A Way to Humanize Onboarding Without Extra Work

by Eleni Pallas / Tuesday, 10 March 2020 / Published in Human-Centric Leading

Are you a leader who feels that there are better ways to lead and deal with team-oriented challenges yet not sure what they are?

Have you experimented with new ideas or strategies and noticed that some worked and others didn’t? Yet it wasn’t clear why each worked or not?

How about trying human-centric leading. It is a mindset and toolkit that sets you on a transformational journey to solve problems at their core. This creates long-lasting results that amplifies your impact.

Let’s take an example.

HCL and Onboarding

Let’s say that you lead a team and want to apply human-centric leading (HCL) to onboarding new team players. You feel that you’ve recruited the best people who fit your team culture and can contribute new energy and ideas to the problems you/your organization tends to resolve. You’d like to help them feel welcome and become acclimated to your team and the challenges your team focuses on solving.

You can use the MINDSET TOOL that includes two steps:

See the people you recruited as humans with emotional needs and unlimited potential
Choose the specific mindset that you’d like to use when working with them and invite them to choose the mindset they’d like to use in their new job

You can use the CONTEXT TOOL that states that when/if people do not do what they have committed to doing, there is something in the context that prevents them. It could be their mindset (internal context) or something in the culture or broader environment that causes issues for them.

See people as humans

Within the context in which we work, the legacy industrial model, we are socialized to focus on achievements and outcomes and see people as titles, roles or job functions. We do that automatically without realizing it. In doing so, we forget to see the entirety of the people standing in front of us. We forget to see them, listen and interact at a relational instead of transactional level. It doesn’t make us bad people, rather good people with an unproductive habit.

When we start to see people in their entirety, we can relate to them and develop a trusting relationship through which all great things can happen. It’s tough to be interactive and creative with people we don’t trust, so trust is a must. We can trust people who see us as humans instead of people who DO things for them and that’s it.

Choose mindsets

Mindsets in the HCL parlance includes thoughts, feelings and behavior.

On most days, we wake up intending and expecting to be and do our best. However, we do not tend to take the time to consider the mindset we bring to work. Are we thinking about what’s going wrong without amplifying what’s going well? Do we feel tired, anxious and frustrated or calm, energized and focused? Do we say what we do and do what we say — or say one thing and do another? By deliberately choosing our mindsets, we can decide how to think and feel, which affects what we do and how we do it. Deliberate thought/feeling patterns set the ground for more insightful and impactful behavior and outcomes.

For your onboarding initiative, you can invite your new team players to think about a time when they felt energized, confident and successful. A time when they felt their best and did their best. They were happy and fulfilled. Then invite them to draw out the triad they were using at that time. A triad is a pictorial version of a mindset, including thoughts, feelings and actions. Drawing it out helps us see how inter-dependent our thoughts, feelings and behavior are, copying success we had in the past or making changes we consider useful.

Through this exercise, your new team players will get to know themselves a little better and you will get to know them, too. What tends to happen with this exercise is that people document all types of behavior or actions they took that felt powerful such as:

taking action
gathering critical data
asking clients what they needed
being proactive
figuring out what triggered the problem
inspiring others
mission over ego
etc.

This opens a conversation about what it would be like if your team players used empowering mindsets in their new jobs.

Consider context

You could continue with your new team players suggesting that if/when they are not in this mindset, they could chat with you. Not that anything would be wrong, rather to explore what shifted them out of their desired triad. This could include something within them that changed (a thought or feeling) or maybe some CJB (criticism, judgement or blame) exchanged on the team.

By doing this, you would signal that working from their empowering mindset is something you value. A mindset that they already have experience using, which respects what they uniquely bring to the table. Plus, you would be assuming that if they’re not working from that mindset, something in the context would be blocking them rather than their innate value or skills.

WOW!

Imagine how your new team players will feel.

How might you feel when helping your newcomers stay empowered?

Imagine if your entire team uses their most-engaged mindsets at work. Imagine if people talk about what blocks their use of such mindsets without any judgement. The discussions will be high-quality and relational. If done with a judgement-free awareness, it leads to trusting relationships that spur on great collaboration and even better work quality and outcomes. If done with any hint of judgement, it can backfire, so be careful. You can stay in judgement-free awarenesses by thinking that anything that happens is OK and happens for a reason. When you look for the reason or trigger, you can solve the problem without any CJB.

Enjoy applying these HCL tools to onboarding! Feel free to share your experiences with us: