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- [00:00]
A
Hiring is hard. Hiring product people is very hard. Even if you hire someone they might call a rockstar from a company, it doesn't always guarantee that they are going to be successful at your company. I will even argue that no one starts with everything they need to be successful at a new job. In this episode, I'm going to reverse roles a little bit and I'm going to have SVPG partner Chris Jones interview me on how I onboard and coach new hires to be successful. I am hoping I can walk through the techniques I use my bootcamp that I created years ago as a product leader to hire and onboard key people. I want to go deep and share the tactical week by week, day by day guide I use to ensuring my new hires are successful. Chris, as always, I am super excited to have you back on put up therapy.
- [00:56]
B
Hey Christian, thanks for having me back and thanks for letting me, you know, turn this around. What happened was, you know, this was a topic that, that you wanted to talk about and usually this has been, you know, Christian, interviewing and getting, you know, driving the conversation that way, interviewing the partners. But this is a topic that I have always thought that you know so much about and know so much more than I do about this. So I'm glad that you agreed to us flipping this around a little bit. So I'll just, I'll just jump straight in and you know, the onboarding is the term that we're using here. You know, onboarding a new employee into the company. Start off with, why? Why is this so important to get right?
- [01:37]
A
I kind of learned this a whole lot. I was being recruited by a friend of mine that was a general in the military, was kind of telling me, come join the military. And I was like, look man, I'm too old to be doing like a boot camp or, you know, running all that physical preparedness in there. He was kind of telling me, it's like, look, many people think it's just about getting people in shape and well equipped to join the military. And it's like, look, there's more about how we onboard or how we prepare somebody to be part of a military experience. We want to share with them our purpose, our common intent. We want them to build relationships. We want to make sure that if somebody is going to trust you to stand beside them in a fight, that they know that you understand the rules of engagement and the tools and. And it always struck me how almost all the high performing teams and organizations focused on how they get people ready for battle or war or events or a show or A game or a concert, and how little that happened in a human construct. But here are my reasons why. How you onboard and coach. New hires are super important. First, you know, there's no job description on the planet that has properly described what people are going to do every day in their job. Just none. There's not enough pen and paper in the world to write down everything you see, do have to think, a problem you face or challenge you will have. So the job descriptions that somebody might use to come into a job may not truly describe what they would do day to day. So there's a big gap of what you need to succeed at your job versus what you may have been hired to do on paper. Secondly, people fail to understand the power of a new hire. I often describe it this way. You know, Chris, you join a company and you go on LinkedIn the first day and you say, I am so excited to join the amazing and talented team at this company. Most of the time the company hasn't even paid you a salary. When you made that announcement. You left a perfectly nice paying job, joined a new company, announced to the world how excited you are. You actually have the highest amount of trust for the company. This is why you left your career. You believed in the vision, maybe you believed in the team or what they are doing. You come in with the highest trust. However, the opposite is true in the company's lens. The company doesn't know you. You're like, yeah, I'm looking forward to having Chris here. But I know Chris doesn't know anything about us. He doesn't know anything about our business. He doesn't know anything about our politics, our stakeholders, how things work. The reality here is that in our product world, we always say the competency of a product manager is a deep knowledge of the customer, the business, the data, the industry. Just if you think about that on your first day, how do you know this business? How do you know the players? There's a significant gap of what you need to be successful at your job. When you join a company in terms of what competency is. And the failure that I see in so many companies is Chris was great. He, he built the rocket ship, he's super smart. He joins the team. They say, chris, yeah, now go build products. Chris realizes, like, first of all, I don't know anybody here very well. I've never worked with the team. You know, I know I'm not competent because I'm good. I really don't know the organization. Maybe I know the industry, maybe I'm an industry. Expert, maybe. I've worked with similar customers, but I don't even know who is who. So he comes in with a low level of competency and we throw a heavy amount of expectation at him and he never, ever has any time to actually learn what he needs to be good at it. He's learning while doing.
- [05:11]
B
Yeah, I mean, I heard a few things in what you said there and I think they're all really resonating. I mean, the first one is you're never going to get this time back, right. This is a magical time when somebody has maximal excitement and maximal trust. So take advantage of that. They're going to be a sponge at this particular time, I heard also, and this is sort of the obvious one, right. They need a lot of stuff in order to be successful. They might have been a very, very successful product manager in 10 other places. They've never been one here. They don't know what's required here. And the third one that, you know, you kind of dropped in there was, was actually quite interesting. It's moving in the other direction. This is a little bit not so much about what we give to the employee at this particular time. It's kind of what we need from the employee. Right. It's helping, helping convince leadership that this person knows all these things and that we can begin to trust this person. So I think those are all really good reasons.
