3 Ways to Set up New Senior-Level Hires for Success in a Hypergrowth Start-Up
How we’re doing it at monday.com
Successfully retaining senior managers is challenging in hypergrowth start-ups like monday.com. While we always strive to promote people from within, we also need to look outside our organization for senior talent as we scale.
External hires can add new energy and a fresh perspective to your start-up. They can also bring experience in areas that your existing team lacks, which can help take your growth to the next level. But many of those advantageous qualities can also be problematic, as new hires try to make an impact while adjusting to a new company culture.
As a result, we’ve learned that hiring executives comes with an adjustment period that needs to be fully understood and taken seriously. Every senior-level hire, regardless of your confidence in them, needs to be supported and evaluated during the first few months in their new position, to ensure their long-term success.
To be candid, we didn’t always do the best we could have in preparing our new senior-level hires for success. Some good people, for whom we had high hopes, are no longer part of our team. And now, we recognize that we had a large part to play in why things ultimately didn’t work out.
Even though we’re still in the early stages of rolling out a new process, I want to share what we’ve done to improve our qualifying and onboarding processes at monday.com.
We’ve invested a lot of time and effort into revamping the way we bring on senior executives, and we’re already seeing results.
Tailor the onboarding experience
When we started the senior-level onboarding process, we didn’t question our approach. We applied the same strategy that worked well for us in the past for team members that we had elevated internally. The strategy was simple:
Throw them into the deep end and see if they sink or swim. More often than not, these new hires would swim and end up doing power laps around the pool in no time.
However, our external senior-level hires, weren’t taking to this approach as well as the others. They didn’t yet have a full grasp of our company culture and our way of working. They also didn’t intuitively understand our expectations as well as those who’d worked with us for years did. So when we threw them into the deep end, they often ended up treading water with no clear sense of direction for success.
Once we started to notice this concerning trend, we understood we had a problem. We didn’t have an appropriate onboarding plan for our external senior talent. That’s when I started thinking about what we could do to support and evaluate these new hires and improve our retention success rate.
Develop a comprehensive senior management course
In the past, I noticed that there was often a lack of mutual understanding between new hires and our existing executive team. There were regular breakdowns in both communication and trust.
To remedy this, I started to keep track of these unfortunate, but all too frequent occurrences, and their possible causes, as I saw them. I then grouped common issues into categories that ended up becoming case study lessons for part of our first senior management course.
The course consists of eight, one-hour lessons:
- Company culture: Examining our core values and deep-diving into how we do things.
- Management style: An overview of our approach to management.
- Team communication: Best practices for team meetings and communication.
- HR in your team: Focusing on hiring, firing, feedback talks, salary talks, and so on.
- Setting goals & KPIs: Best practices for setting goals and KPIs for the team.
- Managers & peers: ‘How-to’ communicate with your managers and co-workers.
- Managers evaluations: An introduction to the senior management evaluation process.
- Specific role expectations: An introduction to expectation talks.
One of the most important things we did, and continue to do, is involve the senior management team in building the course. We want it to be a collaborative effort, where everyone’s perspective is heard, and their input is welcome.
Our goal is for this course to become a guide for our current senior team and future hires. It’s meant to be a “living document” that evolves and changes over time.
Maintain an open dialogue with your senior-level team
So far, we’ve learned many valuable lessons in good communication from our leadership team that we’ve already put into practice.
1. Set out expectations clearly
Some of our executive-level team members told us they would prefer to have a better understanding of what we expect of them from the start. They want baseline expectations and direction clearly communicated to them.
My co-founder Roy and I can get passionate and excited about new opportunities at any given moment. In sharing these new ideas with our team members in conversation, we sometimes inadvertently led them to think that our objectives for them had pivoted. Unfortunately, that was often not our intention, and it resulted in misunderstandings and their unwelcome repercussions.
As a result of this feedback, Roy and I developed a process for clarifying our expectations to each senior executive in writing, for every key milestones throughout their onboarding process. We outline what we expect from them after three months, six months, and nine months into their new role.
Having these expectations to refer to gives new senior hires clear guideposts and direction, so they can move forward and succeed with confidence and assurance.
2. Engage in immediate and ongoing feedback
We now understand that the quicker we can identify and make corrective changes to issues and potential misalignments, the greater chance our senior execs will have to succeed and flourish.
As a scaling company with currently more than 600 employees across four continents, Roy and I can’t always have our finger on the pulse of what’s happening on an individual level, like we used to when we were a smaller, tight-knit group.
Today, if there’s a problem, we often learn about it too late to take any meaningful action. This is why we implemented an intensive feedback process in the first three months of each onboarding, which includes:
- 1st 360-review after one month.
- Feedback talk after two months.
- 2nd 360-review after three months.
Incorporating the 360-reviews that involve the feedback of team members and peers who engage with the VP on a daily basis, gives us a better understanding of what’s happening on a personal level. This intensive feedback process allows us to take action earlier to remedy the situation to everyone’s satisfaction.
We want to allow everyone to improve and correct what we think they might be doing wrong. We also have a weekly one-on-one check-in meeting with each exec to ensure we are aligned and moving in the same direction towards success.
This is especially important in this remote work era, when in-person, face-to-face communication is harder to come by, and team members can feel more out-of-touch and isolated.
3. Ask for feedback too
While we’ve initiated a feedback process for our new senior-level hires, Roy and I also want this process to be an opportunity for us to both learn and grow.
We frequently ask our new execs for feedback to understand what’s working well and what can be improved from their perspective. This is where their fresh viewpoint can be valuable on both a company, and individual level.
We’ve already started to act on and incorporate the feedback we’ve received. It’s important that we continue to listen and learn as we evolve, adapt, and grow our organization.
We’re continuously improving our onboarding process
As with anything, we know there are still areas for improvement. We continue to evaluate and improve our onboarding processes and procedures, to ensure and validate that we are doing our very best to equip our leadership team with the direction and feedback they need to deliver on their full potential. In helping them succeed, we succeed in our leadership roles, and so does our company as a whole.
