stand. So even fur­ther defin­ing what win­ning looks like, and then build­ing the plan to get them win­ning, basi­cal­ly, it’s just the plan to get them up to speed and win­ning. You know, it’s a basic, it’s a basic of hav­ing peo­ple suc­cess­ful. Inter­est­ing­ly, one of my clients down in the US, they actu­al­ly mea­sure moth­er, a large sales orga­ni­za­tion, they mea­sure the time that it takes to get peo­ple win­ning, and they have a tar­get with­in three months. Some­times it takes four so but they have a process, they do all the right things. And they have a very strong KPI on it, which is the gross prof­it that the per­son gen­er­ates on a week­ly basis. Yeah, so they know. And they have a great dis­ci­pline, not per­fect, no one’s per­fect. But but they also have an out­put met­ric of how suc­cess­ful it’s work­ing. And we have the per­cent­age of peo­ple that are hit­ting that, that that those expec­ta­tions with­in 90 days, and we know who is and who isn’t. And what are we doing about the ones that aren’t? So it gives them a lot of data to go up and improve? What you would call? What is the tool you call the sprint plan? Yep, they have they have their ver­sion, but then they have mea­sure­ment to tell us and tell them how good it is. And they’re con­stant­ly refin­ing it. Because, you know, the more suc­cess­ful the sales­peo­ple are the peo­ple when and so does the company.

Brad Giles 08:39

Yeah, that that’s inter­est­ing. One of the tools, one of the quick and dirty things that I explained in the book that you can do, is to ask peo­ple when they’ve com­plet­ed their onboard­ing, you know, what do you what did­n’t you learn? Or what do you wish that you learned through the process? So it’s this con­stant in con­tin­u­al improve­ment process that we can build in there with a real­ly sim­ple ques­tion or two?

Kevin Lawrence 09:06

Yeah, and I think I explained that the pre­vi­ous episode, one of my clients in the Mid­dle East, they they have been ask­ing for years. Know, how effec­tive was your onboard­ing zero to 10? What would have made it more effec­tive? And what about it was effec­tive? And inter­est­ing­ly, one of the things they found and they did a lot of work on is that when peo­ple come to a new coun­try, like many of the recruits do, they would­n’t be mov­ing there and mov­ing to Dubai, they would then, you know, it was like find­ing the schools and find­ing a lot of these basic things that were real­ly huge­ly impact­ful. And so they real­ized that, you know, at some point in the process, that this con­nect­ing them with the right schools for their kids was crit­i­cal and you know, you would call pre board­ing some­thing that would be done in advance to get them up to speed. But, you know, after many, many years of dial­ing in that onboard­ing process, they can 10 you to refine it. Because in their case, they fig­ured out this is darn impor­tant, and they did­n’t want to let slip. Right. So the point,we’re talk­ing about this part of your book, the thing that stuck with me is, we have this tool called the sprint plan to make sure that as a com­pa­ny, we do our job. That we are clear on all the things that they need to learn and under­stand and be con­nect­ed to to be suc­cess­ful. And we don’t leave it to chance. And we talked about pre­vi­ous­ly, and then there won’t be onboard­ing debt and, you know, a low­er chance of peo­ple suc­ceed­ing, but it’s a very thor­ough check­list of things that they need to under­stand before they can kind of pro­ceed to the next lev­el. And I think you talk about as unlock­ing like the next lev­el in a video game. You know, what has to hap­pen for them to get to the to the next lev­el, and it’s a day by day, week by week plan to that links back to their suc­cess. And you know, it’s pret­ty straight­for­ward. And, you know, it reminds me when I start­ed in the radio busi­ness, like 30 years ago, I remem­ber my onboard­ing was real­ly good. Like, I remem­ber, in the first, they might have been week or two weeks, I don’t remem­ber, I went and actu­al­ly, prob­a­bly a week, we’re going a bit, I went and spent a day in each of the dif­fer­ent depart­ments of the radio sta­tion. Now, this was the awe­some rock sta­tion in Van­cou­ver at the time called C Fox, where these DJs, Lar­ry and Willie, and even one of the days I just sat in with Lar­ry and William and it was a riot, but I got to see, but I set with the account­ing depart­ment, the traf­fic depart­ment, the, you know, the news depart­ment and all these dif­fer­ent depart­ments under­stand­ing all of the inner work­ings of the radio sta­tion, man, it helped. And in addi­tion, then I had my sales man­ag­er who was in sales, that was work­ing with me on the sales train­ing step by step by step. And you know, it was sup­posed to be a three month onboard­ing. I know it took longer before I start­ed to hit my tar­gets, you know, he was four or five. But he kept work­ing with me step by step, mak­ing sure I was learn­ing all the things, man, and then not just learn­ing them, but mas­ter­ing them to be suc­cess­ful. It was, it was, it was a case study of a spec­tac­u­lar­ly well done ver­sion of it. And I keep that on my mind when I see oth­er peo­ple start in orga­ni­za­tions that don’t have that kind of sup­port, when they’re get­ting going, I feel bad for them.

