MANAGING THE HUNGRY NEW HIRE
John Gooch was ready for a change. In his mid-fifties, after fifteen years of running his own civil engineering and soil-testing business, he and his partners decided to sell their assets, and Gooch went to work for a nonprofit. When he discovered the new job wasn’t a good fit, he mentioned this to long-time professional friend, Don Cantore, the CEO of Fielder’s Choice Enterprises, an excavating firm specializing in large infrastructure projects. Cantore didn’t know of any available jobs, but after thinking about it overnight, he decided he’d like to hire Gooch. Cantore offered him a job as a junior estimator. He couldn’t pay Gooch what he was used to, but he could offer a decent salary and get him trained in a year or two.
This would be a big step back for Gooch, both economically and in terms of expertise, especially so late in his career. Gooch had transferable skills as an engineer but hadn’t done much estimating, nor did he have experience with large-scale infrastructure, like building bridges. The learning curve was steep, and he had sleepless nights for eight to ten months at the start. Now, with three years under his belt, he is no longer junior but a regular estimator. He says there is much still to learn, but the company has been great. A “really good group of people” have made it possible for him to successfully make this career pivot.1
The low end of the S curve is usually occupied by early-career new hires or talented professionals with deep domain expertise who are branching out. You optimize your team with 15 percent of your people at the low end. This chapter will explain how to successfully onboard these new hires, which includes outlining the why of your organization and team, understanding your new hire’s goals, and articulating your vision of what they can accomplish in this role. We will discuss how to manage the first six months, using constraints for quick feedback. We will also help you embrace a short-term loss of productivity while discussing the unique qualities and compensating advantages that ambitious S curve low-enders bring to the table. And finally, we will provide a checklist for determining if progress is slow because your new employee is on the wrong curve or simply at the low end.
Successfully Onboarding Your New Hire
As you set out to manage your recent hire, there are a few things to consider. First, how to communicate your vision—or the “why” of the organization. Second, you’ll want to understand your employee’s “why” (e.g., why they came to work for you). Third, you must have vision for your new employee—how you’d like them to develop, and how you will gauge if they are succeeding in their new role.
Communicate Your Vision—the “Why” of the Organization and Your Team
When our son was in high school, at least once a week he would say, “What is the point of school? I am never going to use [insert subject] again.” The counterargument was, “You may not use all of it. But good grades get you into college, and knowing how to work gets you into a happy life.” On days when I was desperate or just exasperated, I would huff, “Do it because I said to.” I would often lament to my husband, “Why doesn’t he have a vision for his future?” In trying to understand why teenagers procrastinate, psychologist Timothy Pychyl discovered that “until we have a vision of who we want to become, we can’t do much.” Once we have a vision, we get stuff done.
New hires need a vision. Understanding why their job is necessary and important will power them through difficult days, when the cost of the struggle toward competence seems steep. For the first three to six months on the job, they may struggle with discouragement. They may try your patience. You may even wonder why you hired them. And maybe it was a bad hire; it’s too soon to know. But you can increase their odds of moving up the learning curve by laying out a vision from the outset.
Start with the why of your organization—and your team. You may be reluctant to do so. There are too many things clamoring for your attention. You need your new hire to get right to work. (One benefit of hiring internally is that the new hire will already have an idea of what the company is about.)
Maybe you feel that you can’t offer a clear vision. After all, doesn’t the word “vision” imply the ability to see the path ahead and chart your course accordingly? As a discovery-driven disruptor, you may not see exactly where you’re going. But even if you don’t know what lies ahead, chances are you know why you are moving in that direction. The purpose that drives what you are doing is foundational. It is worth the time to examine, understand, and share it with your team.
