How to Give New Employees a Productive-and Memorable-Start

Are your key people heading out the door as fast as you hire them? You're hardly alone: Research by the Center for Creative Leadership indicates that within the first 18 months, up to 40 percent of new hires are terminated, resign, or are viewed as ineffective.
The problem extends to the most senior levels of management. A recent survey of 25 large companies conducted by the Corporate Leadership Council, an association of human resource executives, revealed that half of the companies' new upper-echelon hires had been dismissed or quit within their first three years.
Of course, a new employee might not measure up for any number of reasons, including misrepresentation of competencies or failure to adapt to the firm's corporate culture. But in many cases, the damage that occurs in the first few weeks has less to do with a new hire himself than with his boss's approach to him and the job-and, worse, with the boss's snap judgment of him quickly hardening into permanence.
Naturally, boss and new hire are likely to have different views of how the job should be done and what should be done in that job, and talking can help reconcile these differences. But too often, those conversations do not happen. Even when they do, the boss's tendency is to under-communicate expectations-partly because of time pressures and partly because of the view that new managers should be given space, time to settle in, and the opportunity to prove themselves. So a new hire will talk to his predecessor, other new colleagues, subordinates, and even clients and suppliers to gain important clues. He will draw on his own experiences and the examples of previous bosses. But none of this may quite square with what his new boss has in mind.
As a result, the first serious exchange of expectations often takes place when the boss grows irritated with a particular tendency or notices the first slip-up. By that stage, the subordinate can try to align his performance with the boss's preferences and priorities, but the labeling process has already kicked in: He is deemed a problem hire. And field studies confirm that impressions established as early as during the first five days prove surprisingly enduring and difficult to overturn.
Avoiding poor management practices. A number of seemingly reasonable management practices on the part of bosses spell danger for new hires. The following traps can quickly saddle good people with bad labels:
The sink-or-swim principle: A boss expects the new hire to hit the job running, to be instantly operational, especially if he has many years of work experience. Such bosses believe that saying something once should suffice.
The laundry-list approach: Bosses outline a multitude of managerial responsibilities but fail to highlight the two or three critical objectives in which the subordinate must excel.
Respecting the honeymoon period: Bosses try to withhold negative feedback at the outset, on the assumption that overt criticism spoils the development of a working relationship.
The not-so-jointly-agreed-upon plan: Bosses overestimate the willingness of fresh employees to challenge objectives or time frames. In reality, the new hire, trying hard to make a good impression, often lacks the confidence and the experience to contradict the boss's unrealistic projections. The job becomes "mission impossible."
The open-door fallacy: Bosses assume that if a new hire runs into trouble, he will come to them for advice. The opposite is more often the case. In fact, the situation may be compounded by foggy expectations-the new hire may not even realize that he needs help.
These mistakes often lead to a boss sticking a new hire with an unfavorable label, compromising his chances of recovery. The label serves as a distorting lens through which the boss views subsequent actions and outcomes. A boss then finds it difficult to assimilate information about the new hire that runs counter to his first impression. But to be fair, bosses operate under intense pressure, which means they sometimes lack the time or processing capacity to revisit their labels and to make inconsistent information compatible.
The high cost of miscasting "bad hires." Additionally, the managerial process is messy, riddled with uncertainty and ambiguity. The productivity of the management team as a whole is difficult to identify, never mind the input of any given individual-and that uncertainty is often compounded by subordinates' geographical remoteness.
Moreover, there is the challenge of trying to make connections between actions and consequences that occur over time, which means that bosses may imagine false links and overlook real ones. Under these conditions, bosses see what they expect to see. When they note something unexpected-such as an "average performer" who gets a great result-they are liable to attribute it to external circumstances and dismiss it as a stroke of luck.
It's not that bosses set out to treat people in a biased manner-they do try to be evenhanded. But they tend to process ambiguous information in ways that confirm their existing views. The net result is that many good recruits get prematurely miscast as "bad hires" and, finding it difficult to discard that image, end up leaving-a costly outcome for all parties.
Those costs run higher than you may realize. To begin with, there's the performance forfeited by the new hire. The company never gets a full contribution out of the new employee, who disconnects from the job and starts preparing an exit strategy, easily reactivating a still-warm job search. Then, of course, there are replacement costs, so you must add the costs of recruitment, induction, and training to the probability of renewed failure. Why renewed failure? Because the boss doesn't learn from the process-he attributes the failure to poor fit or sloppy HR processes, absolving his own contribution. Consequently, the boss is condemned to keep repeating the same mistakes and incurring the same costs.
And then there are the costs to team spirit. If the boss's treatment of a new hire is seen as unfair or unsupportive, team members will be quick to draw the appropriate lessons. Removing people who, arguably, were not given a proper chance is bound to create perceptions of unfairness-even for those not directly affected.
