🦅 The Eagle and the Toad: A Playbook for Onboarding Senior Hires 🐸
Go deep or go broad?
In my conversations with CEOs and other leaders, one question surfaces time and again: how do you ensure the success of a senior hire? While there’s plenty of advice on 30-60-90 day plans, earning trust by solving critical problems or watching before acting, there’s a nuanced challenge that often goes unnoticed. For senior hires, whether they are individual contributors (ICs) or managers, the scope of their role is often vast. It’s tough for new hires to balance going broad versus going deep. Stretching too thin can result in superficial contributions while staying too narrow can limit their overall impact.
The metaphor I’ve found most useful to navigate this balance is the “eagle and toad” analogy. An eagle soars high, seeing a wide expanse but perhaps missing crucial details. A toad, on the other hand, stays close to the ground, observing the fine intricacies of its surroundings. The key to onboarding senior hires lies in helping them first be successful as a toad before evolving into an eagle.
Why? Because new hires need to build a solid foundation of the people, processes, and culture around them. Consider this: at a new organization, even an experienced senior IC or manager will need to learn the intricacies of how work gets done. What are the unspoken rules for shipping products? How do teams collaborate and make decisions? What does escalation look like? These details are critical and can’t be learned from a 10,000-foot view.
For individual contributors, especially those at the Principal or Distinguished Engineer level, it’s often beneficial to start small. Give them manageable, clear-cut tasks—simple features to build and ship—so they can learn the ins and outs of the company’s processes. As they master these early challenges, the complexity of their projects should gradually increase. By the time they’ve shipped a few cycles of features, they’ll not only be comfortable with how the company works, but they’ll have built credibility within the organization. This process might take six months or longer, but it ensures they’ve developed a comprehensive understanding before tackling broader strategic initiatives.
Onboarding managers is more complicated. They typically arrive with a broader scope of responsibility, which can make it harder to narrow their focus initially. However, even for senior managers, directors, or VPs, narrowing their focus in the early days can make a world of difference. By concentrating on a few key teams or initiatives, they can immerse themselves in how specific teams function, learn the rhythms of the business, and develop empathy for their team members. Understanding why “things get done a certain way” within a particular company is crucial before applying insights from their past experiences.
This approach transcends job titles and industries. Whether you’re hiring for engineering, product, marketing, or operations, successful onboarding at the senior level is about learning the motions of the new environment.
The advice is simple but powerful: hop like a toad before you soar like an eagle. Focus on mastering the terrain before taking flight.