How Entrepreneurs Can Coach a New Hire for Success

You've just hired someone to help you with your business. Congratulations! As a busy entrepreneur, there may be a temptation to start delegating right away but you will have more success if you help your new hire adjust to a new tole. 

Joining a new company is a high-stress time for most people. A new company has a new set of rules, a different corporate culture, and a completely different cast of characters. Often a new hire has been recruited from a good job where she was recognized for her contribution within the firm and had a certain degree of job security; change feels scary. While some companies have a formal onboarding program to help ease a new hire into the role, many, including most small businesses and start-ups, do not.

Many orientation processes you can Google tend to focus on explaining the policies and procedures contained in the employee handbook rather than addressing what a new hire wants to know: details about the specific role, the makeup of the team, the resources available, and the immediate performance expectations. Often the hiring manager (that's you!) is too busy to properly welcome a new hire but it's important to lower the new employee's stress levels to help them succeed.  

Stress in the workplace consists of relationship tension (the tension that comes from working with others: call it office politics) and the tension of the task itself (managing complexity.) Typically, when an employee has a high level of task stress in their job, a good manager can help offset it by easing relationship tension. In the days before a tight deadline, you might bring in lunch, give more praise, or help offload less critical tasks so the employee’s tension levels allow for peak performance without tipping over into burnout. With a new employee, however, both the task and the relationship areas are stressed as she comes up to speed on the job requirements and tries to integrate into the organization.

There is a real risk that a new employee will be too stressed to be productive, which can lead to increased relationship tension with an entrepreneur who expects the new employee to immediately improve results. The mismatch in expectations can cause conflict and lead to an early exit. According to PwC Saratoga’s Human Capital Effectiveness Report 22% of hires, or one in five employees, leave within their first year. When a new hire does not work out, there is an associated financial loss of half to five times that employee’s salary (comprised of search fees, potential negligent hiring suits, wasted training costs, wasted interview time, and productivity loss from disruption and negative morale.) Plus, the company is still faced with the skills gap they were trying to address in the first place. As an entrepreneur, you want to do everything possible to increase a new employee's success and comfort. 

If you do not have the time or bandwidth, a coach can be brought in early in the process to help an employee integrate into the new organization. A coach can work as a bridge between the new employee and their team, ironing out any integration pains before they grow into major problems. A coach has dedicated time to spend with the new hire and does not have the bias or agenda of a peer. A coach has the skills to help an employee with task stress (through teaching critical thinking, project management and process improvement skills) and relationship stress (through improving a new hire’s relationships with his manager, team and customers.) There is no perfect hire but a business coach can ensure that a good hire can integrate as quickly into a company as possible and begin to focus on their role and results. I coach other entrepreneurs and I always have a coach of my own. If you are too busy to onboard a new employee, this may be an attractive solution.