- [06:15]
A
Real quickly, as you were saying that someone was asking me, how do you know that they trust us so much? I said, have you ever seen the amount of paperwork somebody fills out on day one? Like all the hoops they go through, like you could ask for a blood check, a DNA test an it, they will go through all of the hoops. But as a 20 year veteran in a company, to fill out the exact same paperwork again and see how well they'd be like, why do I need to do this? What is this?
- [06:41]
B
Right, right, right, right. No, that's good. Yeah, just take advantage of that magical time. It's also, it's like, it's, you know, within a product. It's like that very first experience with the product when somebody is onboarded. You have to treat that as this absolutely precious resource because you get to, you get to go there once.
- [07:01]
A
That's right.
- [07:02]
B
So that's, that's really good. You know, one of the things, and we've talked about this a little bit, that, you know, onboarding actually starts well before day one. Talk a little bit about that. What were, what were some of the things that you think are part of that whole process.
- [07:18]
A
We've always described the role of leadership. You know, we kind of talk about coaching as a big, that's your day job and staffing. Most people tend to outsource staffing in some ways, like, oh, you know, hr, go find me a person. And I'm always like, really? You're going to hack somebody that has never been an engineer to write a description of an engineer and evaluate what good looks like. But even with the offer letter and the references, in some ways, all of these are part of setting people up. When I ask people, what is the number one reason people leave a company? People always, oh, yes, a bad manager or manager or leadership. And then I asked them, I say, well, why is that not the number one reason people join a company? It's often because there's a disconnect between the hiring manager and the offer or the staffing of that person. You know, the best product people on the best teams are built by recruiting, not by staffing. Somebody went out to find you and own body. And one of the ways I take this seriously is I do the reference checks. Many people outsource this to hr. Hey, run a reference check on Chris and tell me if he's good to join my team. And I say, what are they asking for? What are they listening for? How do they know what a good reference or good feedback might look like? When I'm doing my references, I wouldn't do them two way. I wouldn't have. I give people references on me because I was like, I want you to know what kind of crazy I am as a manager too. You know, like, let's talk about those things. But I am targeting a lot in place. I want to understand your strengths because that's what I'm going to use on the team, kind of why you hired the competencies. I also want to understand the things I should not be surprised about in that I might need to coach. So what you're doing very early on in your reference checks in your evaluation, you know, think about it as perceptions. People cannot adequately in an interview talk about their weaknesses or their gaps or how people might see them. But people that have worked with you before can say, you know what? Chris is great at this. You know this. I may be asking pointed questions. How am I? How does he do with difficult situations? Working with team in this circumstance, that doesn't disqualify you. It just allows me to know where. What gaps I need to address early on because those would be the areas that would be perceived very quickly in the new Organization.
- [09:36]
B
I mean, it's basically you just are making sure you've got a pretty good idea of what you have coming in so that you can craft that. There was one thing you said there that I want to bounce off on. Some of the things that I used to do to help preserve that magical moment and that enthusiasm, like how you close with somebody, I think can really set them off on a good or a bad foot. Yes. Like if, if it takes weeks and weeks for you to get an offer out and they're, and they're having to prod you and all of this, you are not sending them a message that you're excited about them to be there. I was always coached on this. Be deliberate, make a decision quickly. I mean, make a good decision, but make it deliberately and solidly so that the, you know that things aren't dithering and you know, you don't feel you're not signaling to the, to the candidate that you're having second thoughts. And you know, there's one other thing I'll put in here and it's. I've not been a hiring manager in a while and I don't expect to be one, so I can let this one out a bit. But I used to actually relish when somebody really wanted to negotiate with me on, on salary. Not because I like negotiating and I wanted to grind them down. It actually gave me an opportunity to maybe find a way to give them a little bit of a win, like to allow them to fight for something and actually get it. Because it's another way to signal. We want you here and we want you to, to really come and make the full contribution that you can. It's in a little bit different space, but it' all about that kind of preserving that magical enthusiasm, you know, I.