One company that articulates its vision from the get-go is Globalization Partners (GP) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which in 2017 was ranked number 33 on Inc. magazine’s prestigious Inc. 5000, an annual list of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States.2 Week one on the job, each employee goes through GP University. The first day they spend time with CEO Nicole Sahin, who explains her vision for the company: “Venture capital, private equity, and public companies only consider their shareholders, thus maximizing profit on a quarterly basis at a cost to the well-being of clients and employees.” Sahin defines success as “A triple bottom line: happy employees equals happy clients equals happy shareholders.” The employees then hear presentations from every director in the company. This sets the stage for cross-silo collaboration and respect, quashing entitlement from the start. Not surprisingly, people like to work there. In a survey done by CultureIQ, GP received a 92 out of 100 in its employee net promoter score, a barometer of employee loyalty. And job-search company Glassdoor, which amasses worker reviews, indicates that most current and past employees give GP solid reviews.
There are endless methods and tactics, but there are very few “whys.” When we have a vision and believe in it, instead of seeing drudgery, we see discovery. Instead of aimless wandering, we see ourselves on a defined path to proficiency, at the low end of our personal growth curve. Once there is a why, there is a way.
Understand Your New Hire’s Vision—Their “Why”
Just as your new employee needs to understand the company’s vision, you’ll want to understand theirs. Find out what they are trying to accomplish as a person and how this new role fits with their goals, as well as what they anticipate they will need from you to be successful. Ideally, in the first week of employment, you’ll hold a strategy session with your employee, just as you would with a customer. In fact, a new hire is a customer: a highly important, long-term customer. (For more on this, see the sidebar “The New Hire: The First Week.”)
There’s both risk and responsibility associated with asking these questions. Knowledge is power, and when someone shares their hopes and dreams with you, they hand you a lot of power. Kathleen Warner, former Executive VP of Economic Development for New York City shares, “In my experience of corporate America, personal information wasn’t valued or exalted but used as a sledgehammer or other object of destruction or discrimination.”3
I am confident that if you are reading this book, this is not the kind of boss you want to be. How you wield power will be your legacy: best boss ever, worst boss ever, or somewhere in between. If you aren’t being respectful of the people who work for you, something is wrong, including the possibility that this management curve is the wrong curve for you.
What Is Your Vision for Your New Hire?
Some managers seem to believe that a new hire or reassignment requires nothing from them: this new person can be launched into the fray and expected to mysteriously succeed. With these managers, expectations are unrealistic, decision making is capricious, and metrics arbitrary. Michael Hone, VP of Payor Contracting’s select medical division, relates an experience from his career:
I felt confident when I started … I knew I had the skill sets to be successful, though I knew being in a new company and building a new department while implementing new reports and processes would be a challenge. The hard part was that I had only one month to transition, and I reported to two different VPs: one in finance (technically my boss) and a VP of supply chain and logistics. Unexpected tension was created because each boss had different expectations on priorities and timelines and silently deferred to me on how to manage each relationship. Things couldn’t happen fast enough for the supply chain VP. He quietly became upset at my progress, and out of nowhere decided to put me on a sixty-day notice to improve or be fired (this was after six months with the company). I had never been on the wrong side of performance, ever! As being fired was not an option for me, I discussed a plan with the finance VP (who wanted me to succeed), for turning things around. I worked long hours and started to deliver. Meanwhile the supply chain VP started to take some ownership over what we would build, including timelines and a resource plan. I learned a few years later that my experience with the supply chain VP wasn’t unique: many more people had been fired or left the company in frustration [because of his management style].
If we operate on the assumption that none of us acts out of malicious intent, maybe the supply chain VP didn’t know what he wanted Michael to do. This happens, not infrequently. Perhaps we are clear on the functional job but haven’t thought about the psychological role. Or maybe we believe that the person will somehow divine what we want them to do without being told what we want. When we assume that, we’ll likely be wrong.
