If you honestly believe that people are assets to your organization, if you want to maintain a competitive advantage in the marketplace, and if you are serious about managing costs, then talent integration (also known as onboarding) must be part of your people strategy.
Talent integration is the third leg of the three legged talent management stool, with recruiting and retention representing the other two legs. In future blogs we will address new employee (non-management) orientation and integration.
Talent integration involves working with new managers and executives (whether promoted from within or hired into the company) to transition them quickly and effectively into their new role. The key purpose of talent integration is to reduce the time for those new to their roles to become productive contributors (i.e. shorten the new job learning curve).
Talent integration involves:
- Formal transition plan to help the manager / executive integrate into the organization usually covering the first 90 days
- Formal and purposeful discussion between the new manager / executive and their immediate supervisor on how best to work with each other and to define clear expectations regarding job performance and expected results (for more information on this see our “Transitioning Middle Managers” article in the resource section of our website)
- Internal mentorship to help the new manager / executive better understand the organizational culture, the players, and “how work gets done here”
- Coaching (best done with an external/neutral executive/performance coach) – to help personally with the transition especially if new skills are needed (i.e. technical person being promoted to manager)
Clearly, talent integration done well requires frontloading in investment. But, recruiting top talent is a challenge for all organizations and the success rate is disappointing. A good hire not properly integrated into the position and the organization will lead to poor performance of the individual, which in turn often leads to into a host of issues that impact the department or organization, such as, retention problems, morale issues, even customer service or product quality issues, then you are frequently back at the beginning-recruiting. This can and does become a vicious and expensive cycle. We see it more than we would like. The great news is that is it correctable.
Think all this is now redundant:
While recruiting is an explicit cost, the more significant cost of not having a talent integration process is the opportunity cost created by a lack of focus and concentration on the work and the marketplace. To be competitive, attract and keep the best talent, you must treat them that way from the beginning.
Copyright 2009 Kubica and LaForest
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