3 Steps to Onboard Successfully

A framework for successful onboarding to a new role/group/team

8 min readFeb 4, 2021

Introduction

An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage (Jack Welch, Former CEO of General Electric)

Congratulations!!! It’s your first day on your new job. After updating your LinkedIn profile, it’s time to start onboarding. This is usually when your anxiety kicks into overdrive as you ponder your onboarding endeavor questioning — “how do I get started?”, “who can help me?” , “who will help me?”, “what information do I need to review?”, “who should I meet with?” — along with a litany of other questions and concerns.

Onboarding and coming up to speed for a new job/role can be quite a daunting challenge for many of us. Our onboarding goal is clear…we want to set a great example early on and be as informed and prepared as possible to do our job. Yet, we desire a roadmap to help guide us along the way.

The thought of such a roadmap was prompted from a recent conversation I had with a college buddy of mine on how to quickly come up to speed for a new role/company and the best tools/framework for doing so. After our discussion, the question still lingered in my mind — “what useful onboarding tools or frameworks were available?”

I looked back at all my formal and professional education and glossed the Internet looking for articles and did not find a lot of useful information. Instead, the resources available were primarily coming from an HR perspective.

Thus, I sat down and decided to devise my own framework based on what I have found most useful from my education and experiences. The result — the Eastan Onboarding Framework (EOF).

In this series of articles, I will elaborate on the EOF providing detail and follow-on resources to be of use. The EOF focuses on 3 key steps for successful onboarding:

Clarify Your Role and Responsibilities
Get to Know Your Company, Team, and Customer
Integrate and Act

The EOF should enhance your onboarding experience covering many critical areas you’ll need to know Day 1 to be most effective in your new role. It should be noted that the EOF is not meant to replace your company-sponsored onboarding training, but rather to complement it.

In this series of articles, I will talk through each of these steps in greater detail with examples. Again, this is a framework to get you started. Do not consume yourself on the rigid adherence to the EOF structure but rather focus on understanding the critical elements that will impact your ability to be most effective. The spirit; not the letter.

Let’s get started….

1. Clarify Your Role and Responsibilities

The first step in the EOF framework is to understand your role, your responsibilities, and how your success will be measured. Well, that seems pretty straightforward, right?!? Sorry, nothing is ever that straightforward and easy. Oftentimes, there can be misalignment by your manager and your key stakeholders on the expectations of your role and responsibilities. Therefore, it’s incumbent upon you (especially for sanity sake) to talk and drive alignment on your role and responsibilities with your direct manager and key stakeholders. Furthermore, please use this as an opportunity to revisit and understand their role and responsibilities and priorities, as well.

To assist you in your efforts, I have put together the following workbook.

After compiling this feedback, review the worksheet with your direct manager to clarify your role, align it with other roles and priorities, and prioritize your responsibilities.

Most importantly, communicate it. This relatively simple step (communication) is often overlooked and yet is just as important in your role definition. You will likely not meet everyone’s expectations but you will be most effective acknowledging everyone’s input and informing everyone what you will and will not do and how your performance will be measured.

2. Get to Know Your Company, Team, and Customers

For the next step in the EOF, get to know your company, team, and your customers employing the 5C Framework. The 5C framework provides insight into the key components for a company’s success, and the internal and external micro/macro environmental factors that impact and influence a company.

Image: Get to Know Your Company, Team, and Customers

The 5Cs framework focuses on the following areas:

Company (Capabilities): What does your company do? Do well? When evaluating your company, become well versed on your company’s core competencies — human, operational, financial, technical and infrastructure capabilities, its competitive differentiators, and its current and future strategy. Additionally, your Company can be analyzed through the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) lens.
Customer: Who’s your company’s target customers? When evaluating your company, it’s success begins and ends with your customers. Therefore, it is incumbent upon you to get to know your customer — who they are, their pain points, their needs, and their desired solution — and know them well.
Competition: Who’s your company’s competition? Know and evaluate your company’s competitors — their strengths, weaknesses, and perceived strategy/focus areas. This is Bird vs. Magic, Coke v. Pepsi time! The better you know your competition, the stronger and more adept you become in your ability to defend your turf, differentiate, and serve your customer. If you are starting a new role in your company (e.g. switching from sales to marketing), it would be advantageous to learn how your competitor performs and competes in your particular function (i.e. how does your competitor market?).
Collaborators: Who supports/assists your company in the development and/or execution of its strategy/plans? Review your company’s collaborators. As you think of your company’s collaborators, think of the collaborator’s role, their purpose, their behaviors, and how the relationship benefits from their relationship with your company. Also, think of the influence and impact your company collaborators have on your company and customers.
Conditions: What are the external elements that may impact your company and its market? How is your company equipped to address these conditions? Lastly, it is just as important to understand the external forces and factors that can influence your company, it’s future and ultimately, its success. These elements can be analyzed through the STEEP (Social, Technological, Economical, Environmental, and Political) or PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technology, Legal, Environmental) lens.

