Properly onboarding new hires is hard.
You want them to both understand the work they will have to do, as well as the company culture they are about to become part of.
Most companies tend to focus on the former. But if you have a strong culture and want it to stay that way, you should spend plenty of time and attention on the latter.
During DICE last week, I learned a brilliant way to approach this from remote control productions‘ Chief People Officer Ina Lesser.
Homework for the new hire
Remote Control Productions’ culture has (at least) two major influences: the holacracy company management model, whereby people are assigned roles instead of hierarchies and titles; and the radical candor approach, which promotes giving each other direct yet caring feedback.
And this isn’t just talk.
Ina gave me a handful of examples of these elements in action, whereby people were encouraged to “radical candor” each other to resolve a brewing conflict.
So how do they ensure that these elements stay a strong part of the fabric of their culture?
Simple: Each new hire at RCP is gifted the original books related to these concepts (in this case: Radical Candor by Kim Scott, and Holacracy by Brian Robertson)
With that gift comes the expectation that the new hire actually reads those books.
I cannot overstate how much I love this idea.
First of all, I love Radical Candor. It’s a great book, and as a practice it solves so many persistent company and team issues.
Second, in all my years of recommending and being recommended books related to company management, I have never come across a company that was this thorough in integrating certain concepts into their core ideology.
I think this is absolutely brilliant, and here’s why.
Why it works
If you were to condense the concepts of these two books to some paragraphs in an employee handbook, they become much more dogmatic.
You leave out so much, that the resulting information reads more like a set of rules than a fully fleshed out principle.
This is why I’ve always liked reading books.
It gives me access to much more of the concept I’m trying to understand, rather than trusting the perspective of a summarizer, or relying on my own experience to fill in the blanks.
And that’s exactly what happens here.
By reading the original books, your new hires are exposed to the full thinking of the original authors, warts and all.
They will gain a richer and broader understanding because of it, which will inform their actions and interactions moving forward.
In the short term, this means that they will be an active part of your company culture much faster.
And in the long term, these employees can play a much more constructive part in upholding, sharing and adapting your company culture.
You will only be better off by doing this, and I hate that I didn’t think of this myself.
Right now I’m a one-man band by design. But if I were given a team tomorrow, I would ask them to read these two books:
The Advantage, by Patrick Lencioni. It would be useful both in explaining the principles of organzational design our clients, as well as to keep a positively critical eye on our own internal operations.
The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, by Jim Dethmer. This book has been a big inspiration for me, and I’m working on ways to incorporate its concepts into my services. Having my team read it would help to make them more aware of their own behavior in the team, as well as the behavior of the teams they coach.
Over to you
I would love to see other companies experiment with this approach, and learn what benefits it brings them.
But before you start handing out books and quizzing your hires on them, I think two things are of paramount importance to consider:
- Whatever book you choose, they should explain something that is absolutely essential to the way your company operates. There’s no sense giving your new hires homework they won’t ever use in practice.
- Be explicit about how this concept is used in your company. It’s your company, so the work of explaining this, and making it visible in every day operations is your responsibility. Don’t leave it up to the new hire to intuit how a particular book relates to your company.
Given these two requirements, what would your book(s) be?