Stop! We’re Headed to Poland!

Nobody expected us to move the business to Poland.

But there it was. Word came down from headquarters, “Get ready. We’re offshoring your entire business unit.”

I use the experience as an example of how even the elimination of your job can create opportunities if you look for the positive.

I had been hired to grow a brand new training department. I was to build talent and create pipelines for career mobility and advancement, as well as to upgrade business and leadership skills. The division executive brought me in and we were off to a great start.

Four months into this journey, the company CEO announced that we would be offshoring the whole business unit for cost savings.

Nearly all of my leadership team peers began searching for new jobs but I saw the positive: When else might I ever have the opportunity to lead the learning and development portion of a business unit offshoring?

I decided to stick around through the full length of the transition–another 18 months.

This was a huge organizational change. For me, it was challenging and fun.

As it all shook out, I got to test out the improvements I had made to our employee onboarding system. When the notice came down, I had already been working on strategies and tactics to get new hires up to full productivity in 3 months, instead of the previous 6 months.

Yes, that’s a 50% reduction in time to full productivity!

And it worked. It turned out to be very useful for the offshoring transition.

I’m glad I had the experience.

It wasn’t something I would necessarily sign up for again without a full consultant’s compensation, but it was a rare opportunity from a career standpoint.

In the midst of the slippery chaos of standing up a brand new office location with all-new staff in Poland, the onboarding and training methods I had created served us well. I got to travel over to Warsaw for three weeks to supervise and see it working. (And to train my own replacement.)

The concept of rapid onboarding isn’t hard, but it is detailed. It’s something that even many Fortune 1,000 corporations overlook. This high-speed onboarding strategy is based mostly on structured on-the-job training plus a good dose of effective automation.

The secret is being intentional about how new hires and their supervisors and peers are spending their time. They have to know what the new person needs to learn. And they have to know when, why, how, and how well. To do this, you have to know what full productivity looks like, and how to measure it in different kinds of jobs.

I built that all into the onboarding and training strategy and then I prepared my volunteer trainers.

While the training team was skeptical at first, they gave it their best effort. They weren’t experienced trainers. They were subject matter experts I had trained to go over to Poland and teach their replacements how to do their jobs. Every one of them handled this with professionalism. I was very proud of them all, even though they didn’t technically report to me.

The results were excellent. We had motivated new hires, solid training material, and the system of checklists and processes I had created. I equipped the Warsaw training team (all new, themselves) to pick this up and use it. Within 3 months, the new staff members reached full production capacity. (The information systems kept failing on them, but that’s another story.)

This rapid onboarding and training method became part of my professional toolkit. Every person who is new to a role wants to do a good job. But there is a lot of discipline and teamwork involved in bringing them on board and up to speed. Doing this well with a solid, easily-understood plan and plenty of support helps the new employee succeed and creates a favorable impression of their new company.

In the end, I didn’t get what I had expected from my time managing training at that company. I got a great and unexpected opportunity, instead. And it worked out okay in the end.

All because I looked for the positive, instead of letting my Saboteurs tell me this was unequivocally bad.

Seeing the positive, intentionally, is ultimately a matter of choice.

May you look for and see the unexpected opportunities in everything that comes your way!

Cheers,
–Steve

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P.S. - If you’d like to learn more about this onboarding and training method, or the train-the-trainer methods I used, contact me and we can find a few minutes to chat. I’d be happy to share.