None of us is as comprehensible or knowable as we like to think we are. In her book No One Understands You and What to Do About It, Heidi Grant of Columbia Business School and the Neuroleadership Institute helps us understand this phenomenon. Grant became intrigued by this topic when her then-husband, a successful executive, came home perplexed: Why did his employees, colleagues, and others so often mistake his intent? The short answer is, because we all assume our intentions are clear, even when they’re not. One of the examples Grant highlights is the work of Jacquie Vorauer and Stephanie-Danielle Claude of the University of Manitoba, in Canada. The researchers examined how readily negotiators detected the goals and intentions of their negotiating partners. The study participants estimated that they had communicated well enough to be understood 60 percent of the time. Their partners reported understanding them only 26 percent of the time.4
Every time you speak to your new hire assume that you’re not easily being understood and that you’re not necessarily understanding what is being communicated to you. There are times when uncertainty is something to be embraced, but this is not one of them. Communicate your expectations clearly. Answer the questions: What do you hope they will accomplish in this role? How do you see them contributing to the team and to the bottom line over time? What do they need to do to be prepared for a next role? What do you need them to do now?
You also want to answer the oft-wondered, but rarely asked question, How do I manage up? I confess that I get squeamish when I hear “manage up.” I can’t help but think of the seemingly spineless J. Pierrepont Finch who rises from window washer to president of Worldwide Wicket Company in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. He does it by lying: he tells the head of HR that the CEO has given him a job when he hasn’t. He does it by scheming: Finch supports a rival for a promotion—not to be selfless, but because it’s a dead-end job. He does it by manipulating: when J. Pierrepont is about to get fired for a snafu, he refers to all his fellow employees as family, saving his skin. Those who equate managing up with being sneaky or downright conniving—doing whatever it takes to climb the career ladder—probably aren’t going to be very good at managing up.
Managing up means thinking like a manager even when you aren’t. It’s about proving, through consistent, proficient work, that you can manage yourself and are therefore capable of increased responsibility.
As your employees share their goals with you, lay out the expectation that they learn to solve problems as they would in the role they aspire to. That’s what Mike Kopelman, the junior employee I talked about earlier, who is now Senior VP of finance at HBO, does. “I always take the approach that my primary job is to make my boss be successful,” he says. “It’s not that I’m not ambitious. But I trust that if I do a good job, my boss will take care of me. Of course, that’s more effective when you have a boss who is looking out for your career.” Some people come into the workplace intuitively understanding this. Others don’t—and it’s not something they will learn in school.
For all your junior employees who didn’t learn how to manage up in school, be explicit: I am here to help you help me get my job done. Here’s how. I will then reward you for your contributions. And here’s how I’ll do that.
As the chess master for your team, are you looking at your new hire as an expendable pawn to be sacrificed for short-term strategy gains? Or as a pawn that can become a queen? As you bring someone new onto the team, what kind of development do you want to occur as they move across the board? You may not know exactly how to help them develop because you are focused on discovery, but you can have a substantive vision. Relay this clearly and your new employee will be poised for a strong start up the S curve. (See the sidebar “The New Hire: The First Six Months.”)
Managing the First Six Months
Now that you have the until-you-are-ready-to-jump-to-a new-curve plan in place, it’s time to focus on the first six months of this role and to provide metrics of success. Because the math at the low end of the S curve will have them working hard with seemingly little result, you want to focus on measuring effort and momentum, not just accomplishment.
I had a coaching client who came to me as he was starting a new job in the construction industry. He was optimistic about his plan, as was his employer. That is until he was thrown into combat with no backup and no short-term milestones by which progress could be reckoned. The boss seemed to believe his new hire would be the magic bullet and change everything. When two months had passed—and he wasn’t and hadn’t—his boss broke the dreaded news: things weren’t working. After only a year on the job, he was let go.
For new hires, it is vital to set short-term goals. This de facto constraint gives your new employees something to bump up against to assess how well they are doing. Like a skateboarder who gets quick and useful feedback about their various tricks (in the form of falling on asphalt), they’ll know that doing X leads to success; not doing X means they’ll crash and burn. Tighten the constraint. Increase the pace of the feedback, and employees will learn faster.
Start with a checklist. Measure progress against the plan. For example, sketch out one or two clearly defined projects with precise deadlines and maximum budgets. Make them projects within projects, if necessary, to allow for rapid iteration and quick wins. This will keep them focused on learning and improving rather than being fearful of blowing it.