Brad Giles 12:25

So you spoke about the sprint plan there. So we send this to tools, I want you to use this anal­o­gy of a house being paint­ed. Right. So the sprint plan is like the paint­ing. That’s the fun bit, right. That’s where we go around with all the col­ors, and it looks a lot dif­fer­ent. But it’s only as good as the prepa­ra­tion that we do before­hand. The prepa­ra­tion for paint­ing is where the work is. And then we’re just trans­lat­ing that into that. So whilst it’s sprint plan is impor­tant and fun, and it gets us to see the tan­gi­ble results. Before that. The score­card real­ly mat­ters, it real­ly mat­ters. Because the score­card tells us how to suc­ceed in the role. It tells us how a new hire will be suc­cess­ful across those three ele­ments, the cul­ture, the tech­ni­cal process expec­ta­tions and the man­agers expectations.

Kevin Lawrence 13:21

It’s almost like what you’re onboard­ing them to. Yeah, right. It’s like, it’s like, in many ways, if you’re think­ing about the paint­ing, there’s cer­tain specs that the paint needs to meet, make. And there’s cer­tain prep and cer­tain dura­bil­i­ty and all of this stuff. And so that you are doing the prepa­ra­tion and the paint­ing to a plan or to a stan­dard. And not only is that help­ful when you’re hir­ing to make sure that the peo­ple have the capa­bil­i­ty to do those things and ful­fill those expec­ta­tions. But when you’re onboard­ing, it’s, it’s so sim­ple, but it points at the things that they need to learn to be suc­cess­ful at the define suc­cess in their roll.

Brad Giles 13:56

Yeah, but here’s the thing. It’s got to be rel­e­vant to the time peri­od of the onboard­ing. I had one CEO, love­ly, love­ly CEO, but she said nine months of work to be done in three months. Okay, so it’s got to be rel­e­vant. You look at it in this in the role score­card and you say, how long would it take that per­son to meet 40 cus­tomers as an exam­ple? Well, it’s not be, it’s not going to be 40 min­utes, it’s going to be an hour each plus trav­el, like and then you can begin to think about how long do all of the things that I’m set­ting, how long will they take?

