Asking and answering key questions facilitates the integration of a new leader with their team and others in an organization. The dialogue that a new leader engages in and encourages early in their tenure provides a foundation for future flourishing.
During the first weeks and months of a new leader, building trust is a key factor for overall engagement. People throughout the organization are watching for competency, integrity, and compassion. Will working with this new leader bring out the best in others? Every small and large conversation will either make a deposit in the trust bank or a withdrawal. It is essential for a new leader to have as many trust deposits as possible! Asking questions and listening throughout the organization sets up a new leader for success.
Your hiring process was successful and now you have a new leader in your organization. Whether this person is the CEO, reporting to the board, or a team leader within the organization, a successful onboarding process involves strong communication and dialogue throughout the team. There are several categories of questions that are important as you integrate a new leader into your organization:
Obviously, during the hiring process, there were many questions asked and answered in interviews. Now that the new leader has started in their role, the questions go from theoretical to actual. A flourishing workplace culture will encourage healthy questions and dialogue to bond new teams as they move forward. And even if only one person on a team has changed, the team is new and needs to do the work of integrating and re-shaping to steward the abilities of all on the team.
When human resources leaders were asked about onboarding practices fewer than a third said they actively helped executives adapt to the cultural and political climate, according to a Harvard Business Review article, “Onboarding Isn’t Enough” by Mark Byford.
Rather than “onboarding” which implies just getting the person on deck, Mark Byford says, “Integration is a more aspirational goal—doing what it takes to make the new person a fully functioning member of the team as quickly and smoothly as possible.”
The onboarding article cites a survey of more than 500 new leaders at the vice president level and above that pointed to issues in successfully integrating new hires into the corporate culture. Almost 70 percent of respondents pointed to a lack of understanding about norms and practices for failure in their new roles. Poor cultural fit was close behind. When asked what would reduce failure rates, they emphasized constructive feedback, help with navigating internal networks and gaining insight into organizational and team dynamics.
A transition to new leadership is an excellent time to assess a benchmark of the health of the organizational culture, to listen to feedback, and learn about potential issues. The BCWI Employee Engagement Survey helps a new leader understand their team, using professionally developed questions. The survey results provide actionable results based on BCWI’s years of experience.
Ryan Stanton, CEO of Compass, leads an organization that quickly grew from two to 40 employees, serving families in Nebraska. He shared on a recent episode of The Flourishing Culture Podcast how pulling the staff together for listening and information sharing helped them integrate their new staff into the core values of the organization:
We realized our core values were in a handbook that we went through at our orientation time, but that's as far as we went. We really wanted our core values to be more than aspirational. We started having an all-staff quarterly gathering—a state of the organization meeting. We would highlight accomplishments as a team for the last 90 days and then what we were prioritizing for the next 90 days. We also did a one-on-one quarterly meeting with all of our direct reports to include goals and core values, and how those were part of their specific job.
In addition to intentionality around core values and staff goals, Ryan realized that they needed a baseline to measure the health and culture at Compass. They used the BCWI Employee Engagement Survey to understand their growing team. Ryan shares, “After our first survey and our time debriefing with Cary Humphries (BCWI Consulting Director), I knew that was exactly what we needed.”
Helpful questions that create interaction to integrate a new leader can range from vision-related questions to operational queries. As existing leaders in an organization engage with a new leader, they invite honesty and effectiveness and provide practical learning opportunities.
1. Vision questions
2. Operational questions
Everyone naturally considers their own self-interest in a season of change: What’s in it for me? How will my life change because of this leader? This may be especially acute if there are many changes occurring simultaneously in an organization, perhaps during a season of growth when a number of new staff and leaders have been added.
Pulling a team together for regular sharing of goals and values offers the opportunity for staff to raise questions they may have for their leader. However, depending on the openness of the culture, such questions might be better in a smaller setting, even one-on-one, as team members may not feel open to sharing in a larger setting.
Here are some questions that may be voiced by staff under a new leader. Or the questions may be in their minds, even if they don’t share them. If a new leader is not hearing these types of questions from their team, they may want to address the issues anyway, to get to the concerns of those who may stay silent.
From the beginning of their tenure, a new leader needs to establish good communication practices with their staff team. This foundation of communication will help build trust within the team. Sometimes there is a hesitancy to share too much information with staff, an issue that Ezra Benjamin, the vice president of global ministry affairs for Jewish Voice Ministries addressed in a recent episode of The Flourishing Culture podcast on building trust:
As we went through our BCWI survey results with Cary, from BCWI, we asked, “Do we really need to say everything to our staff? Do we owe it to every employee in the ministry to know everything?”
And he said, “Well, of course not. But people are going to talk at the water coolers, and they're going to talk about what's happening in the organization that's of import. The question is, Do you want to be a part of those conversations, or do you want to be absent from them? Because if you choose to be absent because people don't 'need to know,' the narrative is going to spin with or without you present. But if you choose to insert what you can tell people and communicate that as widely and as real-time and as straight talk as you can, you're going to have more of an opportunity to inform those dialogs and even to shape the narratives with what's really true."
To move from onboarding to integration, a new leader needs to understand the nuances of an organization, including informal networks and actors who may not be obvious from the official organization chart. The following questions will help them develop a deeper understanding of how teams interact:
Next Steps
Taking the time and effort to ask questions and listen to input is a key factor in building trust with a new leader, and success in shaping a new team. Being willing to ask questions also sets a tone for an organization. Here’s what John Hegel III, a longtime Silicon Valley consultant says in “Good Leadership is About Asking Good Questions” (Harvard Business Review):
By asking questions as a leader, you also communicate that questioning is important. You’ll inspire people to identify new opportunities and to ask for help when they need it. These behaviors lead to a culture of learning, which is critical since the institutions that will thrive in the future are those that encourage everyone to learn faster and more rapidly expand the value that they deliver to their stakeholders.
The questions a new leader fields and asks are not just about understanding the past and present of an organization, but they set a trajectory into future learning together. This is essential because an organization does not bring on a new leader just to survive, but to thrive.
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