One of these projects should be building out their network. Provide a list of specific people to reach out to in the first week, then in the second week. Give them credit for having these conversations. Whom do you want them to look to for guidance? Whom do you want them to help? These networking tasks are especially important because they are concrete and easily achievable and because they weave your new hires into the fabric of your organization. The more people they know, the greater their ability to make things happen.
When you provide constraints in the form of clearly scoped projects, they (and you) can receive feedback that will help take account of their progress. Room-escape games are increasingly popular as a corporate team-building activity for that very reason. Locked in a room together, a group of people look for clues and solve puzzles to gain the key to escape. Such exercises expose strengths and weaknesses as individuals cope with constraints. Who communicates well or is calm under pressure? How is a deadline handled? Who are the analytical thinkers, and which team members are more imaginative? Cooperative? Confident? Under normal circumstances we leave a room by opening a door; thinking outside that box is unnecessary. Lock the door and withhold—in other words, embrace constraint—and concealed strengths may be revealed, along with a newfound appreciation for the strengths of their colleagues.
Listen to the New Hire’s “Outsider” Ideas
One important milestone during the first six months is to get your new hire’s perspective on your operation. It seems like an obvious thing to do, but getting information from someone less experienced can be annoying. They have all these ideas and they question everything: why you do what you do and why you do it the way you do it. So we fight it off.
I recently worked with a CEO whose sales team was at the top of the S curve. To invigorate the team, he hired someone new, at the low end of the curve. It completely backfired. The entrenched employees ran the new hire out, Hunger Games–style. This sort of workplace warfare has been termed “gentle mobbing.”5
When someone new is introduced to your team, how will you as a leader manage the confrontations that may erupt? Aicha Evans, chief strategy officer at Intel and one of the most senior women in the chip industry, has said that when a report comes in and wants to “gently mob” someone, she asks, “Are you escalating this? If you are, then I need to know and we’ll get human resources in here.” And the mobbing stops.
We all love our comfortable ideas. We cling to the moorings of our established opinions as if for survival. But being able to hear the contrary ideas of others without affront allows us to move more quickly up the learning curve. We may even find ourselves agreeable to things we initially found disagreeable—if we dare to step back and give them a chance. Learn to solicit ideas and opinions from newcomers who aren’t yet blind through familiarity. Future performance and innovation may hinge on it.
Jayne Juvan, chair of the private equity legal practice at Tucker Ellis, found that the questioning spirit of a new hire can provide advantages she’d never considered. Midway through a difficult high-risk twin pregnancy, Juvan decided she needed to hire a junior attorney to take on some of her more mundane tasks. Her firm hired Ashley Gault, an attorney who had recently moved back to the area and was just returning to work herself after having her first child. Normally innovative and high-energy, Juvan was exhausted and struggling to keep her head above water with a recent increase in client activity. “Ashley came in like a tornado,” Juvan remembers, “eager to rejoin a law firm and enthusiastic about shaking up past practices to plow a better path. When I asked her to print and review contracts for a corporate transaction, she instead sought out resources from our library that would allow her to review the contracts electronically in a more efficient manner, expediting the process and saving client resources. When I said networking was off the table because I could hardly walk, she challenged me and suggested that we line up conference calls. Ashley Gault knew that maintaining a positive mental attitude and continuing to innovate despite real hardships were both key to building and growing a successful legal practice. Because it became a genuine team effort, my practice never declined.”
Juvan was hoping a new hire would lighten her load during a vulnerable time, both professionally and personally. It would have been easy for her to resent Gault and resist her new-fangled ideas. Instead, her willingness to embrace Gault’s energy, ideas, and pushback against established norms proved to be an incredible asset to Juvan.
