E21 | How to Successfully Onboard New Members in your Team

Hi. Welcome to lead with a coaching mindset, a Podcast where we explore how leaders unlocck their followers potential. I am Dr Damian Goldvarg, and I am very excited to discuss my new book, lead with a coaching mindset.

Hi everyone. I'm Elaine Padilla. I'm also coach and I will be the host of this podcast. We hope that you find this space inspirational and thought provoking.

Let's get into it. Welcome to lead with a coaching mindset. We meet with Elaine twice a month to discuss lead with a coaching mindset, the book that I published last year. And in every session, we discuss one of the chapters, and we are going to be exploring together today. Chapter number four, coaching agreement. Elaine, how are you today?

Good. I'm doing well. Good to see you again. Damian, yeah, so chapter four, the work agreement. What makes it important? Tell us more about this agreement that you discuss in chapter four.

Well, coaching agreement is one of the competencies for professional coaches. And following the International Coach Federation framework, there are eight competencies, and in the book, each chapter is one of the competencies. So this is a chapter number four is the third competency that is about agreement, and the idea that to the extent that we develop good agreements and we contract for what we need, for what our expectations for how we are going to be working together, the more possibilities are for us to have better working conditions. So the idea is that when we intentionally spend time building the relationship, clarifying need, clarifying expectations. There are more possibilities to have effective relationships.

Yeah, okay, so, so you mentioned in the book, you talk about the importance of of onboarding. So the kind of setting the foundation, what makes it important? You know, for for leaders to to serve as it, as a coach and as a mentor to their employees?

Well, I think that onboarding is an opportunity to start building the relationship. And when people are entering into a new culture, into a new system. When leaders are intentional in creating the conditions for their new employees to succeed, they intentionally have some practices and Gallup studied on successful onboarding, and in they have some suggestions, and I present these strategies. In my book, I want to talk about that, basically the idea that when leaders and organizations invest in onboarding practices, there are more opportunities for the process to go faster, because it takes some time for people to just get into a new job and start being effective at the world, there is a learning curve. So what do you do to enhance this learning curve? What do you do to make this faster? Because they say that onboarding can maybe last a whole year till somebody feel completely confident in the new job. And so number one is communication is communication is about clarifying communication channels being open to discuss issues, being clear about what is needed, so being intentional in particularly understanding what are the other people need, and you need to ask questions. So communication is all about intentionally being curious, also about the people who are new employees and asking questions to getting to know them, being intentionally having clear communication. And then the new person feeling comfortable, going with questions to the leaders, so opening the communication channel. Let's say number number one number two is about being supportive. Being supportive different people need different things. So finding out what my new employee needs, what are the unique needs, what are the strengths, what the areas of opportunity? Some of that you may know from the interviewing process. So if the interviewing process has been effective, you already started building the relationship there. So you don't start from zero. There is a relationship between interviewing, hiring and onboarding. There to processes that go hand in hand, to the extent that it has been an effective hiring process, an onboarding process, both of them will create opportunity for succeed, but sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes the hiring process is not done correctly or is in a hurry, and then they don't get the right person to the job, and then there are a lot of problems. And then in this onboarding is an opportunity to go a little bit further. Further in understanding the unique needs of each person to create the supportive environment. The third one from the book is integrating into the new company culture. It's about creating condition for people to understand how people work in the organization, and again, in the hiring process that should have been discussed to some extent, but that needs to be reinforced. I remember many years ago, Elaine, when I had a job at the company, and my boss sent a message to the whole company, saying, listen, Damian Goldberg, join us our company. He's a very experienced trainer. We're very lucky to have him, please help me to welcome him into the organization. That's great. Support him about telling him how we do things here, and thank you for your support in the onboarding process. So she was pretty intentional, and that email meant so much to me because I was new, I didn't know anybody, and for her, just saying a few nice words about me was opening the path the space for people to get to know me and to be interested and curious about me and contacting me and supporting me. So Liz can make a big difference in this process, just with a brief email like this one that it took her five minutes to write and contributed for me a great deal. So these are kind of the small things that lead us with a coaching mindset thing, because they're thinking about, okay, how people can get the most support, and then how they can be integrated into the culture. Some some companies have mentoring programs, a specific program where people work with a mentor that is assigned, and the mentor help to the new person to understand the culture and the organization. But in most of the cases, people don't have that luxury. So the leader looks for opportunities and wait for new employees to get to understand and know the culture. And the

