Month: July 2022

Outline:

• Why Onboarding is an Extension of the Hiring Process
• The Benefits of Effective Onboarding
• Answering Common Objections
• Elements of an Onboarding Plan for Thriving Success
• Corporate Citizen Requirements
• Working Effectively with You
• Setting Expectations and Defining Success
• Processes, Practices, and Rituals
• Specific Projects and Initiatives
• People and Networks
• Getting Recognition for Progress and Successes
• Final Recommendations

Why Onboarding is an Extension of the Hiring Process

Hiring the right people is clearly one of the biggest responsibilities of managers.  The more senior your role, the more you think Who and the less you think How.

My observation is many hiring failures are more accurately onboarding failures.  (Many, not all.)  I’ve kept notes on the career success of everyone I hired.  A few times I hired the wrong person for a position.  No amount of onboarding would have helped.  My most embarrassing hires were two people who were excellent for the role but who both flamed out because I did almost nothing with their onboarding process.  I can’t do the split-test experiment to know, but it’s likely that a better onboarding effort would have helped these two become successful for our organization.

You can reasonably expect less onboarding for senior roles, for very experienced people, and much more onboarding and training for entry-level roles and less experienced people.  But there is always some onboarding.

I recommend the hiring manager own the onboarding process.  Delegate aspects of the overall effort while keeping the overall responsibility.  Treat onboarding as an extension of the hiring process.

The Benefits of Effective Onboarding

A new employee will get a much faster start to being a productive contributor when you provide systematic help.  Long-term retention of talent will improve. Project teams will suffer less disruption because of new-but-not-informed members. Effective onboarding redounds to your reputation as an effective hiring manager and increases the likelihood you’ll have more opportunities to hire in the future.

This article focuses on knowledge workers (though a portion of what is described here will be helpful for any kind of role).  Knowledge workers roles are focused on adding value through information flows and decision-making. They create knowledge-based products and services.

Effective onboarding does take significant effort. It’s neither free nor passive. I suspect this is why many managers fail to do it well.  This article will give you a straightforward, repeatable framework that you can use – and I’ll share many time-saving tips to reduce the overall workload on you as the manager.

Answering Common Objections

“Onboarding is HR’s job, not mine!” Almost no HR department in organization today has the capacity to handle more than basic transactional startup (which I address below).  You can delegate portions of the onboarding work, but you dare not abdicate it as this person’s manager.  No one is better equipped than you to work through the onboarding process. 

“I don’t have this kind of time.” This is a short-sighted excuse. Invest some focused time early, and both you and the organization will reap the dividends going forward.  You’ll avoid serious problems.  You’ll minimize the disruptions that new team members can create.

“I hire people who should be able to do these things themselves.”  Even the most experienced people will benefit from help navigating an organization and getting started on key initiatives.  Reducing the threshold energy for success is worthwhile.  Plus, you can ensure they understand your working style, your perspectives, and a clear picture of what success looks like.

“This is a lot of work for an employee who is likely to leave in 2-3 years anyway.”  Are you always this cynical about the people you hire? Losing talented professionals reflects badly on you as the hiring manager.  Failing to onboard well increases the likelihood they will leave sooner.  Maximize their potential contribution by systematic help at the start.

The Minimal Work to Onboard a New Corporate Citizen

Your organization certainly has requirements for new employees.  This is the list of items that most people think of when they hear the word “Onboarding.”

Your HR department likely has a checklist of required paperwork and registrations, including for payroll.  The IT department will set up new account and appropriate security access.  There are building security and ID badge requirements.  Your organization may have required compliance or safety training.  You may be required to identify initial performance goals.

The key for success here is to leverage the help your organization gives you and your new hire.  Focus on efficiency and completeness so these required tasks are executed quickly and don’t leave lingering stumbling blocks.  You may be able to delegate parts of this work to administrative assistants and designated contacts in support organizations.

A common mistake is to think the onboarding process mostly ends here.  The larger value comes form the next steps.

Elements of an Onboarding Plan for Thriving Success

Beyond the “minimal corporate citizen” requirements are all the aspects of helping a new hire become successful in the role(s) for which you hired them. 