We all marvel at the hugely successful mega-businesses that began in a basement, garage, or shed. They often share a familiar and seemingly unlikely path to success: Someone starts tinkering with an idea. Instead of doing the conventional thing, they are highly unconventional. Your new reports are not likely to be consigned to the company barn to do their work, but tinkering in a garage with an unconventional idea is a low-end-of-the-curve activity, and it can yield striking results. When you aren’t yet entrenched in company culture and conventions, when you don’t know how to do what you’re trying to do, when you haven’t yet mastered your responsibilities through the performance of specific, repetitive tasks—this is when eyes and minds are most open to doing something new. Use it to your advantage.
The Six-Month Check-In
If your new hire is still struggling six months into the job, you may be questioning your hiring decision. As we’ve said, progress will be slow at the low end of the curve. But one can’t help wonder: Is it still the low, flat end of an S curve of growth, or is it just a flat line? No one wants to declare a curve dead unless it is, in fact, dead. But if your new hire is on life support, a nudge to a new curve may be unavoidable.
How can you know when it’s time to give up or time to have more patience? I have evaluated thousands of new ventures and career-dreamers. Here’s what I’ve learned: if you can answer “yes” to the following questions, your new hire is at the low end of the curve and growth is coming.
1. Is this person occupying an otherwise unoccupied niche? When I first moved to equity research, I was hired to cover the cement and construction sector in Latin America. Soon thereafter, our bank merged with another, and they already had a highly ranked cement and construction analyst. When there is an overlap with another employee, there isn’t the space to do the job or even a distinctive job to do—and even a true high potential might not have room to grow. Fortunately, there were a number of media companies going public with no analyst to cover them. In assuming coverage of this sector, I moved into an unoccupied niche, and was able to move up the learning curve quickly.
If you’ve created a new role, it may not be immediately obvious what a new hire will accomplish. You expect they will eventually contribute, and brilliantly, but there aren’t yet quantifiable results. They are in good company: many game-changers have garnered little attention in their nascent stages. The Wright brothers tested their flying machines without an audience for years.6 The first powered flights weren’t covered by the press. There was apathy and skepticism. Few outside the immediate neighborhood even believed they’d occurred. The Wrights were visionaries; they persevered until their genius flew up the S curve and off the charts. A slow start isn’t the whole story.
2. Is this person playing to their strengths? One of the key accelerants of personal disruption is playing to your strengths. Work with employees to identify their unique strengths and then learn to deploy that talent where it will be most effective.
Jocelyn Wong studied engineering at Purdue University before going to work in manufacturing at Procter & Gamble. This is what her father wanted for her, and Jocelyn wanted to make him proud. But she felt trapped. And she wasn’t good at her job. Instead of giving up on Jocelyn, berating her, or firing her, her boss asked if there was any other role she’d like to explore. She was, after all, a hard worker. As it turned out, Jocelyn was very good at marketing. Since that fateful day in 2001, she has gone on to become the chief marketing officer at Family Dollar (now Dollar General), and she is currently the CMO at Lowe’s, a Fortune 40 company. What a waste if P&G had thrown up its hands and given up on her instead of finding a different curve for her to scale.7
3. Is the work difficult but not debilitating? For the curve to be difficult is one thing; if it’s debilitating, that is something else. An ever-growing body of psychological research indicates that persistence in the face of an unattainable goal adversely affects your quality of life. Concordia University psychologist Carsten Wrosch says, “The disappointment of perpetual failure or shortfall leads to negative effects on biological processes in the endocrine, immune, metabolic, and central nervous systems” with consequences for the development of long-term disease.8
Dreading work, or suffering adverse physical conditions or serious emotional ones, are symptoms of a flatlining curve. Learning to disengage from a goal, to stop tilting at unreachable windmills, is an important life and career skill, a self-protective ability that can save your health. It’s something we need to help employees do when we realize that they are on the wrong curve.
If, by contrast, people are energized, getting their work done on time and well, consistently coming up with ideas, rest assured that growth is on the way.
