What Is The Purpose Of A New Manager Assimilation

Onboarding a new manager after an exhaustive recruitment process can feel like crossing a finish line. But if you want to ensure your new hire’s impact justifies the effort and expense of recruiting them, you shouldn’t ease up yet. 

In fact, despite all your hard work, the odds are still against you. 

With just 40% of newly hired managers managing to make it past 24 months in a new position, companies can’t afford to rest on their laurels — they need to start preparing for the next manager recruitment cycle!

Sound familiar?

For far too many businesses, this is the reality of hiring new managers in today’s business landscape. 

If you want to break free from this frustrating, expensive, and time-intensive cycle, you need a new manager assimilation plan. But what is a new manager assimilation plan? What benefits does it offer? And how can a new manager assimilation process stop the bleeding and bring an end to the never-ending hiring cycle?

We’ll answer all of these questions and more — so read on!

What Is The Purpose Of A New Manager Assimilation?

The primary purpose of new leader assimilation is to maximize the value, impact, and ROI of every managerial hire. Without an intentional assimilation process, new managers typically struggle to:

• Understand their role and responsibilities
• Understand and align with company culture
• Connect with their team, colleagues, and superiors
• Capitalize on the resources and assets available to them
• Maintain team organization, engagement, cohesion, and morale
• Follow your company’s preferred approach to decision-making, conflict resolution, etc.

As a result, new managers often crash and burn…starting and ending their engagement with your organization in two years or less. Investing in new manager assimilation is the key to anticipating, addressing, and overcoming these common obstacles and issues. 

What Are the Benefits of New Manager Assimilation?

The benefits of new manager assimilation are multifaceted, impacting both your new managers, their teams, and your company’s bottom line and long-term success. 

Let’s look at five of the top benefits of new leader assimilation for each of these parties. 

Benefits for New Managers

Benefits of assimilation for new managers include:

• Reduced pressure, stress, and anxiety
• A structured, low-stress path toward effective team-building
• A clearer understanding of responsibilities, expectations, and priorities
• A stronger grasp of organizational structure, strategies, goals, and values
• An actionable and comprehensive understanding of company resources, tools, and other assets

Benefits for Teams with New Managers

Benefits of assimilation for teams welcoming a new manager include:

• Improved team dynamics, collaboration, and innovation 
• A clear and actionable understanding of new expectations 
• Reduced anxiety that is common during leadership changes
• A smooth, structured, and streamlined team-building process
• Opportunities to build trust through open communication, asking questions, voicing concerns, and sharing ideas

Benefits for your Company

Benefits of new manager assimilation for organizations include:

• Reduced manager and employee churn
• Stronger cultural continuity, alignment, and support
• Lower recruiting, hiring, training, and retention costs 
• Stronger performance, productivity, and engagement
• A stronger reputation as an employer and organization

What Are the 5 Stages of Assimilation?

There are five commonly accepted stages of new manager assimilation. These five stages are: taking hold, immersion, reshaping, consolidation, and refinement. Understanding these universal stages of the leadership assimilation process can help you: 

• Establish assimilation expectations
• Identify stalled or slow progress early
• Anticipate and eliminate potential points of friction
• Structure your organization’s approach to assimilation
• Track new managers’ progress through the assimilation journey 

Each stage calls for different strategies and approaches to supporting your new managers, so it’s essential hiring managers, executives, and other business leaders can easily identify the characteristic signs of each stage. 

Taking Hold – Taking Hold describes the earliest stages of new manager assimilation. During this stage, newly hired managers can generally be found making efforts to build relationships with peers and superiors, earn trust from their team, gain a working understanding of SOPs, best practices, and preferred approaches, and settle into the day-to-day responsibilities, priorities, and goals of their new position.

Immersion – The second stage of new manager assimilation is immersion. Immersion arms new managers with the knowledge, context, skills, and insights they need to identify, address, and solve challenges within their team or department effectively and efficiently. It also introduces them to the more intricate aspects of your operations, culture, vision, and values.

Reshaping – After successfully navigating the immersion stage, new managers will enter into the third stage — reshaping. Reshaping describes the time new managers first feel confident and competent enough in their new role to establish new visions, goals, strategies, and expectations for themselves and their team.

Consolidation – Consolidation represents an evolved, mature version of reshaping. After gaining confidence, credibility, and authority from earlier, smaller successes, they will begin to ideate, implement, and improve large-scale initiatives, updates, and changes.

Refinement – During the final stage of new manager assimilation, new leaders will begin refining their strategies, approaches, and philosophies to align closer to the organizational ideal and improve outcomes. They will exemplify and uplift your company culture and demonstrate mastery over their role. 

How Do You Facilitate New Manager Assimilation?

Now that you understand the importance of new manager assimilation, you’re probably wondering how you can facilitate the leadership assimilation process within your own organization. 

While your company’s culture, structure, values, and other unique qualities will undoubtedly play a role in determining which facilitation strategies are best suited to your new managers, almost every company can benefit from tactics like:

• Arranging Key Introductions
• Scheduling Q-and-A Sessions
• Formalizing an Assimilation Plan
• Arranging Peer and Role Shadowing 
• Establishing a Technology Workshop
• Facilitating and Celebrating Early Wins 
• Creating a Leadership Mentor Program
• Outlining Ongoing Training Opportunities 
• Clarifying and Standardizing Expectations for New Managers
• Enhancing Your Approach and Outcomes by Partnering with Assimilation Professionals 

How Medallion Partners Can Help

Medallion Partners has helped organizations attract, engage, assimilate, and retain the most exciting, innovative, and impactful business leaders on the planet for more than 15 years. Contact us today to learn more about our expert approach to assimilation and one-of-a-kind assimilation support services.