- [11:17]
A
Mean, I love that kind of thinking about the negotiation, the offer dynamics. You know, I take it very seriously. When I'm actually hiring someone, I will actually do dinners with people prior to hiring them and I might invite a spouse, a partner, even a parent or mine. I sit with them and I kind of want to ask the parents about what motivates them. It's a very interesting dynamic with trust. And if you think about this, the people you bring in as a leader are your product. But I want to clarify something I think many people fail to understand. You're not hiring a finished product. You're hiring the raw ingredients to build a product. That's your day job as a manager. You're building and iterating. So I typically want to understand Even from your parents, like what excited them as a child, what motivated them. And I have had teams where, you know, it's very hard for people to quit because their parents were like, I love that boss of yours we had today. You know, they defend me every day at work when they come back, you know, but you have to understand, if this is your product you're investing in, leveraging these raw ingredients in cultivating what will create value in your company. It's really good.
- [12:31]
B
Yeah, I think, you know, if I were to net this out, I'm kind of hearing two big points, you know, in the sort of pre onboarding before they come in. You know, number one is, is we as the, as their managers do what we can to understand what their strengths, weaknesses, drivers are so that we can craft a program really thoughtfully. And the other point is to signal to them in a way that is going to encourage them to bring their best self and be, you know, as, as enthusiastic as possible. So yeah, I mean, you spoke about, you've got a whole, you know, battle plan, you know, for, for how this works. You've showed me some versions in, you know, it even gets down to the day of the week, you know, as somebody is first coming in, maybe give us a little sketch on how you approach that.
- [13:20]
A
It's very deliberate because you're calling out. I only have this magical window. You're never going to get back someone's first day at work. You're never going to get back someone's first week, second week. And remember, you kind of called out. They have the highest amount of trust, the highest amount of excitement, we have the lowest amount for them. There is a fundamental aspect people always talk about 30 day plans. I don't know if there's some magic behind those planning things, but I do know certain things that I have to make true very quickly. I kind of talked about trust, the idea being like on one end. I have to build trust between you, the new hire, a new employee and me because this is foundational for everything we are going to do. You have to trust me as a coach invested in getting you better. You know, I have to trust what competencies you have. So there's some vulnerability with those gaps or weaknesses or opportunities that we need to explore. I have to build trust between you, the new person joining a team, especially if you work in a team sport. Think about this. This always rocks my wall. You know, you throw somebody into a team in a wartime dynamic, you know, maybe Chris, you might play on a band or something. Imagine if you are the first day you're with the team is at a concert. Like, they're just like, yes, Tris is our new drummer. We throw you right? That's what we do. And then the team is like waiting to say, okay, does he know the plays? Does he know our rhythm? Does he know where we stop? Does he know what this language is? There's this awkward dynamic. It's game time, it's show time. Nobody has the patience to say, oh, yeah, yeah. Chris is just learning. We have a deliverable. We have a data stakeholder is screaming at us. So I have to build trust between you, the new hire and the team. And lastly, I have to build trust between the new hire and the company because, remember, the company doesn't know you. They are going to probably see this new guy pop up in some meeting or some presentation or something, and they will assess you based on what that is. So the entire idea of my bootcamp, or training program is really designed to accelerate competency in the job, but also relationships in the organization that will set you up for success. That's kind of the framing behind it. So I designed this two week kind of bootcamp. And as a leader, if I'm the head of product, I personally onboard every single person in the product organization, designer, engineer. And the reason that that's important is because, remember I said people leave a company for a leader. But I'm trying to reframe. What about if they join the company for the leader? Because I tell people, companies cannot care about people, only people can care about people. And the representation of how the company cares about you is through an individual. So, you know, the first week is focused on that individual. The second week is focused on that individual as part of a team. That's kind of my ongoing type of framing. And please don't get it wrong, this is not new hire orientation where, you know, HR is. You fill out paperwork, you watch a company video on our mission and vision. Smart people can read about all these things on the Internet. This is about the practical reality of what it means to work here, about sharing our expectations, reinforcing. One of the tools I love is what I call a user guide. So a user manual for a manager and a user manual for an employee. I typically will have a user manual for myself that I want to walk you through, how I like to communicate, how I give feedback, what my cadence is for coaching, how to reach me, what I will ignore, you know, and I walk you through and I say, look, manuals, in the modern world, nobody uses your TV manual. Until something breaks. You know, if you're like, oops, what's going on with my tv? You start to find that old manual. And so I'm building trust between me and you by going through the relationship stakes. I like to walk a new hire around the company myself because when people see Chris, our leader, with this new person, what you're actually doing is you're extending your trust to that person by people saying, oh, they have a relationship. In my first week, the first five days at work, I'm doing relationship exercises, getting to know you. I am doing a lot of introductory things. So I have a very set guideline of who is this person going to be a part of, what team, which stakeholders are they going to influence? I am personally sharing the context, the strategic context. I don't want you to hear it from a line manager what the company vision is or the product strategy is. I want you to hear it from the leader because you don't want the interpretation loss. I have a short window to jump all of the bias because you know how quickly you can start to think like us. You are going to ask me very interesting questions from the outside in joining the company than someone that has been here for 20 years or has heard the same thing. So I am actually using that to learn more.
