Executive onboarding is the application of general onboarding principles to helping new executives become productive members of an organization. Practically, executive onboarding involves acquiring, accommodating, assimilating and accelerating new executives.[39] Proponents emphasize the importance of making the most of the "honeymoon" stage of a hire, a period which has been described by various sources as either the first 90 to 100 days or the first full year.[40][41][42]
Effective onboarding of new executives can be one of the most important contributions any hiring manager, direct supervisor or human resources professional can make to long-term organizational success, because executive onboarding done right can improve productivity and executive retention, and build shared corporate culture. A study of 20,000 searches revealed that 40 percent of executives hired at the senior level are pushed out, fail, or quit within 18 months.[43]
Onboarding may be especially valuable for externally recruited executives transitioning into complex roles, because it may be difficult for those individuals to uncover personal, organizational, and role risks in complicated situations when they don't have formal onboarding assistance.[44] Onboarding is also an essential tool for executives promoted into new roles and/or transferred from one business unit to another.[45]
It is often valuable to have new executives start some onboarding activities in the "Fuzzy Front End" even before their first day.[46] This is one of ten steps executives can follow to accelerate their onboarding.[47]
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Position yourself for success
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Choose how to engage the context and culture
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Embrace and leverage the Fuzzy Front End before day one
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Take control of day one: Make a powerful first impression
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Drive action by activating and directing ongoing communication
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Embed a strong burning imperative
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Exploit key milestones to drive team performance
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Over-invest in early wins to build team confidence
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Secure adept people in the right roles and deal with the inevitable resistance
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Evolve people, plans, and practices to capitalize on changing circumstances.
Recommendations for practitioners
Ultimately, practitioners should seek to design an onboarding strategy that takes individual newcomer characteristics into consideration and encourages proactive behaviors, such as information seeking, that help facilitate the development of role clarity, self-efficacy, social acceptance, and knowledge of organizational culture. Research has consistently shown that doing so produces valuable outcomes such as high job satisfaction (the extent to which one enjoys the nature of his or her work), organizational commitment (the connection one feels to an organization), and job performance in employees, as well as lower turnover rates and decreased intent to quit.
In terms of structure, empirical evidence indicates that formal institutionalized socialization is the most effective onboarding method. New employees who complete these kinds of programs tend to experience more positive job attitudes and lower levels of turnover in comparison to those who undergo individualized tactics.[6][48] Finally, it is also important to note that in-person onboarding techniques are more effective than virtual ones. Though it may initially appear to be less expensive for a company to use a standard computer-based orientation program to introduce their new employees to the organization, research has demonstrated that employees learn more about their roles and company culture through face-to-face orientation.[49]
International business
Intercultural competence is the ability to communicate successfully with people of other cultures.
In interactions with people from foreign cultures, a person who is interculturally competent understands culture-specific concepts in perception, thinking, feeling and acting. The interculturally competent person considers earlier experiences free from prejudices, and has an interest in, and motivation towards, continued learning.
Cross-cultural competence
Cross-cultural competence (3C), another term for inter-cultural competence, has generated its own share of contradictory and confusing definitions, as it has been studied and sought by a wide variety of academic approaches and professional fields. One author identified no fewer than eleven different terms with some equivalence to 3C: cultural savvy, astuteness, appreciation, literacy or fluency, adaptability, terrain, expertise, competency, awareness, intelligence, and understanding.[1] Organizations from fields as diverse as business, health care, government security and developmental aid agencies, academia, and non-governmental organizations have all sought to leverage 3C in one way or another. Poor results have often been achieved due to a lack of rigorous study of the phenomenon and reliance on "common sense" approaches based on the culture developing the 3C models in the first place.[1] The U.S. Army Research Institute, which is currently engaged in a study of the phenomenon, defines 3C as: "A set of cognitive, behavioral, and affective/motivational components that enable individuals to adapt effectively in intercultural environments".[2] Cross-cultural competence does not operate in a vacuum, however. One theoretical construct posits that 3C, language proficiency, and regional knowledge are distinct skills that are inextricably linked, but to varying degrees depending on the context in which they are employed. In educational settings, Bloom's affective and cognitive taxonomies[3][4] serve as an effective framework to describe the overlap area between the three disciplines: at the receiving and knowledge levels 3C can operate with near independence from language proficiency or regional knowledge, but as one approaches the internalizing and evaluation levels the required overlap area approaches totality.
The development of intercultural competence is mostly based on the individual's experiences while communicating with different cultures. While interacting with people from other cultures, the individual generally faces certain obstacles, which are caused by differences in cultural understanding between the two people in question. Such experiences motivate the individual to work on skills that can help him communicate his point of view to an audience belonging to a completely different cultural ethnicity and background.
One salient issue, especially for people living in countries other than their country of origin, is the question of which culture they should follow. Should they try to fit in and adapt to the culture surrounding them, or should they hold on to their culture and try to avoid interacting with the culture surrounding them? This issue is increasingly common today. Globalization has caused immigration rates to skyrocket for most developed and developing countries. In a new country, immigrants are constantly surrounded by a culture which does not belong to them. International students face a similar dilemma: they have to make a choice about whether they are willing to modify their cultural boundaries in order to adapt to the culture around them, or whether they hold on to their culture and surround themselves by people from their own country. Those who decide to live by the latter rule are the students who experience the most problems in their university life and face constant culture shocks, while the students who live by the former rule face less problems and interact more with the domestic students. They end up increasing their knowledge about the culture which is followed by the domestic students, and they modify their own culture to inculcate certain aspects from the culture surrounding them in order to help them blend successfully into the society.
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