other one is about related to the having clear goals, and so you can measure them, so the goals are not clear and perform. And this is also related to performance appraisals and performance management processes. Some organizations are strong about that. Some are not. So it should be a link between hiring, onboarding, performance management. Ideally, you do have a relationship with analytics elements. Sometimes that not happen, but when it's possible, you also say that people for success by being clear about how goals are going to be set and how they're going to be measured. So all of these elements support people to be successful. And the last one that I think it's also important is about ongoing learning and development. So it's not just okay. You got all of the support. That's it. You need to provide opportunities for ongoing learning, training, coaching, conversations, opportunity for people to learn from each other, but having this in place so people can count on these opportunities to keep learning and growing.

So, you know, while you were sharing the list of sort of best practices on onboarding, it made me think about, you know what, if you know what, if somebody's listening to you and they realize, Oh my God, I didn't do a good job of onboarding my employee, we know sometimes feel people feel uncomfortable, kind of showing up differently and kind of like admitting their mistake. Do you have any tips for managers that might discover that OOF I didn't do everything that Damien is recommending that it would be a good idea? You know, how can they feel comfortable having that conversation with with their new new employee?

Well, the good news, Elena, you're never late. You always can go back and say, you know, I would like to spend some time clarifying what you need. What are your expectations? And clarify what we need, setting up some goals, looking for opportunities to connect people with others. Some of these practices, ideally, you set it up at the beginning, but if it is not possible, or you didn't know about it, or you can still take them into consideration and make that happen, I like to say that people don't have a crystal ball. They cannot read your mind. If you spend time knowing them, understanding them, and getting them to know you and understanding you, then there are more possibilities for for success, like if you look at previous interviews and in my book, I will remember it when we discussed this topic with one of our leaders from Google, he shared that he spent time at the beginning of the process with everybody who is new issue, or even when he was new to a team, not was somebody new in the team, he was new to a whole team. So he. Needed to take himself up for success in the relationship with all of these people, so he will spend time with every person for a couple of weeks, looking for opportunities to have one on one sessions, getting to know them, for them to get to know him, and invest in time in getting to know each other and understanding each other. You think that that was key for his success in the position?

Well, you know, it makes me we what, you know, what is the the challenge, or what makes it more important to do this when you work with a hybrid team or completely remote, what do you need to do in addition to this, to these recommendations,

well, this is in this is a real war, isn't it? Now, a lot of people work virtually, and leader need to pay attention that again, if they're going to set up for success, and people are going to be virtually, if they're not going to be in person, they need, again, to be intentional. How are you intentional? So you are sure that again, people say that for success, for example, about clarifying expectations. Hybrid work allows people to work from home so they don't have to travel. They'll have to spend money in renting an office. There are a lot of way that there are savings from doing that, but also there is a cost sometimes in building the relationships. So you need to spend even more time being sure that you get to know each other, that you understand that a person need, that the person get to understand you and your need. So you need to create conditions for exchange and interaction between you and the new person, but also between the person and the whole team. So here, when you're working in the hybrid world, and sometimes there is a mixture of you work, sometimes hybrid assignment the office, that's different. When it completely hybrid, when it completely hybrid, you have to be even more intentional in creating opportunities for socializing, this small talk that happened when you meet in person, but doesn't happen virtually. How you create this small talk space virtually? So here is where, again, the leader need to be paying attention and investing time in having meetings, activities that will allow people to get to know each other, support each other, and build trust and psychological safety that will be our next chapter in the book.

Yeah, yeah. The so I hear you saying that the manager needs to be intentional. I do know that there are employees who who miss that time connecting with their colleagues, and so then, you know, they try to meet them for coffee, you know, halfway, or for lunch as a way to build community, because they know that they're missing out on those opportunities that happen in the hallway or describing coffee when it's possible. That's a great when possible, when possible, exactly, exactly. But for others that that that that takes a you know, not only does a manager need to be intentional, but then the employee, it also needs to be really intentional to find time to to connect with colleagues when it's not focused on on a task or project, but just kind of getting to know each other.

Yeah, so that's a good example that you need to tango. You need to have a leader who's paying attention to this thing, but then you need to have collaborators who are willing to take the initiative to spend time in creating their own condition for success.

Great. Well, Damien, I think that's all for today. Yeah, well,

thank you, looking forward to our next episode.

Sounds good. All right, take care, everyone. Bye.