3. Integrate and Act

In Step 3 in the EOF framework, it’s time to integrate the learnings from Step 1 and Step 2 and develop an actionable plan.

To do so, revisit and understand your role (Step 1) in the context of the 5C Role framework (Step 2). Map out, how you can or will address the related areas as you think about your role and how you will evaluate and measure your efforts. — One cannot improve what one cannot measure.

Use the Role_Actions worksheet in the EOF workbook to capture and prioritize your actions also noting how they may support other stakeholder priorities. I realize, not everything requires immediate action so simply just capturing an item of concern for later follow-up can be just as important an action.

Map out your 90 day planand the critical priorities you will look to address related to your plan with supporting justification based on your analysis in Steps 1 and 2.

Next, set up brief meetings with your manager and key stakeholders to review your plan along with their plans and priorities. Update your plans and priorities, appropriately.

Lastly, calibrate and update your plans as you execute, progress, and learn.

Key Resources

No meal is complete without after dinner mints (or drinks). So, as I conclude, I wanted to leave you with a few additional resources to complement your onboarding experience. Think of this as your EOF “after dinner mints”.

Sites

http://Udemy.com: To stay relevant, you should always think of yourself as a student. Udemy provides a great compilation of online courses on various topics that you can take at fairly reasonable prices.
http://Medium.com: Medium does a great job of curating articles for quick consumption. You can set up a subscription on a topic of interest and receive related daily articles.

Books

Atomic Habits: A great, short read detailing the importance, process, and impact developing strong habits. Atomic Habits focuses on the psychology of maintaining good habits and the resultant “compounding interest” effect.
Strength Finders: Strength Finders highlights the importance of focusing on what you do well. The book has you complete a questionnaire and follows up with an explanation of your survey responses. The general theme is that too often, we focus too much of our energies on what we don’t do well. We then focus the bulk of our energies improving our weaknesses and not enough time bolstering our strengths. Have you ever questioned how good Michael Phelps plays golf or Tiger Woods swims?!? No, you don’t.
The Miracle Morning: I am not a morning person yet over the years, I have learned that effective, disciplined management of your mornings can and will be your best tool to be most productive. This quick read provides an extremely helpful approach to structure and attack your mornings.
The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People: While this is categorized as a self-help book; don’t freak out, this is so much more. Stephen Covey dials in the importance of cultivating your character to focus on the critical areas of our life to achieve sustainable success.
Decisive: A great read detailing the psychology on decision-making and a strategy/framework to make better decisions — individual and group. You will want to read this and take notes.
Effective Executive: Peter Drucker does an outstanding job detailing the requirements to be not just an executive but an effective executive. During my college internship, my mentor, who was a Senior Vice-President at the company, gave me a copy to read. I ignored him. I finally pulled it out a few years ago and couldn’t put it down…too much sage.

Articles

How Employee Onboarding can increase Productivity and decrease Turnover to create Profits: This is a little self-serving but this article provides additional justification to bolster my argument on the importance of onboarding — Help me help you.
If You Don’t Believe in Setting Goals, It’s Because You Don’t Know How To Do it: A really good read discussing the psychology required to set and act on goals. The article serves as a great complement to Atomic Habits.

Conclusion

The Eastan Onboarding Framework (EOF) seeks to address the daunting challenge of onboarding to a new job/role focusing on 3 critical steps:

Align/Define Your Role and Responsibilities
Get to Know Your Company, Team, and Customer using the 5C framework
Integrate and Act

The EOF provides a roadmap/guide to assist you in addressing the critical areas you’ll need to know to be most effective Day 1. Employing the EOF should not only increase your effectiveness, but greatly improve your ability to perform in your new role maximizing your impact and success. Again, in this series of articles, I will elaborate on each step in the framework in greater detail.

I strongly recommend that you prioritize this effort early in your new role while expectations and responsibilities are low. This will enable you to absorb yourself fully in learning mode addressing the critical areas required to understand your role requirements and become well versed in your business environment. So, take the time and act now!

About the author

Ronald (Ron) Berry is an executive with global experience and success in B2B and B2C digital transformation in a variety of industries and companies. If you have any further questions, please contact him at ron@EastanConsulting.com.