The challenge
Onboarding is crucial to helping a new employee feel connected and engaged
When a new employee is hired, their onboarding experience usually focuses on their role and responsibilities, rules and policies, and systems and technology.
Onboarding can also be a key moment to look in as well as out and enhance self-awareness.
How will their personality, work style, and behavioral tendencies help them be successful in this new role, and what could get in their way?
What do they need to understand about their new manager and team?
The solution
The Core Drivers is a common language to understand themselves, their manager, and their team
You can use their Core Driver results to get to know your new hire and facilitate a meaningful discussion about their strengths and potential limitations in their new context and how you can best support them. You can also use Core Drivers to share more about yourself and your team.
Plan of action
Step 1: Understand their Core Driver profile and debrief their results
Ahead of your meeting, read through their full User Report for full descriptions of their Drivers, Risks, and Sub-drivers, along with information about how their Drivers affect their Teamwork, Leadership, and Decision-making. You can also view their Coaching Report for an in-depth description of their profile, along with helpful Coaching Questions and Tips to structure your conversation.
Review our Playbook on how to help my direct report understand their Core Drivers to remind yourself of the process and best practices for debriefing results, creating the right environment, and helping them move from awareness to action.
Use the questions in their Coaching Report to deepen understanding and help them think about how their traits will support them in their new role. Here are some other potential questions to include:
In thinking about your new role and responsibilities, what do you think you will excel at from the start? What will be more challenging?
What are you most excited to learn here?
What types of tasks do you find energizing, and what tasks are more draining?
How would you describe your communication style?
How do you like to give and receive feedback?
What are your biggest sources of stress? How do you manage stress and improve wellbeing?
What support do you need from me right now?
What are your personal or professional goals for the next 6 months? 1 year? 5 years?
Step 2: Share more about yourself and the team
Sharing your own Core Drivers will help this employee better understand your leadership style and how you tend to communicate and solve problems.
Sharing the team’s Core Driver profile will help the new employee understand the team culture and typical behavioral patterns. You can use the Team Dynamics Report to discuss how the team tends to communicate and work together, their norms, strengths, and challenges. Then you can discuss how their profile aligns with or is counter to the team’s results. What new strengths do they contribute? What potential challenges will they face?
Step 3: Ask them to complete their Learning Journeys
After completing Core Drivers, every user receives customized coaching insights based on their results, including articles and videos relating to their strengths and development opportunities. They have three personalized learning journeys to understand their talents and practice micro-actions to support lasting behavior change.
Each learning journey is self-directed, interactive, and takes about 15-20 minutes to complete. Assigning these learning journeys as part of their onboarding activities can be a great way to help them focus on building self-awareness and thinking strategically about how their strengths and gaps will play out in their new environment and role. They can access their learning journeys within their User Report:
Final thoughts
Good onboarding is related to higher engagement, performance, and retention. You can add a lot to the employee’s onboarding experience by using Core Drivers to help them feel understood, connected, and motivated.