4. Is your low-ender gaining momentum? Using the metrics that are appropriate to the situation is key, and at the low end of the S curve, momentum is what you want to measure, not absolute performance. If, for example, last week, your new hire needed eight hours to complete a task that would take an experienced employee one hour, this week, does it take six, or even four hours? The math around exponential growth tells us that the starting point is to a large degree irrelevant. What matters is: Are you growing, and how fast?
One way to track momentum is by pairing your low-ender with other stakeholders—a buddy system—to create goals for what needs to happen over the first few months on this curve. As your new hire becomes publicly accountable for what they need to accomplish, receives feedback from their “buddy,” and improves (or not), it will be more and more clear whether this employee is flat-lining or on an upward trajectory.
If you answered “no” to three or more of the questions I’ve just covered regarding your new hire, it might be time to pull the plug. Any jump to a new curve results in at least a short-term loss of efficiency. And there are plenty of times when the only thing standing between us and the outcome we desire is tenacity. But at other times there’s just no viable prescription for success. Believing that additional stretches of time or investment of money will save the day is tempting (we are all sensitive to the sunk-cost fallacy). But knowing when to pull the plug can be the difference between sinking a rowboat and sinking the Titanic.
What do you do if a new hire is on the wrong curve? Not only will you know it, but secretly, they probably will know it too, even if they aren’t ready to admit it. If you respect their work, you may be able to help them find the right fit within your company, as the senior executive did with Jocelyn Wong. Or they might need to move on. Treat your ex-employees with respect, and they will become lifelong ambassadors for your organization.
Even if a curve has flatlined, experience is a great instructor. Failed adventures help us chart a smarter path the next time. The Sports Performance Research Institute of New Zealand has studied competitive surfers and determined that they typically spend 8 percent of their time riding waves, 54 percent of time paddling, and 28 percent waiting.9 No one would suggest that the paddling, waiting, and inevitable wipeouts aren’t integral to their ultimate success. Like a surfer, the next wave to roll in may well be the S curve you’ve been waiting for.
Be a CEO (Chief Encouragement Officer)
Devn J. Cornish, a pediatric physician, relates that when he was a young resident at Johns Hopkins, he often felt ill prepared and unintelligent when he compared himself to other interns. He shares that in his third month, he was sitting in the nurse’s station late one night, “alternately sobbing to myself and falling asleep as I tried to write the admission orders for a small boy with pneumonia. I had never felt so discouraged in my life. I didn’t have any idea how to treat pneumonia in a ten-year-old.” At that moment, one of the senior residents put his hand on Cornish’s shoulder and asked how he was doing. After pouring out his frustrations, the resident “told me how proud he and all of the other senior residents were of me and how they felt like I was going to be an excellent doctor. He believed in me at a time when I didn’t even believe in myself.”10
One of the biggest challenges of being on the low end of the curve is that people work hard, but they feel like their work isn’t very good (and they may be right). Feeling the agitation or disapproval of you, their boss, increases the weight of concern. Remember they took this job and will stay in this job—or not—largely because of you. If you can make them feel safe in exploring this new S curve and acknowledge their efforts (even when their performance is less than perfect), you’re sitting on a gold (and copper) mine.
Summary
•The low end of the curve is home to new hires and early-career professionals, as well as experienced and late-career professionals. Regardless, manage all as newcomers to their learning curve. You optimize your team with 15 percent of your people.
•Low-end challenges are made more manageable when we can convey to the new hire our vision for the organization and for them within that paradigm.
•Invest in frequent, honest communication about what you need and expect from your low-ender, and encourage them to be equally open about what they need from you to develop in their role.
•Some of the accelerants of personal disruption are particularly relevant at the outset of a new role. Ensure these are understood and used to best advantage.
•Consistent evaluation of the low-ender’s momentum, as well as their fit with the rest of the team, helps address problems in a timely manner and allow for adjustment. It also gives early warning if the curve or team fit is not working well, alerting to dysfunction within the team.
If you'd like more tips on applying personal disruption to building an A-team, email me at [email protected] or sign up at whitneyjohnson.com