The successful outcomes of this plan are:

• An effective working relationship with you as their manager
• Clear expectations on projects, ongoing work, and what success looks like
• A working network of peers, colleagues, and stakeholders
• An understanding of organizational culture – common practices, expected standards, rituals, internal language
• Successes with initial project work and meaningful contributions that will be recognizable to your superiors and other stakeholders

Let’s consider these desired outcomes in turn and outline what you and your direct report need to do. These are the steps which distinguish a new hire.

Working Effectively with You

We manager have our preferences – we know what works well for us.  Our new hires are not mind-readers, and often fail to ask the correct questions early.  The first few days are the best time to create expectations.

You should explain:

• How you prefer to receive information.  Some people are primarily readers, others prefer listening.  There is in-person and remote communication. Managers generally don’t like surprises.  How should they keep you apprised on work in progress, and concerns?  Do you prefer email, instant messaging, text messages, phone calls?  Give them concrete examples.
• How you will give them feedback and what kind of 1:1 time they can have with you.  I recommend you explicitly say “I will coach you when I see situations where you need to know something, can avoid a ditch, or do something better next time.”  
• Expectations for team interactions, notification about absences or problems, standing meetings, typical agendas, and seasonal rhythms.
• Mutually share some personal history information to help create a stronger relationship.  You can’t and shouldn’t force people to share but most people will be happy to answer a few questions about what’s important to them outside of work, and their previous work history.

Setting Expectations and Defining Success

Your new hire may already know the purpose of the organization. They may know something about goals and expectations of the senior management – but explain them in depth.  At worst, you’ve reinforced the importance of this perspective.  Likely you will add to their understanding and provide additional context which connects their role to the larger organization objectives.

Don’t assume they know it or will magically “absorb” it from others. Own the responsibility that they know and understand. Here’s the test: Can they relay it accurately back to you?

You should also discuss the seasonal, quarterly, and annual flow of the business.  Every organization has rhythms, and calling them out helps your new hire how to fit in, why project timelines are what they are, when budget decisions need to be made, etc.

It’s quite rare for knowledge workers to be fully effective immediately.  Share your perspectives on how long it will take for them to experience success.  Here is a script you can edit and use:  “We hired you because we believe you can be a contributor soon, and a much better contributor in coming years.  I’m going to help you get some early wins in the next 3-6 months.  We have a complex business.  Some things only happen a few times a year or once a year.  So you might not hit stride for 18months – and that’s ok. The key is continual learning and striving for excellence.”

Establish formal goals. Your organization probably requires a document about annual goals.  Focus on concrete, achievable goals for the next 2-3 months.  Edit these goals as you go forward.  Co-develop a work plan for the 6 weeks.  That process will make it apparent who your new hire needs to meet and what they need to know (more on this below).

Schedule a review time 3 months out.  This doesn’t need to be a formal “HR performance review.” Tell them the purpose is to set aside a few minutes to review how things are going and make any adjustments.  “Your work is valuable. I want to ensure you’re getting what you need so you can deliver extraordinary results.”  Specifically ask if there are things you need to do differently to be more clear, break down hurdles, and introduce her to more people.

Processes, Practices, and Rituals

Given enough time your new hire can probably figure out how the organization works.  A few short conversations from you will dramatically reduce that time and eliminate the problems that happen with “trial and error” built on a dogpile of faulty assumptions.

Here’s a starting point of topics to explore:

• Typical cultural expectations for email, instant messaging, agendas, meeting management
• Standing meetings they need to attend.  (Sidebar – make sure they get the invitations!)
• Budget and expense tracking.  Rules about travel and gifts.
• Mechanisms for recognition and awards
• How projects are typical approved and managed
• Rules for getting approval to share information externally
• How bonuses, promotions, and merit salary increases are handled

Specific Projects and Initiatives

Knowledge workers will generally jump into one or a small number of specific projects. 

For existing projects and initiatives: Take some time to go through the project history or expectations of what the project should deliver.  Brief them on project methodology (e.g., “we use agile software development here”) as helpful.  Give them a concise and tangible description of what the successful project outcome will be. Discuss key attributes and background for other team members. Work with them to clarify project milestones and KPIs. 

For new projects you’re asking them to begin: Add to the above more conversation about the picture of success, resource availability, what you expect for project updates and addressing problems, and details about all the stakeholders.

One of the most important outcomes of your onboard plan is to deliver early wins for your new hire.  Design them.  Make it tangible, with specific value.  What can be delivered in 2-3 weeks, and then within 2 months? 

People and Networks

Knowledge worker roles, even those defined as “individual contributors,” require significant interaction with other people. It’s simply a fact.

Your new hire will benefit from introductions to:

• Her close working team, and peers
• People in key supporting roles
• Anyone who provides them information or context for their work
• Direct beneficiaries of their work (sometimes called internal customers or clients)
• Your boss

I recommend you create a 30 second and a 2-minute introduction “script” to personally introduce your new hire to others. Pick which one depending on who you’re introducing her to. The basics plus some context.  Voice or in person introductions are best though this is not always possible. 

You should also create a list of key influencers in your organization, including more senior managers and your peers. Give your new hire this list and ask him to set up meetings with them over a period of months for mutual introductions and sharing insights.  Ask him to report back to you what he learned in the conversation.  (Creating that expectation up front helps.) The goal here is to give your new hire additional opportunities to hear from others, but also to be “on the radar” of decision-makers in the future.

Getting Recognition for Progress and Successes

Consciously work to draw attention to the good work that your new hire is accomplishing.  I recommend creating a weekly or bi-weekly recurring task to remind you to tell your boss about their work. Emphasize the value this new employee brings to your organization.  Trumpet the early wins.  Be candid about development opportunities when something did not go well.  

Schedule time, even 15 minutes occasionally, to talk with stakeholders who are supposed to benefit from their contributions.  Test assumptions.  Listen to their feedback and suggestions. Relay insights and recommendations back to your new hire.

Look for opportunities to forward email correspondence or project documents to your boss or other stakeholders, adding your comments about their performance.

Timeline of the onboarding work

I recommend you think about onboarding work in three timeframes: 

1. The first two weeks
2. The first two months
3. The first six months

A large fraction of the onboarding work – especially information sharing and introductions — does fall in the first two weeks, but the effort on your part will diminish as they develop confidence and connections. 

The focus and effort over time looks like this:

Final Recommendations:

This is significant work but the cost of not helping someone onboard effectively is far higher.  This fits the old mantra, “Pay me now, or pay me more later.”

Create a few notes about the onboarding plan.  It’s likely that you can re-use some of this for future hires.

Explain what you’re doing and why to your boss. Emphasize the benefits to the organization. Reinforce this by sharing specific milestones and project deliverables from your new hire.  This will add to your credibility as a manager.

Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see other managers doing anything like this. Hopefully your good example will be contagious.

Make this a fun process!  Don’t think of it as a burden.  You don’t have to do this onboarding work, you get to do it.  Your new hire will benefit enormously, your organization benefits, and you benefit. 

There were a series of events in the US in the 1970’s – all sincere, responding to desires in the time– which have had profound effects on our culture:

• No fault divorce (first legalized in California in 1970)
• Establishing Earth Day (1970) to anchor more attention to clean air and water
• Abandoning the gold standard (1971) which accelerated fiat currency practices
• Roe v. Wade (1973) which made abortion legal nation-wide
• Exiting the Vietnam war (1975)

These, building on events in the 1960’s (e.g., Civil Rights legislation, the massive increase in federal social spending, introduction of the Pill, Marxist ideologies gaining credence in universities, TV becoming a dominant news and entertainment medium) have profoundly shaped the US over the past 50-60 years.  It’s concurrent with the rise of widespread granting of decisive authority to inner feelings rather than from institutions and social structures.

These events came after the momentous global changes from WW1, the Great Depression, the rise of Communist states, WW2, the rebuilding of Europe and Japan, the beginning of the Cold War, and more. 

Earlier than this you consider the consequences of the Franco-Prussian war, the consolidation of kingdoms in India, the American Civil War, the Napoleonic era, the Ottoman Empire, and so on.   I haven’t even mentioned all that occurred in Asia and South America!

I continue to ponder all the connections and implications.  Maybe someone will have enough perspective in 2200 to explain the impacts of the 1900’s more accurately. 

An acquaintance, long-time Economist subscriber, told me that he has kept the annual “forecast” issues published each December about the year ahead.  “They’re amazingly wrong,” he said.  “Very little of their forecast turned out to be correct.”

They wrote these predictions with great confidence.  What does it tell us that a group of smart people have this much difficulty predicting the events and trends in next 12-18 months?  We’re addicted to punditry on current events and predictions about what comes next, even if we know they’re more likely to be wrong than correct.  We somehow weight the confidence of their statements much more than we care about their track record of accuracy.

So many changes have happened, so frequently, that we must avoid the error of assuming the future is a short extrapolation of the present.  It’s difficult (and uncomfortable) to imagine a future radically different than our immediate past, but major transformations will happen.

A lesson that I’m still learning:  Lean into changes and work for the best, rather than leaning back fearfully and hoping someone else makes it all better.

You don’t need to embrace everything new.  Tik-tok is now the most-visited website in the world and your life will be fine if you decide not to go there.  Retain your power of choice. 

Lean into changes when they are reality now.  Don’t waste energy being angry or resentful when reality foists changes upon you.  Be prepared for different scenarios, while being skeptical about anyone ability to correctly predict future events.

An acquaintance, long-time Economist subscriber, told me that he has kept the annual “forecast” issues published each December about the year ahead.  “They’re amazingly wrong,” he said.  “Very little of their forecast turned out to be correct.”

They wrote these predictions with great confidence.  What does it tell us that a group of smart people have this much difficulty predicting the events and trends in next 12-18 months?  We’re addicted to punditry on current events and predictions about what comes next, even if we know they’re more likely to be wrong than correct.  We somehow weight the confidence of their statements much more than we care about their track record of accuracy.

Be prepared for different scenarios, while being skeptical about anyone ability to correctly predict future events.

Scale of operation capability has been a deciding factor in war for many centuries, and in businesses since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.  People oversimplify scale.  Scale is only a benefit if you are larger than your competitors. Relative scale is what matters.

(It’s the same if you’re competing with who you were yesterday. I’ll talk more about this another time.)

Relative scale succeeds when the means of competition are roughly the same (e.g, both sides of are warring with similar weapons, or two businesses have similar business models).  We see David v. Goliath upsets when the competitors are using different tactics entirely, or playing by different rules.  Then the relative scale can become a limitation, a hindrance.

My observation is that what makes everything worse in a changed situation – whether war or business model competition – is the reluctance to recognize the shift combined with stubbornness (the ugly twin of persistence).  Britain and France got bogged down in a trench war with Germany in WW1.  Rather than changing approach, everyone just executed artillery strikes harder.  Sears and other big retailers had the potential to compete against digital suppliers like Amazon, but doubled down on their physical retail space advantage rather than recognizing it was a growing liability.  Kodak famously invented a digital camera but dismissed it as inferior, failing to recognize the power of pixel density doubling and quadrupling each year. 

It’s easy to criticize others in these stories.  It’s harder to see it when you’re making the same category error.  Therefore, strive for humility when you have a relative scale advantage, and be willing to release your stubborn grip to better hold any advantage loosely.  It helps to remember you win bigger by playing the long game rather than optimizing for short-term gains.

Have you ever noticed how proverbs come in matching pairs, like “Look before you leap” and “He who hesitates is lost”?  The wisdom is in the combination. The hard part is figuring out which side to act on in each situation.

I favor the word ‘Prudent’ to describe the best leadership approach.

prudent (ˈpruːdənt)  (Adjective)

1. discreet or cautious in managing one’s activities; circumspect

2. practical and careful in providing for the future

3. exercising good judgment or common sense

[from Latin prūdēns far-sighted, contraction of prōvidens acting with foresight; see provident]

The key to being able to exploit opportunities when they become available, especially when you perceive them before most others do, is to guard against the downside.

In your personal life, be prepared for the worst that can happen.  Keep an emergency fund. Develop relationships.  Pay for maintenance.  Buy insurance.  Having two is one and one is zero for truly essential items. You don’t have to become a conspiracy nut to understand the value of a few days of food and water plus provisions to sustain your family for a few days when the power goes out. 

In your business operations, consider cross-training and bench strength for essential work.  Backups and spare inventory.  A cash flow buffer.  A second means for managing payments to suppliers and receive income from customers. 

You might not grow as fast, but you’re unlikely to be out of the game entirely.

Oh… and don’t be concerned about what others may say about this.  Prudent people don’t mind a little teasing. 

Developing leaders need practical experiences beyond “book learning.”  In general, every experience which helps them sharpen problem analysis, project leadership, persuasion, and presentation skills is a win – these are the little hinges upon which big doors swing. Here are ten ways to develop the leadership potential of the people your sphere of influence. 

1. Give them recommended books, articles, and podcasts to study.  Tell them why you think the content is valuable for them.
2. Ask them to explore a new area and report back to you and others.
3. Delegate a portion of your work (pick something relatively routine for you now, even if it’s difficult for them at first). 
4. Ask them to run one of “your” meetings (e.g., a team meeting or project meeting).  This gives them practice.  You get to step up and out of the meeting to think more about what is going on (and especially what’s not being done or said).
5. Ask them to sub for you in a meeting where you have a conflict.  They’ll need you to give context and coaching.
6. Ask them to review an existing procedure and make recommendations on how it might be improved.  This can be individual work, or an effort which requires them to get insights from others.
7. Give them opportunities to take assessment tools like DiSC and Strength Finders.  Review the results with them.
8. Ask them to co-lead a project with someone who has more experience, as an intentional ‘apprenticeship’ effort. 
9. Arrange for another leader to provide them with coaching on a skill, or mentoring in an area where you may not have as much experience.
10. Share your work stories with them – good, bad, and ugly – pointing out what you learned.  Explicitly say, “I’m telling you this story because you have leadership potential and can learn from my experiences.” 

A pattern common to declining organizations is that experienced and senior people who serve as good mentors to the up-and-coming talent exit the organization.  Sometimes it’s because of downsizing and restructuring, sometimes these critical people simply have had enough and choose to work elsewhere, or retire earlier than they might otherwise have.  Whatever the reason, you look around and “suddenly” there is a dearth of experienced mentors actively working in the organization.   

This has a natural tendency to create a weaker set of leaders in the coming years.  Leaders are brought in from the ‘outside’ because there are fewer qualified leaders in the internal pipeline.   

Yes, I’m oversimplifying.  There are many factors involved here.  It’s necessary and right for organizations to bring in different leaders when a big change is needed.   

Yet I’m confident that a leading indicator of organizational health for the next decade is the size and quality of your experienced mentoring class.   

Note: this is from a draft chapter from my upcoming book about influencing the next ten generations.

…

Some people say what the world needs is education.  Many people have said that what the world needs is love.  There’s truth in both. 

In terms of influence, what the world needs are difference-makers. 

Influence is about being a difference-maker.

Influence is about living a life that others respect, admire, and see reasons to emulate.

Influence is about communicating through example: words, actions, creating, serving.

Can you guarantee your influence in the near-term or long-term?  No.  It can be frustrating to see people (apparently) not responding to your influence, or flat out rejecting you.  It can be frustrating when we feel our sphere of influence is small.  We must not let these realities deter us from seeking to be a person of influence.

It’s tempting to compare yourself to others.  It’s discouraging to look at goofy videos that get millions of views in five days while your meaningful content gets 94 views in a week.  One man, a genuine scholar, said to me, “Hell, the Kardashians are famous for nothing more than having big butts and being famous!”  Another acquaintance, who has poured his life into youth soccer, commented to me that he doubts any of the kids will remember his name in 15 years.  Our aim must be to do our part and trust the results will come.  Influence is an emergent property of living a good life.

Influence must be rooted in hope.  Yes, people are stupid and foolish.  Yes, your excellent ideas and messages and recommendations often fall on deaf ears.  Yes, your own sinfulness damaged relationships at times and undermined trust with people you love, which makes it harder to have positive influence with them.  Yes, a gazillion other people seem to be more influential than you think you are.  Yes, you struggle to find the right words in the moment (and replay those events a thousand times afterward).  Yes, some wretched people have bought and finagled their way into positions of power. Yes, you’re impatient.  Yes, your ego has occasionally bested you. Yes, people have said things to you which discourage you, and you’ve run into barriers. Yes, you’ve been lonely.  Continue to fight the valiant fight anyway.  Continue to believe that living a life of influence is worthwhile and rewards are coming, however delayed.  Find running mates in the race. Continue to “strain forward to what lies ahead” (Philippians 3:13).

My recommendation is this:  Don’t measure your influence against others, and heavily weight the long-term outcomes of living a good life over what’s going on today. 

Sometime people get tripped up by thinking of influence as ‘motivating people.’

A personal story… Some years ago, I was asked to be on a panel discussion at the end of a supervisor training session. I scooted into the conference room just in time and took my designated seat at the front of the room. 

The first question that came to me was from a younger lady: “How do you motivate people?” I replied simply, “You can’t.” 

There were a few chuckles, and then the laugher spread. I noticed the HR facilitator at the back of the room put her hand over her mouth. The young lady smiled and pointed at a spot over my head.

I turned to look behind me and realized I was sitting directly underneath a big poster titled “How to Motivate People.”

I laughed and explained my view:

“All motivation is intrinsic. You can’t affect something intrinsic in person directly. You can provide new information. You can give them an alternative frame of reference. You can create incentives for behaviors you prefer, and disincentives for behaviors you don’t prefer. These are all indirect means of influence. Their motivation is 100% their decision. The best leaders tap into their pre-existing motivation. It’s like stepping in front of a parade and helping the parade make turns and go a bit faster.”

Persuasion is an element of influence.  The main factors in persuasion (above and beyond the content of your statements and stories) are

• Reciprocation
• Commitment and consistency
• Social Proof
• Liking
• Authority
• Scarcity

(I refer you to Robert Cialdini’s books “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”  and “Pre-suasion” for a master class in these factors.  He explains the psychology behind them.  You’ll never look at advertising and sales pitches the same way again!)

Persuasion is a craft – a combination of learned skills and art to produce something beautiful and useful – which contributes to our ability to influence.  Most people who seek to be more influential should work on the craft of persuasion.

Communication is another craft of influence.  Here I’m referring to using our voice, words, and artistry to share messages.  The mindset of sharing is different than telling. We all have points of view, ideas, and stories.  Vocal range, silence, pauses, body language, and imagery are part and parcel of the craft. There are learnable skills in sharing them effectively.  Communication is also a lifelong craft.

Influence is not manipulation.  Manipulation is coercion without violence (though it may include the threat of violence).   I’m not advocating that we as individuals should sanction manipulation in our plan to be influential.  The people who are famous for being notorious were master manipulators of the people around them.  Don’t emulate their methods.

Authenticity is a popular word now.  It’s not a bad word, but I still prefer the word Integrity.  A person can be an authentic devious, manipulative, arrogant ignoramus and liar.  Integrity comes to English from the Latin word integritatem which is translated in old literature as soundness, wholeness, completeness, and blamelessness.  My ancestors stressed that integrity means saying what you mean and meaning what you say.  My Scoutmaster told me “Make promises carefully, because you must keep them.”   Integrity and influence are soul-mates.

I’m pleased to announce that my latest book is now available on Kindle.  In “How to Positively Influence the Next Ten Generations” I explore

• You have more influence than you think
• What could happen and who will thrive in the next 300 years
• A systematic way to catalog your strengths and experiences and identify who you should serve
• My recommendations for increasing your influence
• How to stay on your desired vector

It’s been very helpful to several colleagues and now I want to make it available to many. 

Two readers have contacted me recently asking for input and ideas related to creating a bigger initiative with their good ideas; one is Christian discipleship, the other more business-development.   

This is the general problem of creating/fostering a movement, or a formal institution – a human entity which is bigger than you, and/or outlasts you.   

Movements have their time.  Even the best movements will not last — see Ecclesiastes 3:1-8.  Movements usually grow quickly and die faster.  

No one person designs or controls a movement, though a single personal event can spark them.  Movement leaders occasionally make claims about ‘designing’ or ‘directing’ them, but I don’t see that in historical examples.  Movements sometimes destroy the initial leaders, too (i.e., the origin of the French Revolution).  Movements are vulnerable to being exploited by people who don’t care about the movement but are happy to take advantage of them (i.e., The Tea Party and BLM in recent memory in the US).  

There is a correlation between movements and tribes.  Tribes pre-exist movements, and the people who participate in movements often come from sympatico tribes.  You can’t engineer a tribe but you can find them and get in front of them.  You can’t will a tribe or a movement into being. (See Seth Godin’s excellent book “Tribes” for the best information on this.)   

It’s important to distinguish movements and mobs.  Both can be sparked. Neither requires a leadership design pattern. Anger and fear can be present in both.  Mobs are more mindless and bring forth awful behaviors that individuals would unlikely exhibit.   

