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Newly promoted leaders need support too

Nurse Leader Insider, April 21, 2016

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Many companies have clear guidelines for onboarding a new hire; they often have formal training, manuals, and extra resources to help them adjust to their new responsibilities. However, many nurse leaders are promoted from within, and their training path is often less clear. As a new study suggests, the training process for internal promotions is often inadequate, and internal hires require just as much support as external ones.

Michael Watkins wrote in the Harvard Business Review about this issue, and coined the term “inboarding” to describe the process of training internal hires for their new position. About two thirds of the new hires in his study were internal; 70% of them said that their transition was as difficult as joining a new company, and 35% found the transition more difficult. This results in unnecessary failures and difficulties for the organization.

Watkins identifies the lack of support given to inboarding as one of the main reasons for this disparity. So how can an organization make inboarding easier? To start, leaders should adopt a common methodology when approaching new hires. This includes using the same framework and tools for all leadership transitions. Watkins also suggests performing a risk assessment for transitions: identify the potential difficulties (such as relocation, new business divisions, or shifts in work culture) and provide additional support for those risks. This might sound simple, but changing an organization’s culture can be difficult and the first step is identifying that internal hires need the same support as external hires.

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