Kevin Lawrence 14:32

Yeah, you know, it’s inter­est­ing. I had an exec­u­tive and I always ask the exec­u­tives that join us from oth­er com­pa­nies about awe­some things about their com­pa­nies that they came from, etc. One of them talked about, they were in the roof­ing, busi­ness, sell­ing roof­ing, and their onboard­ing was six months. It was insane­ly thor­ough. He goes, it’s you said, you would­n’t have believed it. Unless I had expe­ri­enced it. He was offered train­ing here and train­ing there and meet­ing peo­ple here and meet­ing peo­ple was six months they spent doing it. And it was incred­i­bly thor­ough, but because there was so much to learn and a lot of com­plex­i­ty, and I think it’s a great point that it can’t all nec­es­sar­i­ly be done in three months. That’s a, that’s a pret­ty good tar­get for a lot of peo­ple. But there’s more advanced things that need to be learned in roles. And tru­ly, for some rules, it might be over a peri­od of a year, you know, it could break down to based on what they need to learn to thrive. Awe­some, great, great, great exam­ple, I’m think­ing about a client that I work with. And it’s almost embar­rass­ing what they did. And they’re like, they’re good peo­ple. They’re real­ly good peo­ple. But they hired a new exec­u­tive, who had sim­i­lar kind of expe­ri­ence, but nev­er done the exact job they need­ed. And they got very excit­ed about the per­son fill­ing this role, because this part of the busi­ness was a major, major headache for them. They hired them, they got excit­ed. And they said, Great, here you go, go work with your team, and basi­cal­ly let them to run from day one. I am not exag­ger­at­ing. And so I had a con­ver­sa­tion. They were com­plain­ing about this exec­u­tive. And I’m like, Okay, well, what was and they talked about some­thing, a pur­chase that they had made on the com­pa­ny’s behalf. That was well inten­tioned. But there was no need to make the pur­chase, because the com­pa­ny already had some­thing that would have worked. Yeah, it was wast­ed mon­ey. I said, Well, how would they know that? Well, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, as I’m lis­ten­ing to this, I go in this is not a per­son prob­lem. This is a com­pa­ny prob­lem. As we dug in, I said, Okay, well tell me about the onboard­ing plan. And then they start­ed. Ah, okay. Well, what do you dis­cuss in your week­ly meet­ings? And they’re like, week­ly meet­ing, what do you mean? So, no onboard­ing at all, ful­ly giv­ing the per­son like 100%, auton­o­my, day one. No exag­ger­a­tion, and no week­ly meet­ing to check in with them just lit­er­al­ly threw them to the wolves. And I mean, you know, the worst thing they could do, I mean, if all they did was make a deci­sion and blew 10 grand, who cares? Con­sid­er­ing they were thrown to the wolves with no sup­port, and no, noth­ing that is minor, it’s almost incon­se­quen­tial, com­pared to what they could have done. And unfor­tu­nate­ly, it’s the they’re the, the the per­son who they’re report­ing to is the per­son who was mess­ing it up. And it’s just, it’s not it was­n’t inten­tion­al. It was­n’t any­thing, but it was negligent.

Brad Giles 17:37

But that’s the prob­lem, right? And, you know, I did this research study, as a part of this book, 1100 CEOs and hir­ing man­agers around the world. 83% of peo­ple have an onboard­ing process of 14 days or less, and 49% have a sev­en day or less onboard­ing. So that’s what you’ve just described, there is what the aver­age com­pa­ny does. Now, this sub­set was across all sizes. You might think, Oh, they were just the small com­pa­nies. Now, it was across all size com­pa­nies in a fair­ly even dis­tri­b­u­tion as well. So yeah, it is the aver­age, every­one does a ter­ri­ble job of onboard­ing. Here’s one thing I picked up from what you said ear­li­er, as well. When we’re look­ing at the onboard­ing, yes, it’s about train­ing. Okay. But the oth­er thing, an onboard­ing process must tell us if we’ve got an unsuc­cess­ful fit or a suc­cess­ful fit, it must force the deci­sion. Do I want to com­mit fur­ther salary Reese salary costs to this indi­vid­ual? Or do I exit them? Like it’s, we’re imag­ine we’re dri­ving down a road and the road forks two ways you need to make a deci­sion. So when we’re build­ing the role score­card, after 90 days, what does suc­cess look like in the role around those three ele­ments? Remem­ber, and

Kevin Lawrence 18:58

if you’re not in this case, not meet­ing with them every week, and talk­ing to them and eval­u­at­ing how they’re doing and on the things that you get them how it’s work­ing, and can you give them the next thing? How do you make that choice? Like in this, I was talk­ing to this team? And it’s like, well, of course, the per­son not suc­ceed­ing, but I said I from lis­ten­ing to you. I can’t tell whether it’s you or them, but I do know you’re not doing your job. Yeah. But we actu­al­ly can­not assess the can­di­date. Because they haven’t been said it. It’s not fair. It’s like teach­ing a kid to ride a bike, and just throw­ing them on the bike and push­ing them down the street with no train­ing wheels and hop­ing it works. Yeah, that’s not a fair assess­ment of their abil­i­ty to ride a bike, because you haven’t set them up to win. And again, we’ve all made these mis­takes. Now you’ve shared an ear­li­er episode. I think there’s some of the stuff that I’ve done ear­li­er in my career. And thank­ful­ly, I’ve got a good team that’s real­ly good at doing this onboard­ing. Thank­ful­ly, they make sure that it works. But it’s it’s Yeah, and like like, like You have in your book, right? Like we’ve talked about, we use a 13 week onboard­ing plan. And we have a detailed plan, over 13 weeks of what peo­ple need to do to get up to speed. And our team wraps their arms around new peo­ple to make sure it hap­pens. Now, we’re not that big of a com­pa­ny, you know, we don’t have hun­dreds of employ­ees. So it’s a lit­tle bit eas­i­er. But it’s crit­i­cal to suc­cess, and espe­cial­ly a com­pa­ny like ours, where the cul­ture is quite dis­tinct, not say­ing quite strong. And there’s a there’s a con­sis­tent way that we play and work togeth­er. And if you’re not con­sis­tent with that, it does­n’t work. It was real­ly inter­est­ing. There’s just some­thing that I observed with a new mem­ber of our team. And I’m like, that’s a slight­ly off cul­ture. And I just, I just left it watched, they came back to me and lat­er said, you know, like, they had self cor­rect­ed on that, well, that was good. I did­n’t need to, but I already had a note. Because if they were going to go down that road as a nor­mal behav­ior, I would have need­ed to adjust it. You know, and they’ve learned about our val­ues, and they know our pur­pose, all of those things. But they might have, they might have need­ed a recal­i­bra­tion, but I kept an eye out for it. Because it turns out, it was fine.

Brad Giles 21:12

That’s an inter­est­ing point. Because how do you teach peo­ple cul­ture? So what I explained in the book is, we all know core val­ues, we know them pret­ty well, right? A sub­set of core val­ues is behav­iors, because core val­ues are often not pre­scrip­tive, where­as behav­iors, we always do this, we nev­er do that. And so when you think about if you’ve got three to five core val­ues, and then you’ve got three to five behav­iors, for each core val­ue, what you’ve then got is, let’s say five times 525, core val­ues and behav­iors that you can talk about across that 13 week peri­od, and sto­ries of every sin­gle one. So you think about any behav­ior. Okay, so here’s the sto­ry of how that par­tic­u­lar behav­ior, a sub­set of a core val­ue has been played out. And that’s how we get peo­ple to under­stand the val­ue through the val­ues through stories.

Kevin Lawrence 22:09

So what you’re real­ly say­ing is, as part of onboard­ing, you can take some­thing like your core val­ues, and some com­pa­nies will then break down a list of behav­iors that relate to teach val­ue, and have sto­ries that relate to each of that as well. So that’s anoth­er way to cre­ate, it’s the mind­set of a thor­ough onboard­ing ver­sus, hey, here’s the core val­ues, it’s actu­al­ly tak­ing them in depth into it, which is almost like a deep­er train­ing and under­stand­ing process than just, you know, read the core val­ues on the web­site. And I’ve

Brad Giles 22:39

done it. And I’ve worked with teams that have done it, the ener­gy that comes out when you do have the new hire when you do a thor­ough onboard­ing, and the pride, like you can see why attri­tion is so much. Also that anoth­er way, reten­tion is so much bet­ter in com­pa­nies that have good onboard­ing process­es. It’s remark­able, because you’re set­ting people

Kevin Lawrence 23:00

up to win the intent of help­ing them to win ver­sus it’s, you know, throw­ing them to the wolves and see who makes it. And that’s, it’s a dif­fer­ent focus. And if you real­ly, tru­ly care about your peo­ple, you’re going to do a prop­er onboard­ing. And the root of it from my per­spec­tive is that 13 week sprint plan is crit­i­cal, because that’s the doc­u­ment that is built in terms of how they’re going to be suc­cess­ful. And they own some orga­ni­za­tions HR might need to mon­i­tor it or check it just to make sure it hap­pens, because dif­fer­ent man­agers take this with dif­fer­ent lev­els of seri­ous­ness. But it’s the map to suc­cess. And it’s just mak­ing sure the map gets fol­lowed. And then then we can have a more objec­tive mea­sure of if indeed, in the end, that they’re suit­ed for the job.