- [17:57]
B
Are you doing this with just your directs? Are you doing it with everybody in your organization? Because I can imagine if you've got a large organization, it's hard for me to see how you'd be able to give this level of one on one.
- [18:11]
A
So in a large organization. So I do my bootcamping cohorts, so we kind of sync up.
- [18:18]
B
That was my next question.
- [18:19]
A
You can make offers in, you know, any cycle or stuff, but we kind of coordinate start dates so that you can kind of go through the core in the first week. As the most senior leader, I try to ensure I have at least a one on one with every single person. So that's baked in where we can kind of talk in here. But this is kind of like run like a class type of thing.
- [18:41]
B
Got it? Yeah, got it. Yeah. Because there's some things in here that are one on one between sort of the direct manner manager and the employee and then many of them that, that the only way to scale it, you know, would be, you know, through that sort of cohort. So just really quickly and we'll get back to the, the details of the, of kind of the plan. How often would you run cohorts? You know, would they be once a quarter, once a month? Like how? I mean, obviously it's going to be different based on the company.
- [19:10]
A
It's going to be different based on the company. If we're not in a strong hiring cycle, it's a quarterly thing most of the time. It's every two months or kind of every six weeks. So it just depends on the growth plan of the organization and where you are. Like if we're doing a hundred hires this year and you want to get them in because there's a demand for a problem to solve, you will kind of align. You know, you can make an offer to Chris today, you're starting next week to join this cohort. So it's coordinated with all the managers to do so. But the idea here is we are taking the onboarding as a strategic pillar of setting people up for success. Because I don't know how to be more pointed. I think it is absolutely wasteful to a company and actually detrimental for them to hire somebody and throw them into the team to start working. I don't believe companies get any value from those people. The cycle's actually longer because they start from a deficit of trust that they have to earn their way back than when you make this investment upfront, where people are excited about Chris and they know Chris is competent and they can't wait to work.
- [20:17]
B
Absolutely.
- [20:17]
A
And they've practiced with Chris. So I think very seriously, you know.
- [20:22]
B
Obviously doing cohorts, you know, twice a quarter or once a quarter is a really good fit for a company that's growing and kind of actively hiring. But of course, you know, we've had very challenging economics where sometimes things have been flat, sometimes things have been gone down, companies are hiring people, but maybe not necessarily in these big block cohorts like that. So are there adjustments you make to this, you know, to this program when. When things are looking a little bit more like a trickle of hires as opposed to big blocks of hires.
- [20:54]
A
The interesting thing I tell people about when I do my coaches, the hiring managers actually are going through onboarding again with me. They're actually in the class with the employees. And part of it is I'm coaching them on how to coach, but I want to equip them to be able to do one off sessions with people. If you've got trickle things, you know, you, you get Chris in, you're not, you're not losing sight on the things you need to do to set Chris up for success, even outside a cohort or a class. And as a manager, I'm checking in with you like, hey, I know we don't have a class, you just got a new hire. How are they on this? How do you feel good about this? You have a coaching plan for them, an assessment. And so it does work in kind of this trickle effect. Obviously the idea of a cohort is it allows at scale for companies to respond rather than having a BIG program of 301 on ones that you might have to do.
- [21:48]
B
Okay, thank you for helping me with that foundation. So let's get back. You generally in an ideal case, you've got two weeks and you're bringing a cohort through or maybe you are doing it as a trickle and it's kind of a one on one thing. But you know, how do those, how do those two weeks break down?
- [22:05]
A
You remember that first week is all about the individual's a deep understanding of the individual, building trust between them and the manager as an individual, equipping them with the knowledge they need. The second part or second week is really shifting focus because that individual does not operate, at least in a product model as an individual contributor outside of a team. They are accountable to team outcomes. So I always say to myself, like, I don't want you practicing. I don't want you meeting your team in wartime. As much as people might be like, you know, yeah, we'll ice break in one team meeting. Every day is game time, every day is showtime. You know, when they get you on the team, they're not going to be asking yourself, okay, Chris, what's your communication style? So that we can. They have no patience for that. It is wartime. So the whole sense of that second week is I need to create a safe space for practice so that I can introduce you to the team safely in a practice environment so that the team can get to appreciate the skills and competencies you're bringing with them. I can coach and observe the dynamics I'm going to face in the real world that I need to manage. Now one of the things I do in my first week, I call this my emotional intelligence black belt technique, is I actually assign the new hire to a stakeholder. And typically I identify that stakeholder by probably the most influential, the loudest, sometimes the most annoying stakeholder to that team. You know, the person that speaks up and is critical, always has, you know, and I go to that person and I say, look, you know, look, I just hired Chris, smart guy, he builds NASA and a rocket ship. But look, he knows nothing about our company, you know, and you are the smartest person I know in this company. And I would love for Chris to spend Time with you. I have carved out these two days. This is your first week for Chris to just sit in minutes. He just needs to observe how you work. You don't need to change anything. Your calendar. I just think by him observing, going to some meetings with you, his knowledge of our company will increase exponentially. Here's why I kind of call this a black belt technique. It is impossible for you, the new hire, to sit with this stakeholder or leader without the leader saying things like, hey, so Chris, where are you from? What do you do for fun? I'm actually forcing a relationship between you and that person, whether that person knows it or not. Secondly, by nature of you spending time with that person, I'm extending that person's trust and credibility to you. People will be like, wow, Chris knows Sharon, that executive, my goodness, he must be really cool. We need to be close to Chris because that person is influential in our work. But what I'm really doing here is I am sharing the accountability for that person's onboarding and success with an influential stakeholder and partner. That person now can never be critical of you because it was their job to teach you. It reflects poorly on them. So I've already created this safe place of like, we know Chris is incompetent at us. Your job is to make sure that they work well for you now forever in their career, in their company. Your job is to look out for their competence. So it's always a technique that every new I have has a stakeholder body. And it goes both ways. Most of I've seen most of my stakeholders, they will send people to come and stay with me. Let me show you how product works. But there is this reciprocity of trust, like, oh, yes, yes, yes. Chris is my guy. I spent some time with him. They will introduce Chris to other stakeholders because they are immediate. So I have done that the first week, so you kind of get a sense of my goals. The first week. I'm building trust with the company. Building trust as the individual is, you know, they don't feel alone. They know people. Second week, man, this is. We get it down to some tactical working environment things. So I bring the team that they are going to walk into into the onboarding class and I will give them a real problem to solve, a real discovery stuff. It's where I bring, like, salespeople will come in and present something. Marketing. You kind of introduce other parts of the organization in here. But the real benefit is the team actually has a safe place to practice, maybe discovery or collaborate. You might do like think of it like a Discovery Sprint week, but you feel safe because it's just like, okay, there's not a real outcome of somebody that needs something right here. The team is carving out like two hours every day. Hey, we have a new hire coming on board. We have a two hour class session to onboard that new hire. But what's good about that is that you can actually start to look at those coaching things you have. What is the dynamic with the team? What are the challenges they will have in working together? What are the things they need to practice more of? You're not just coaching the person. Because every new person joining a team changes the dynamic of that team. Very important for people to understand. Chris may be great, the team may be working well. Just adding Chris to the team could disrupt the whole team, no matter. So those are the things you're actually working through before game time. And what seemed to happen in that week is the best outcomes are when people are so excited. They're like, oh my goodness, we've made Chris our new, he's going to join us. He's our new designer. He's so good. You know, he did this. They are so excited about working. It's not, you know, they get to know him. So we do all the team games that week of like getting to know the team, but we are actually going through what changes in the dynamic. What's my role, how do I participate?
