Do you really want your new hire to “Hit the Ground Running?”

Is this a sprint or a marathon?

We’ve all heard it from job seekers and new hires, but is “hitting the ground running” the best choice?  I get it… turnover is expensive and disruptive.  The sooner the new position is stabilized, the sooner you can focus on your actual job again.  And for the new-hire it displays enthusiasm and initiative. 

But when I hear someone declare “ I will “hit the ground running,” I cringe inside, and think to myself “Please don’t.”  “Instead, how about landing quietly, and then LISTEN.”  How about getting to know the culture and some of the people.  Maybe assess what’s been working, and what hasn’t.  Gain insight from those who’ve been there the longest about what’s already been tried.  Understand something about the politics-of-change in the organization and how to best maneuver them.

“Gain insight from those who’ve been there the longest about what’s already been tried.”

Now, I’m not suggesting you avoid making changes.  That may be exactly why you were hired.  But change doesn’t have to be a revolution.  I’m a therapist by training, and the whole purpose of therapy is change.  But I would never diagnose and start treating a patient 10 minutes after meeting them.  I need to build rapport, understand the pain points and vulnerabilities, assess the environment and consider relationships, history, risks, and other factors before devising a treatment plan.

I had the pleasure of working with a company with an award-wining culture.  One of the things they did right was to invest in excellent on-boarding and orientation.  They had a company historian who passed along the legacy story to new hires, so they would have context.  A large scroll of Company Values hung prominently in the lobby that every employee signed.  The organization ensured that their Principles for communicating and operating together were clear, and prominently displayed in multiple locations.  They walked new employees around the company on their first day, so they could put faces to names and start to identify potential resources for the inevitable questions to come.    

Over time, the company fell prey to the allure of hitting the ground running, and it paved the way to cultural decay.  Company history was lost, the Value Scroll came down off the wall, as did the Principles.  A worthwhile investment in individualized, multi-day orientation turned into a 3-hour presentation where back-to-back VPs from across the company each had a 10-minute window to convey whatever they could to a group of new hires.  Even the IT training about security, appropriate software, available resources, and appropriate places to share documents was crammed into that 10-minute slot. 

Following the changes, I was in a meeting with a 10-year company veteran, and a relatively new hire.  While waiting for others to join, the newer employee was venting about a report she had been trying to build for her boss, who was also a recent hire. She’d toiled on it for three weeks. She had been searching for the right documentation, digging through shared drives, meeting with various people and trying desperately to gather the data she needed.  After several minutes of frustrated venting, there was a brief silence… and then the veteran employee said, “would you like a copy of that report?”  The new-hire said, “what do you mean, I haven’t finished it yet.”  To which, the other woman said, “We’ve had that exact report for 5 years now.  My boss reviews it twice a week.  Do you want me to show you where it’s stored on the shared drives?”  This person had “hit the ground running”, and then wasted three weeks of company time trying to build a report, when she should have been building rapport.

The story from the IT team was even more surprising.  They approached me upset because they’d received increasing demands to create email addresses, and even VPN connections allowing people into the network from the outside, for people they’d never heard of.  No notices had come from HR about a new hire, so they inquired of the requester and were told “This is for a really important Executive VP who will be coming on-board.  It’s not public because she doesn’t start for another 3 ½ weeks, but we need her to have a corporate email address, so we can start forwarding mail to her, and she needs access to the internal network to start reviewing documents because…we really need her to hit the ground running.” 

Wow.  So that’s the best way to introduce a very important new executive to the company?  She’s hitting the ground running here while still winding down her old job?  Being overwhelmed with emails and documents from a company she doesn’t even work for yet?  And, this wasn’t an isolated incident.  It happened periodically. In one instance a VP-level candidate changed her mind after three weeks and never even started with the company despite IT treating her like an employee for weeks. 

So hitting the ground running, can be the equivalent to a bull in a china closet.  And in this analogy, the china is your company’s historic wisdom, established processes, and even the values and culture itself.

So the next time someone offers to hit the ground running, consider respectfully telling them that you appreciate their enthusiasm, but your company plans to invest in them for the long haul. You’d prefer to build a relationship with them, to have them appropriately settled in, and then determine together what the next steps are.