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in the business world. Whether you’re a virtual team leader or team member, there’s no honeymoon period anymore. The pressure to be productive nearly from Day 1 – which, by the way, is almost as likely to take place at your firm’s offices in Mumbai as it is at headquarters – is enormous.
We can certainly do a better job of on-boarding people to teams, which is naturally made more difficult when teams are not collocated. Just one of many indicators of this is the Corporate Leadership Council’s astounding statistic that 50 percent of recently hired executives quit or are fired within the first three years of employmentvi.
That has huge cost implications. Yet most companies don’t invest nearly enough time and energy in ensuring that new hires or recently chartered teams are fully up to speed. Too often, on-boarding plans consist of a dozen or more documents that team members are supposed to read and digest while in the air on the way to their first assignments.
What’s missing at so many companies with whom I work is the time for virtual team members to learn from and form relationships with the people who are most important to doing their job successfully, many of whom may be located hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
Think about it: No one should have to make sense of an organization in a vacuum. As a Harvard research team led by J. Richard Hackman foundvii, seemingly disconnected threads of information begin to form patterns that make sense only when people have an opportunity to interact with others who can help them to contextualize the information.
In addition, Hackman’s team found that creating a culture of generosity within a company – one in which employees routinely help each other by coaching, teaching, and consulting with each other – was among the strongest predictors of group effectiveness.
Getting off to a flying start I recommend that clients shorten the learning curve and create a culture of generosity by helping every new hire put together a Relationship Action Plan (RAP) in their first weeks. In it, list the 10-15 internal people who are most important to doing their job well and direct your new team member to purposefully go about building a relationship with each one.
Overwhelmingly, those who create a RAP report that it was the most useful thing they ever did in their first weeks on a project team or job. My friend Ritesh Idnani, CEO of ISGN, a global mortgage services company whose entire 11-person executive management team works remotely, puts it this way: Kick-
Creating a culture of generosity within a company
– one in which employees routinely help each other by coaching, teaching, and consulting with each other – was among the strongest predictors of group effectiveness. 11 “You need to get people off to a flying start.” Ritesh gives each new executive two weeks to talk to each person identified in the plan as “important to know,” interviewing them about all aspects of the company and the job.
Then he checks up, and finds the fullbandwidth effort over the new hire’s first weeks pays off handsomely. “At the end of two weeks I ask the person to sit down with me and tell me what she learned – her observations,” says Idnani. Not only do they have a new connection into the team:
you renew yours. “You end up learning a lot from someone coming from the outside with a fresh pair of eyes.”
