Company X had two methods of hiring individuals for executive positions. In most cases, the company promoted existing senior employees into executive positions. Other times, the company hired senior leaders as external consultants before transitioning them into full-time executive roles. A new external executive hire was joining the company in 3 weeks, and there was no formal executive onboarding process in place. The individual was being hired to occupy the most senior role in their department. At the time, there were no other senior leaders in the department to lead the creation of an onboarding program.

The first critical decision I made was whether or not to build upon the company’s general onboarding program for individual contributors or create one from scratch, given the time constraint. Since the program had garnered positive feedback, I started with elements from the company’s available onboarding (such as day one company orientation).

I started the process by reviewing expert opinion articles, research publications, scholarly articles, Reddit threads, and personal experience columns on the differences between individual contributor and executive-level onboarding.

Next, I identified core areas the executive would need to get acquainted with to guide the rest of the process and condensed them into three major areas: the role, the team, and the business.

For the next step, I conducted semi-structured interviews with all existing executive employees, except the CEO, to learn about their onboarding experience, information that would have been helpful to know in their early days, their day-to-day interactions, the nature of the meetings they attended and other questions about their current roles.

I interviewed the managers in the department the executive was slated to join to learn more about their team.

After these interviews, I looked for themes in the information provided to help create an internal orientation plan for the executive.

Based on the information gathered, I drew up a list of key individuals for the executive to meet within their first 90 days in order of priority, i.e. meetings with the most critical individuals were scheduled within the first two weeks. They were arranged in order until the end of the first 90 days. Some meetings were divided into multiple sessions. I also created conversation guides for the scheduled meetings to nudge the conversations in a meaningful and helpful direction for both individuals.

I compiled a list of company policies, strategy documents highlighting company metrics and key performance indicators, and essential company-wide presentations.

All of these were built into the onboarding plan for the first 90 days to ensure the individual had a well-rounded entry into the company. I also suggested a department-wide workshop led by the new executive to help them build professional credibility with their team.

The plan was reviewed by their manager and immediate team for feedback and shared with the incoming executive a few days before they joined. I also set up check-in sessions with the executive and their manager in 30-day intervals for the first 90 days to see how the executive was progressing through the plan. I sought feedback from both the executive and the individuals they met with.

There was a lot of positive feedback from the individual and other stakeholders who supported the process. This individual also joined the company at the start of the switch to remote work due to COVID, so the structure that was put in place proved even more helpful with the entire company trying to navigate the new reality.

Feedback from this pilot program was also used to inform improvements to the general onboarding program for individual contributors.