What Is The New Leader Integration Plan?

If you want to retain the new leader you just spent months recruiting, a new leader integration plan ensures your investment yields a strong and long-term return.

With the average tenure of new leadership hires hovering around 18 months, it’s become more evident than ever that companies need a structured process for integrating new hires. 

A new leader integration plan sets the stage for solid retention and successful new leaders, but what does it look like in practice? 

What Is Assimilation Training?

Assimilation training is an essential aspect of the new leader integration plan. Assimilation training aims to provide newly hired leaders with the knowledge, tools, training, and relationships they need to sidestep avoidable and costly issues like:

• Misalignment with company culture
• Churn from new leaders and their team
• Poor team and leader morale, performance, and productivity

New leader assimilation exercises, activities, and systems provide the structure and support new leadership hires need to steadily assume the responsibilities of their role, align themselves with your company’s culture and leadership style, and take on your organization’s mission. 

What Is the New Leader Integration Program?

New leader integration programs provide a structured process for integrating new leaders into your organization while providing the tools, information, context, and relationships needed for early solid performance and productivity.

New leadership integration programs also set the stage for early success by clarifying new leaders’ roles, performance expectations, preferred communication style, organizational structure, company culture, values, and vision. 

Leaving these essential matters unclear for new hires is one of the leading causes of early burnout, poor performance, and quick turnover.

The best new integration programs also include performance, productivity, and assimilation milestones using time frames ranging from 30, 60, and 90 days to full calendar years. These frameworks provide direction and guidance to new leadership hires, and an objective metric hiring managers can use to track integration and new leader assimilation activity progress. 

What Is the Purpose of New Leader Integration?

New leader integration aims to improve outcomes for all three parties involved: new leadership hires, their teams, and your organization. Excellent assimilation improves new leaders’ performance, productivity, and team dynamics while significantly reducing churn. 

Effective new leader integration streamlines the potentially disruptive or awkward transitory phase for the teams they take over while providing ample opportunities to engage with their new supervisor. 

Finally, organizations benefit from new leader integration by improving hiring outcomes, reducing leadership churn, and developing an experienced body of executives instead of constantly recruiting, onboarding, and integrating new hires with long ramp periods. 

What Questions Should I Ask in New Leader Integration?

Asking the right questions is an essential – yet often overlooked – aspect of a successful new leader integration and team transition plan.

Asking the right questions will help you identify the support, resources, and guidance your company’s new leaders need to enjoy a smooth, seamless, low-stress transition into their new role. It will also help refine your new leader integration process for future highers, strengthening your long-term hiring outcomes.

We recommend structuring your new leader integration questions around topics or knowledge clusters, such as:

• Understanding the Organization
• Leadership and Management Approach
• Challenges and Support

Using these three clusters, a simplified version of new leader integration questions could look like this:

Understanding the Organization:

• How would you describe your role’s impact on this organization?
•  Can you describe our organization’s mission, vision, and values?
•  What do you like about our processes or policies?
•  What would you change about our procedures or policies?

Leadership and Management Approach:

• How will you approach conflict resolution within your team?
•  How do you plan to support your team’s skill development?
•  How will you build trust and credibility with your team?
•  What is your preferred communication style?
•  How will you promote strong productivity?
•  How will you improve performance?
•  How will you safeguard morale?

Challenges and Support:

• What are the top 5 challenges you’re experiencing?
•  Is there anything you need further clarification or education on?
•  Do you have any questions about your tech stack/software suite?
•  How can the organization better support your transition?
•  Is there any training material you’d like to review again?

Are you a new leader preparing for your next role?

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How Medallion Can Help?

Shaping the future of your business starts with supporting your new leaders. If you need more clarification about the process, we’re here to help. 

Medallion Partners helps organizations sidestep poor outcomes by equipping your newest leaders with knowledge, tools, and relationships, ensuring a seamless transition and quick alignment with your organization’s culture and mission.

Excellent assimilation goes beyond individual success and benefits the entire organization by improving team dynamics, reducing churn, and developing a deep bench of experienced executives.

Our expertise and support in navigating integration challenges have resulted in an impressive 98% executive retention rate after two years.

Contact us today to explore the benefits of new leader assimilation or explore our New Leader Assimilation service.