Brad Giles 23:47

Yeah, yeah. This one, just one quick out the sto­ry. One com­pa­ny, I’ve worked with a tech com­pa­ny, and they imple­ment­ed the onboard­ing, process, score­card, etc. And peo­ple were com­ing back say­ing, or at the end of the onboard­ing, we could be labeled an unsuc­cess­ful fit. And like that cre­at­ed some anx­i­ety around them, like because they were trans­par­ent about it. And the CEO, right­ly so came back and said, We did­n’t just spend all this mon­ey on hir­ing you, and all of this effort on hir­ing you and going through all of that stuff, because we want you to be unsuc­cess­ful fit. What we’re say­ing is that we’re going to spend so much of our time to try to make you to cause you to become we want to spend more effort now so that you can be a suc­cess­ful fit and we could con­fi­dent­ly val­i­date that and that’s real­ly the point, right? Yes. Yeah. Is that when it is a bit more effort, okay. But the the return on that effort is outrageous.

Kevin Lawrence 24:49

It is and par­tic­u­lar­ly with new exec­u­tives, which is what most of our focus is on, you know, and I because the con­ver­sa­tion I also have with exec­u­tives if you leave the exec­u­tives to their On device, if you let nature take its course with a new exec­u­tive, the CEO is gonna say great job done, spend a bit of time with them and let them run. And they’re gonna say, Great. Let me show you how good I am and how smart of a choice you made hir­ing me. And I’m gonna run and I’m gonna do stuff. First thing I say to every new exec­u­tive that I have on oppor­tu­ni­ty was like, Hey, we expect noth­ing from you in three months, besides learn­ing and build­ing the rela­tion­ships, learn­ing the busi­ness, under­stand­ing how we work, because what you what it looks like, on the sur­face, often isn’t how it works. And if you go too hard, too fast, you’re not gonna have enough for under­stand­ing a rela­tion­ship, and you’re just gonna piss peo­ple off. And some of that prob­a­bly isn’t reversible. So you’re obvi­ous­ly gonna go and do work and work hard. But real­ly, it’s learn­ing for this first three months to under­stand where you’re at, and how it works in the dynam­ics of this busi­ness. After that point, then you can focus on auton­o­my, and try­ing to do things your­self. And you’ll prob­a­bly have some excel­lent ideas to improve the busi­ness. And I’m hap­py to look at them. After three months up until then, Nope, you’re here as the stu­dent Don’t, don’t go and try and fig­ure out how you’re going to teach the class, just make sure you mas­ter the class first.

Brad Giles 26:18

And that’s a beau­ti­ful way to frame it out. Because what’s between those lines is when you under­stand when you under­stand the role and the busi­ness, and our expec­ta­tions. So good chat, roll score­card, and the sprint plan, why it mat­ters. Now, there are exam­ples of the score­card, and the sprint plan com­plet­ed inside the onboard­ed book that you can see there. And there’s also down­load­able copies on my web­site. So thank you for lis­ten­ing. I hope that you’ve enjoyed the episode today. And in fact of for the jour­ney through these four, four episodes, releas­ing this book on board, it took three years to write. So there’s quite a bit of sat­is­fac­tion to kind of put a bow on it and say, We’re done. Yeah, so And thank you for your time to Kevin. Hope­ful­ly, there’s been a bit of val­ue learn­ing and see­ing my think­ing around that. So with that, you can find us on YouTube, just search the growth whis­pers and of course, you can find Kevin and his week­ly newslet­ter at Lawrence and koat​.com and myself, Brad Giles at. I was gonna say onboard­ing. No, no, no, that’s the name of the book. No, it’s evo­lu­tion. part​ners​.com that are you hope you’ve enjoyed the episode and I hope you have a good week and we look for­ward to chat­ting to you again next week.