Bosses tend to underestimate the extent to which mistreatment of "poor performers" damages team spirit and how a team functions. As one star performer remarked after witnessing his boss's controlling and hypercritical behavior toward a new hire: "It made us all feel like we're expendable." Down the line, bosses will pay a price in terms of subordinates' lower performance, morale, and loyalty. Team members will also tire of helping to train new hires, only to see them leave-and of absorbing their responsibilities when they do.
What managers can do. Two key measures can help effective bosses prevent unnecessary problems with new hires: Frame the relationship and get to know the person. Frame the relationship. Frequent contact during the relationship's formative period gives bosses ample opportunity to communicate with subordinates about key priorities, performance measures, time allocation, and even expectations of the type and frequency of communication. Also, to prevent misunderstandings from polluting a relationship, bosses can be more explicit about their own style-how they work and what they do and do not like. Such clarity goes a long way toward preventing bad dynamics.
Although many bosses are afraid of coming across as micromanagers, early involvement by the boss does not threaten new hires, as this involvement is not occurring in response to a performance problem. Rather, it is part of the normal adaptation process and can be reduced as the new employee settles in. Taking the reverse approach of "let's see how it goes," with low involvement at the start, means that a subsequent increase in boss involvement will clearly signal that something is not working out. That is much more likely to be threatening for the new hire.
For the same reason, bosses should intervene quickly when issues do arise. Large problems typically start small and can be easily handled if one of the parties initiates a discussion early. The longer the boss "sits on feedback," the more often the newcomer will repeat the same mistakes and, hence, the more aggravated-and the less productive-the boss will be and the more threatening the intervention will be for the employee.
Get to know the person. Spending time with new hires allows bosses to develop a more rounded understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, and what makes them tick-as well as establishing some mutual respect. Bosses sometimes argue that they have no time for such niceties. Yet this investment is trivial and painless compared to the time that bosses squander trying to "turn around" or replace new hires who derail.
When bosses get to know new hires as individuals, they are less likely to make snap judgments, hasty attributions, or unfounded generalizations-and to write them off prematurely, thus triggering a self-fulfilling prophecy. From the new hires' viewpoint, that time investment by the boss also signals respect and concern. New hires are more likely to handle criticism constructively if they feel that their boss is capable of making a distinction between them and their performance.
A key reason that new managers resist or fail to act on corrective feedback is because they consider it unfair-either because it feels like a personal attack or because the boss refuses to take mitigating circumstances into account. Developing a personal rapport therefore helps to decrease new-hire anxiety and defensiveness associated with feedback or, indeed, reluctance to approach the boss for advice.
Putting the relationship on the right note. New hires often place an exaggerated faith in the value of hard work to see them through. But that's not enough. Like bosses, they have a responsibility for putting the relationship on the right footing. So when bosses are not particularly forthcoming about expectations and preferences, new employees need to work harder to develop an understanding of their bosses: who they are, what they want, and how they want it. New hires can do this by checking directly with their bosses or by checking with others, so as to draw sparingly on the boss's time.
Again, early impressions count double. Once a boss decides that a new hire has the "right stuff" or the "wrong stuff," it becomes hard for the employee to switch camps. Because judgment tends to fall rapidly, an incoming employee should stay out of trouble for the first 100 days-or at least the first 10 days. Avoid, for example, making rash comments about "all the things that are wrong around here."
New employees need to be mindful of the signaling and labeling that goes on in the formative period of the relationship. And this applies in both directions. It's true that the boss's premature labeling can condemn the new hire. But the new hire's negative labeling of the boss can also condemn the new hire. New hires must monitor their propensity to typecast their bosses and to make hasty inferences, along the lines of, "The boss just did this…. He must be…."
To this end, new hires need to develop an understanding of the pressures and constraints weighing upon their bosses. In all likelihood, the new hire's boss also has a boss (or a board) to whom he must answer. An apparent unwillingness to delegate or to let go of resources may reflect pressure from above rather than lack of confidence in a new employee. It's easy for new hires to "overintentionalize" the boss's actions-that is, to assume that the boss had more choice than was really the case. Part of the reason that new hires jump to conclusions about their bosses is because they don't appreciate their situation.
All this leads to a high washout rate among new hires, which is costly-and largely avoidable. Lack of investment and explicitness up front comes back to haunt both boss and new hire. All too quickly, they get dragged into a spiral of increasing malaise and decreasing performance from which it becomes difficult to escape. Being aware of this dynamic-its triggers and mechanisms-helps bosses and new hires to better understand how to prevent relationships from spinning out of control in the first place.
From Across the Board, the Conference Board magazine

where did u get that paper? its really readale