Best Practice Series: Executive onboarding

Executive transitions, when effective, build capability for people and for organizations. Executives get a new assignment that can build and broaden their experience. Organizations get new leadership to energize the company and advance the strategy. Boards fulfill their succession and governance responsibility.

There is a lot at stake when executives transition. The business case for successful onboarding is clear. Executives are taking bigger jobs sooner in their careers. And, 40 percent of executives in new roles fail within the first eighteen months1. Combine these factors with the cost of executive turnover (some estimates put it at $2.7 million USD per executive2) and the failure to successfully bring executives into new roles becomes a major and costly issue that a company must address.