Institutions are quite different than movements.  There are some examples of movements being converted to an institution but they’re so different that it’s a rare event.  Institutions are structural groups with specific mission, principles, and management practices.  They’re consciously designed to work without the originators.   Examples of institutions are schools, denominations, paramilitary groups, social clubs (e.g., Rotary), and service communities (e.g., YMCA, pet shelters).  

Institutions require endowment funding and cash flow.  They need to clarify and celebrate their purpose as people get introduced, participate more and more – with recognizable milestones and ‘graduations’ – and often training and practice at whatever the institution is focused upon.   

Institutions work on the longer game, whereas movements are about this week or next.  Institutions can’t wing it or fluidly change direction easily.  The best institutions create roots and legacy.  Institutions shape people and events in ways that will be felt for generations.  This power of institutions is at the heart of civilization.  We care deeply when institutions are corrupted or flail.  

I don’t know how to teach someone to consciously plan and begin a movement.  I’m not sure it’s possible.  I can think of several examples where people were terribly harmed because they wanted to ‘force’ a movement to begin.   

Starting an institution has been done successfully many times.  My observation: Top-down programs with broad scope rarely succeed and are always inefficient.  They tend toward self-protecting bureaucracies that extract more and more of what’s put in, with less and less delivered.   

I believe you’ll have more success creating institutions by working patiently within our sphere of influence and trusting God to manage the scope and scale.  First rule of beginning an institution: It’s not about you. Be firm on principles and flexible on tactics.  Get something working at a small scale before you try to expand rapidly. Demonstrate your program approach helps 1, 10, and 30 people.  This helps you define who the institution is for, and especially who it’s not for. Don’t make your institution utterly dependent on a specific technology which could disappear or drastically change in the future.  You might be an important leader to launch an institution; Getting the right 2^nd, 3^rd, and 10^th people on board is crucial.  Seek complementary strengths and people willing to challenge assumptions.  Design and implement practices as soon as possible so that it no longer depends on you.  

Persistence matters.  Building anything worthwhile takes time.  There are many 10 and 20 year “overnight successes.”  There will always be a significant gap between cause and effect, investment and payoff.  One of the basic laws of human systems is that the more you push on a system the harder it will push back.  Change happens more frequently through flanking maneuvers and “blue ocean” strategies than direct assaults.   

Repairing or reforming institutions is more challenging than building them.  The past and present create momentum which is difficult to overcome.  Almost always new leadership is required.  A significant number of people need to behave differently – and most people will strongly resist “being changed.”  There are plenty of people who will give you advice about “change management.”  The truth is that you can’t manage change.  You can give people new information, create new incentives, and encourage them to make changes.   

Businesses are more successful at reformation than others usually because of massive economic incentives to pivot to new models and markets.  Even then many fail. Most non-profit reformations require key people from an institution to start another one with similar purpose or aims, in part because the status quo usually isn’t threatening enough to get a critical mass of leaders to behave differently.

Let me illustrate this last part – the difficulty of changing an institution which is still partially effective – by discussing the diseases which plague our primary grain crops and cause billions of dollars of losses annually.  Diseases can greatly reduce harvestable yields, but the plants are still successful in producing some seeds.  The plants aren’t doing as well they would without the disease, but the fact that they still produce seeds reduces the evolutionary adaptation pressure.  These key crops are relatively slow to evolve disease defenses because the threat is short of existential extinction. The disease has no “incentive” to evolve to lethal efficiency and kill all their host plants. 

In the same way, institutions which are partially effective – even far less than their critics expect them to be – get something done.  It’s truly difficult and lengthy work to repair or reform an institution from within, so usually only incremental improvements will be justified.

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If you desire to criticize an institution by creating something better, I suggest you ask and answer these questions:

• What sacred cows will I slay?
• What dominant institution do I aim to displace?
• What groups am I disrupting?
• Which people will be furious with me?
• What price am I willing to pay?
• What grievous errors and sins must I avoid to see this through?

For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? (Luke 14:48)

Next, who are the gatekeepers?  Who and what are they protecting? What do they optimize for? Can you work with them, or (more likely) will you need to work around them?  Every institution has an existing set of incentive structures. 

Do not undergo institution building lightly.