A regional insurance company hired a brilliant actuary. Top marks. Big potential. Every day, he would come in early, sit at his assigned workstation. Eyes sharp, shirt tucked. Ideas ready, but eight months later, he walked out.
“I still do not know why I was there,” he told me. “Nobody explained how my work mattered. I just kept submitting reports. No feedback. When I asked for a copy of the strategic plan, my direct supervisor simply told me that “it is confidential.” I was there, with no direction. Just… noise.”
He had been headhunted. He was gold. But they buried him in the admin. That is what poor onboarding does: it kills momentum quietly.
One truth most HR manuals never say is that most onboarding is an expensive waste of time. You throw new hires into a whirlwind of passwords, policy files, and polite PowerPoints. Then you leave the most important part of the onboarding process to them to figure it out.
You expect them to deliver results, yet you never showed them what “results” actually look like. You told them the strategy, but never showed them their place in it. You feed those goals, but not meaning.
At a client in the insurance sector, I did a strategy audit. The EXCO was frustrated. “We are not seeing the impact of our hires. The team looks busy, but nothing is moving.”
That is always my cue. I deep-dived into the onboarding process. As our organizational development professor, Munene, used to tell us in the MBA class, “Quality at the gate is useless if the people do not know the why, what, and how.” He was right. Onboarding is as important as hiring right.
There was no link between job roles and strategy. No use cases. No early wins. Just paperwork, access cards, and desk allocations. New staff were onboarded into survival, not execution. They were ghosts with job titles. So, I suggested that we change the ritual. We created the Strategy Welcome Map (Table 5). Each new hire gets a visual one-pager showing:
- Our war plan: where we are going and why it matters
- Where your role sits in the strategy battlefield
- What success looks like—clear KPIs tied to the actual strategy
- The first 90-day mission: What you must fix, improve, or create
- Your execution allies: who you depend on, and who depends on you
The first 90 days of execution map Mr. Strategy’s tools
We also ran “Immersion Week,” five days where new hires do not just listen, they shadow. They walk the frontline. They meet real clients. They simulate decisions. They present their 90-day execution plan to EXCO by day five.
That company’s CEO later called me. “Mr. Strategy,” he said, “It feels like we finally switched on the lights.”
Let me be direct. If your new staff are confused, your strategy will stall. If they cannot connect their daily work to the organization’s battle plan, you will keep shouting KPIs to a team that is busy, not effective.
Here is the leadership activity I give during strategy sprints. The 90-day Onboarding Execution plan activity. Start today. Bring HR, EXCO, and operations heads into one room.
Ask:
- What must every new hire understand by Day 5?
- How will we measure onboarding success after 30, 60, and 90 days?
- What part of the strategy must they “own” from day one?
- How will we track their integration, not just attendance?
- Do not hand them a laptop and call it onboarding. Give them a mission.
Because strategy does not fail in the boardroom, it fails at the desk where a ghost sits, working, but not winning. I have seen it—too many times. You want traction? Then onboard for execution, not orientation.
Have any upcoming strategy retreats? Let’s make it memorable.
Mr. Strategy