- [27:26]
B
That's a huge insight. Most people, you know, myself included, look at onboarding as it's a job of getting this one new individual sort of incorporated into this system that's here. But you know, especially when we're talking about cross functional teams, just adding one person can dramatically change the dynamics of that team. So you're, you're not just onboarding a person, you're effectively onboarding that whole team. You know, within this new context, I think that's a really, that's a really, really valuable insight. So, so the obvious kind of elephant in the room on this is that so many companies now are so much more remote, you know, in terms of some of their employee base, maybe all of their employee base. What are some adjustments or accommodations you make? Especially, you know, I find it particularly difficult when you're trying to establish relationships. You know, it's, it's, you can't as easily assigned that buddy the way that you talked about or you know, getting even to do the, the, the practice time exercise with the team. Things like that are going to get a lot trickier.
- [28:38]
A
You called out the biggest risk which is the relationship aspect and the trust aspect. I mean I, I work with teams where, you know, they may come together for my training or workshop and it's the first time in years anybody has ever seen anyone and somebody's like, oh my goodness, Chris, you have legs. Or you know, you know, greno. They've never seen Chris before.
- [28:58]
B
Pants. Yeah, that's right.
- [28:59]
A
You wear, you know, these are just new and, and you know we talk about non verbal communication and cues and I tell people it's, it's not impossible to do good work remotely. It's just harder. But you have to recognize the risk you have to tackle, which is how do I build relationships and trust in a remote environment? How do I effectively have people practice in a remote environment? How do I effectively build true collaboration? Tools are not the answer. They are meant to be enablers. You know, the only substitute for, you know, relationships is relationships. You got to build it. It doesn't just happen because you mandated. So what I do in onboarding kind of remote team wise is, you know, like even envision they used to have like when they had new hires or stuff like that, they will carry you. You kind of welcome people to the team or the company and you actually do a tour of your house or your workspace. And those were very deliberate things.
- [29:52]
B
Yeah.
- [29:53]
A
To make you feel relaxed working remotely, to make you feel comfortable in your space. You introduce your family and your dog and you talk about these things. The best companies that are successful working remotely have tackled the trust and relationship not as much as they can. And there are many tools and exercises and games. It's just important this does not fall apart because you're remote. It just becomes harder because now you have to say I need a way to practice working together remotely. You know, you have to design something.
- [30:22]
B
Yeah, well, yeah, that's it exactly. You don't get it for free like you used to when you were or almost free. Right. I mean it's, it's a lot easier when people are co located to do that sort of stuff. And in fact, you know, a lot of the energy around online meetings works at cross purposes to this because we're also drowning in these, in these meetings, you know, looking at people in boxes. Everybody is trying to be, you know, rightfully so. They're trying to be really efficient about those meetings. You know, these are meetings that have tight agendas. These are meetings where you know you're going to be or you don't want to waste people's time because they're so taxing to do meetings this way. That's a very difficult context from which to actually forge relationships. You know, you, you. You know, you can't really put that on an agenda, you know, the same way that you can, you know, a status update or whatever you're having that meeting about. So I like these little tricks of we're gonna, we're gonna walk through the house, or we're gonna have this period where we may not be in a meeting, but our cameras are on and we're open, and we can, you know, easily roll back the chair effectively and ask somebody a question. You have to actually, you know, put real effort into figuring out ways to make those things actually happen. Okay, well, I got one more sort of area of questions on this. You know, we've talked about a lot of the challenges with onboarding, a lot of the goals with onboarding. You know, a lot of, you know, kind of the, the. The magical moment that you want to preserve, kind of building trust in both directions. You know, a big part of onboarding is about kind of setting, setting milestones. You know, kind of just looking at the milestones. You know, that was something I would always do in the, in the first day or two with, with somebody is just kind of show them what I think they should be. We kind of work on them a little bit. But, you know, how do you, how do you approach that?
