Who Is Actually Training Your New People?
Hello Learners,
This is Learn Leadership. Every issue takes one thing that quietly goes wrong between managers and their teams, shows it happening through a real story, and leaves you with something to try this week.
Today it's onboarding, and the colleague who ended up running it because their desk was closest to the new starters. You'll leave with a fifteen-minute count of who's training your new people and what it's costing them in hours.
Who taught your newest hire the job?
Think about the last person who joined your team. Skip the induction deck, the compliance modules, and the welcome lunch. Who did they turn to on day three, when the system threw an error nobody had mentioned?
If a name comes to mind straight away, good. If you have to guess, you're in the same spot as a lot of managers, and that guess is what this issue is about.
The question sounds simple. The honest answer is usually "whoever was sitting nearest," and almost nobody writes that down.
The answer nobody puts in the onboarding plan
On paper, the manager owns onboarding, HR owns the checklist, and a buddy exists somewhere in a spreadsheet. In practice, new people learn the job from whoever sits closest and finds it hardest to say no.
The gap shows up in the numbers. Gallup reports that only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization onboards new people well and that new hires take around 12 months to reach their full performance. A year of "quick questions" has to land on someone's desk.
The same Gallup work found new hires were 3.4 times as likely to rate their onboarding as exceptional when their manager took an active role. So the manager matters. The person doing the daily teaching matters too, and that's the person nobody planned for.
Sofia's fourteen months
Sofia is the most patient person on Dan's eleven-person customer support team. Over fourteen months, four new hires joined. Each one got the spare desk, and the spare desk happened to be next to hers.
Nobody asked her to train them. She did it anyway, because they kept turning round with questions, and she's not someone who ignores a person mid-sentence. Dan never assigned it, so Dan never counted it.
At her annual review, Dan flagged that her closed-ticket count had dropped by about a quarter. Sofia went quiet, then said she'd been spending most of her Tuesday and Thursday afternoons walking new people through refunds. Around six hours a week, for over a year.
Dan checked. He asked each of the four new hires one question: "When you're stuck, who do you go to?" All four said Sofia. One of them hadn't realized Dan was supposed to be the answer.
The harder version of the question
So the first question is "Who's training them?" The harder one is "Did you choose that person, and would you choose them again on purpose?"
Proximity picks trainers badly in two ways. It picks people who struggle to say no, and research shows how lopsided that gets. In Babcock and colleagues' 2017 study of tasks everyone wants someone else to do, women were asked more often and said yes more often, and that work rarely counted toward promotion.
It also copies whatever habits the nearest person has. Joel, who joined Dan's billing desk in March, learned from the colleague one seat over, including that colleague's habit of skipping the second refund check. It took three months and a duplicated £2,400 refund for anyone to trace it back.
Sitting near the new person and being good at teaching are two separate things. The first one comes free. The second one costs hours, and somebody's already paying them.
Three answers you can use
Start by counting. Ask everyone who joined in the last twelve months that same question: "When you're stuck, who do you go to?" It takes fifteen minutes across a team, and the tally is usually lopsided. Write the hours next to each name, using that person's own estimate.
Then make it official. If one person is carrying it, give the role a name, put it in their goals, and take something off their plate. In a Microsoft pilot, 56% of new hires who met their onboarding buddy at least once in their first 90 days said it helped them get productive quickly.
Among those who met more than eight times, it was 97%. Microsoft's own advice is to check the buddy's workload before you match them.
Finally, split the teaching. The buddy owns the daily "how do I" questions. You own the "what does good look like" conversations, at least weekly in the first month. Write the core process down once, so the buddy teaches from a page and passes on fewer personal shortcuts.
The one that matters most
Of the three, counting the hours matters most, because the other two depend on seeing them. Once Sofia's six hours a week were on a page, Dan could decide whether that was the investment he wanted. It was. He'd been getting it without paying for it.
He moved two of her queues to a colleague, put "onboarding lead" in her goals and blocked four hours a week for it on the team calendar. Joel's missing refund check went into a one-page guide Sofia wrote in an afternoon.
Two months later a new starter joined. At the end of her first week, Dan asked who she went to when she was stuck. She said Sofia first, then Dan. That was the order he'd planned.
Feedback
| How was your experience with Learn Leadership today? |
|
|
|
|
Subscribe to participate in polls.
If you have specific feedback or anything interesting you’d like to share, please let us know by replying to this email.
