Traps to Avoid When Joining a New Company

The biggest mistakes I see executives make when hired in from the outside are (1) trying to recreate the organizations they left behind and (2) overestimating their change mandates. Both set up vicious cycles that can end in outright derailment for the new leader. And you can usually see these problems start during the recruiting process.

The temptation to try to clone a business model or system that you’ve had success with elsewhere is great. You understand it deeply, struggled hard to make it work, and achieved great things. In fact, your success in making something wonderful happen at your old company is likely a major factor in why your new company wanted to hire you. During the recruiting process you may have been explicitly encouraged to “bring the great ideas you have to us.” So it’s natural to want to try and replicate your previous success.

But efforts to do so all too often go astray. Sometimes it’s because the mode or system simply doesn’t translate well to the new organization. Sometimes it’s because the new organization has a powerful immune system that rejects outside ideas (and people) even though they would in fact contribute to improved performance. But regardless of whether the new leader fails to customize or socialize her ideas, the result is the same. The effort misfires and the new leader loses credibility.

Leaders who overestimate their change mandates during onboarding suffer similar fates, albeit for different reasons. During the recruiting process they are either led to believe, or fool themselves into believing, that they have more scope to make change happen than they do. They enter their new organizations thinking they have a mandate to do significant surgery, only to find out that the support is not there. They fail to check and recheck with key stakeholders, not realizing that understandings that are reached during the hiring process are unlikely to be the full story, and may in fact reflect some wishful thinking on both sides.

Here, too, the outcome is predictably bad. The new leader creates a lot of discomfort. Key stakeholders begin to complain about, organize in opposition to, and even actively plot the downfall of the interloper. If the onboarded executive is lucky enough to have a boss who is willing to run interference or to counsel on how better to move things forward, the outcome need not be dire. But absent that sort of support, the new leader becomes radioactive.

In both these cases of going overboard during onboarding, new leaders fail to recognize an eternal truth: recruiting is like romance and employment is like marriage. During the courtship rituals of recruiting, the hiring company is trying to secure great talent and so has incentives to cast the situation in the most attractive possible light. They need not, and usually do not, engage in outright misrepresentation. It’s more like the puffery and wishful thinking that happens during any mating dance. So it’s inevitable that some of the understanding reached during the courtship phase of joining a new company will not hold up in the cold hard light of cohabitation.

Have you seen leaders coming in from the outside get themselves into trouble in these or other ways? Please share your experiences with other readers.

By Michael Watkins on July 30, 2007 11:22 AM

Harvard Business Online