- [32:12]
A
This is probably the manager in the box technique. When I'm coaching my managers around these dates and managing their onboarding, I call out certain key milestones. Obviously, the first day is the first day, but I kind of want them to see the world from the lens of how a new hire sees their first day. Everything is shiny. You kind of talk about, you know, like, you know, I've gotten the interview, I'm now in the company day one, you know, filling out paperwork, I'm running around, I'm meeting. So what I always say is, imagine they went back home and a partner, spouse, family member asked them, how was your first day at work? What I'm coaching my managers is how do you want that person to answer that question? So typically, what I do in my onboarding is after your first year of work is the great time to have your first one on one with this person. In short, I am going to tell you what you should say. And this is exactly what I do on the first year of work. I kind of remind people why they are hired. There is nobody hired for their weakness. That is not the day of that. I kind of remind you, like, you know, oh, my Goodness. We are so excited to have you here, Chris. As you can see, we're a great company. Culture, whatever it is, kind of stuff, and your experience, your expertise, coming to join our team will set us up for success. You know, what a great first day. You know, I recap the activities of the first day, which you had trust. You got to know me, I got to share my stuff, I got to know you. You know, it's kind of like I'm recapping the day as I just discovered you and you saw us. And I'm giving you the message of, I am glad I made this choice to be here. The second milestone is the first week, and it differs from the first day because you have something called the weekend. You have this weekend, two days where you are reflecting on your first week. I remember culture is how you feel on Sunday about coming to work on Monday. And in some ways you're going to ask yourself, do I want to do this again? So in some ways, at the end of Friday, I'm giving you a very different type of message about. I'm painting the picture of the brightness of the world. And you just, you know, and maybe by that first week, you're talking about your team that you're going to meet, the people you're going. You are excited about this. More on that. Yeah, I just had a great week. So I'm anchoring on. What do I want you to reflect on? How do you describe to people? So that's where I want you to have the cultural, the value words you're describing to people, how you want them to describe themselves. Are we collaborative? Are we caring? Are we kind? Culture? Are we. You're using the words on Friday to help people in their reflection, describe what they should feel.
- [34:43]
B
So. So to be clear, this milestone is immediately before the first weekend, not immediately after. Right. Because you want to set that intention so that when they ruminate, they're ruminating in that way. That's right. As opposed to kind of collecting it and understanding how they did ruminate. And then maybe you don't want to be proactive. Yeah.
- [35:04]
A
You know, you would, you know, and I asked them, and I even asked them, how do you feel about your first week? So that first Friday or that first end of week, whatever that is, recognize they have two days to process. This is different from, I'm tired, I'm going back to work the next day. This is two days of I'm having fun. I'm going to go back again on Monday. So that's a big onboarding Milestone, at least there's psychology behind some of this. The next milestone is an interesting one. It's actually your very first paycheck. Remember I described the reason you have trust for us is most companies don't pay you on day one. You actually are like technically walking with the belief that you're trusting them, that they will give you a paycheck. But here's why this day matters. The day you get your paycheck, you do a mental evaluation of, I have been working here maybe two weeks, whatever the timeframe is, I kind of know more about what the work is. Is it worth the compensation? Now, you know what I do on that day before the first paycheck hits your bank account. The day before. That's actually the day I actually delivered to you your very first coaching plan. Very important. So I will say, you know, Chris, oh man, this, we've spent two weeks here. You've met the team, we got that session in here. This was fantastic. All right, so I'm already seeing there are several areas that we're going to need to work on to get you really good at this. Now this is important. There's something called the social comparison theory. You don't really know how good you are. You can compare to somebody else. But what I'm trying to do here is I'm trying to make you say, you mean I am not the perfect rock star in the world, but they are willing to pay me this much money. So what I'm doing is I'm making your compensation significantly higher than what you might think your value is that you kind of tell people that, well, I'm invested in getting you better and I'm paying you like you're already great. So everybody leaves feeling like this is a great job. I mean, look at how much I get paid. I'm going to learn, I'm going to grow. I'm still going to. Those are important things to carry in that first paycheck. Now the other ones are the obvious cycles that everybody talks about. What is your 30 day plan, 60 day plan, 90 day plan? The first month is actually where you, you do a lot of your personal value. Like, is this a place I'm going to grow? Is this a place I'm going to? There's a lot of that evaluation. I've been here 30amonth in and that's. So it's a critical touch point for me on checking in on your coaching plan and the things we're going to do to help you succeed. The end of the quarter, like when People are in a company after three months, they tend to lose the new shiny object syndrome, you know, like, oh yeah, you know, you can no longer play the new guy excuse as much as you might like. So what really starts, what's important at that point is that you're part of a team that demonstrates outcomes. If you feel disconnected after 90 days, you've absolutely failed in onboarding a new hire. So. But you can imagine I have an acceleration program because by your second week you've practiced with the team. By your end of your first month, you're already working with the team, they know you. So by the end of the first quarter you should be presenting in team meetings, celebrating with them, you know, hey, look at what we did last quarter. So you need to be able to make we statements that you are part of something at that point. So I have critical milestones. All my managers, it's important for every new hire, you know, their birthday, you know their anniversary date, you know, their first day job, their one week job. These are all marked in your calendar. You put the reminders automatically. You have a set of questions, you're asking them to prompt these things right now.
- [38:29]
B
That's great stuff. I mean, I like all the intention, especially in the very early ones. I like the intention around helping sort of shape how they're going to think and relate to the job. I mean this goes back to that what happens before day one and kind of preserving that right sort of energy. And that's definitely a part of the picture. And your timing is really fascinating here in terms of sort of the content of some of these milestones. I mean, you did talk about that outcome and outcome as a team. I'll share one that I learned from one of my managers, especially when I was actually first hiring somebody and he had tasked me with this. I might have talked about this in a different context before, but basically I was hiring somebody and my manager said, you need to ensure that this person you're hiring has a public win in the first. I don't know what it was, 45 days, whatever the timeframe was. And this is interesting because this was definitely part of that person's onboarding. You know, sort of the plan. Like this is a goal, but it was something that we shared. It was actually more for me as the direct hiring manager to make sure that that happened. But it's a really critical thing. I mean, I've described this before, like I said in other contexts, it gave me a mindset of my job is to make this person successful and my job is to do it in a way that even if I'm really instrumental in it happening, I need to step back and create a place on the stage for them to stand and take a bow. And I really liked that. I mean, that was one of the most powerful lessons I got as an employee, maybe ever.
- [40:22]
A
And it's so addictive. It's kind of like that Vegas syndrome. They are very happy with you winning very early because they know you keep playing for a very long time. And do not underestimate that feeling of having a public win being celebrated and being seen as part of a team.
- [40:41]
B
Right, right. And you're picking up on the other half of it. The value of the public to the person getting the win. Yes. And I'm talking about the. The value of the public win to the person who, you know, the hiring manager is making it happen because it's, you know, it's creating space essentially for. For this person to come in the public win.
- [40:59]
A
Demonstrating Chris is successful year is a trust builder to the company. It's like, oh, we heard Chris was good. Now we know Chris is good.
- [41:08]
B
Well, we've been going for. For a good bit here. Is there anything, anything I missed, Anything, you know, in general that we should be sharing with fol onboarding looks like.
- [41:18]
A
Now, I think we've covered a lot of the highlights around this. Obviously it's different onboarding an individual contributor versus a manager because, you know, they have a certain difference of competency and skills that they should demonstrate. Obviously, I'm kind of calling out a lot of this is very deliberate. Unfortunately, many people do it kind of by accident or like, sure, I'll onboard you. Everything I've described here says we are very thoughtful and thinking about how do we set somebody up for success, how do we ensure. Because think about how much effort and time is spent in trying to get a hire. The cost effort to, you know, and just. We see a lot of wasted cycles in there to get them to competency. And the last point I'll make here is the same thing I do with making offers or pitching people. Please don't feel like you shouldn't onboard the people you have today. If you've never been deliberate about setting people up for success in your company ever, or your employees, you can design a program today to onboard people you already have. They are new hires. In the context of they have low trust, low competency, you should be very deliberate. And it's, you know, everybody in a company deserves to have a shot at being well equipped to succeed.
- [42:32]
B
I like that. Those are all great points. But. But a good one is, yeah, it's never too late, even if somebody's been working here for a little while if we didn't do it properly. Good stuff. Christian. Thank you so much for letting me turn the tables on you here and you sharing all your wisdom. It was really, really good stuff. As always, I learned something every time I talk with you.
- [42:54]
A
Indeed. Thank you for doing this, Chris. And as always, it's so good to have you on Product Therapy. Want to learn more? Until next time, Please check out svpg.com, sign up for our newsletter that Mary Kagan puts out. Join us for one of our workshops near you and get access to all of the articles and content we put out. And thank you to everyone for joining us. Until next time, have a good day.
- [43:21]
C
A Quick Disclaimer While this podcast is named Product Therapy, it is not hosted by licensed therapists or mental health professionals and it is in no way a substitute for professional mental health services. We recognize the importance of mental well being and encourage anyone facing personal difficulties to seek support from qualified professionals. See www.findahelpline.com.