Top Three Take-Aways for Onboarding Your First Executive Director
You’ve hired your first ED! Now what?
It’s not an uncommon question to ask once you’ve accomplished the herculean task of hiring your start-up’s first Executive Director. It has been no small feat to get to this point. You’ve been dreaming of opening a beautiful new children’s museum that’s just right for your community. You’ve put in countless volunteer hours to turn that dream into reality. You’ve raised the funds to hire an actual paid employee at the leadership level. You’ve posted the position description far and wide, called on everyone in your rolodex, and over the last several months you’ve brought up this once-in-a-career opportunity at every social event you’ve attended. You’ve fielded resumes and cover letters, reviewed credentials, conducted interviews, checked references, drawn-up an offer letter, negotiated compensation (and gave-in on that extra week of PTO), and you’ve successfully landed your museum’s very first Executive Director. Whew! Congratulations!
High fives around the Board table, pop the champagne, and enjoy the success of this major achievement. You’re a major step closer to finally realizing your dream: opening an amazing children’s museum for your community. Your first ED’s start-date has been set, and you can visualize your to-do list being cut in half, thanks to the miracle of paid employment.
But wait a minute. Aren’t you expending your non-profit’s hard-earned dollars on this new position, and didn’t you promise donors you’d make the most of every dollar? Isn’t every paid hour depleting your museum’s checking account, and isn’t that checking account balance finite? Plus, there’s so much work to do, and most of it’s time-sensitive. How can anyone be expected to make sense of it all?
To make it even more complicated, when an emerging children’s museum hires its first ED, we’re often finding the right candidate from outside of the children’s museum sector. Unless you’re willing to pay the price of relocating an experienced children’s museum executive director, your first hire is most likely bringing transferable skills, but not direct experience.
In 2015, I moved from Mankato, Minnesota to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to lead Knock Knock Children’s Museum through opening and initial operations. I was an experienced ED who had started up a children’s museum (the Children’s Museum of Southern Minnesota). I can tell you that not only is a relocation fee part of the standard offer (and expensive), but it takes a top-notch recruiting firm to convince the right candidate that it’s worth moving across the country. Those headhunter contracts aren’t cheap!
The reality is that most smaller emerging children’s museums don’t get this luxury. If you’re like a current client of mine, a recently opened children’s museum located in a smaller town, you are likely hiring a local candidate from outside the children’s museum sector, who demonstrates an aptitude for leadership growth but doesn’t come with executive leadership under their belt. These circumstances make onboarding even more critical to your start-up’s success. Not only will the new hire need to learn the job, but they’ll need to learn the industry!
You don’t have an HR department on staff yet, so it falls to you and the rest of the volunteer board of directors to train this new person. It’s going to take some sweat equity, but when your community recognizes your rising-star ED as the face of the children’s museum, you’ll be thanking yourself for what you put into onboarding now.
Recognizing that onboarding is critical to her museum’s success, my client has contracted me to make the most of her new ED’s critical first weeks and months. Their HR point-person on the Board of Directors is handling their onboarding checklist, so my role is to focus on initial training, long-term development, and transitioning the onboarding process into a plan for on-going all-staff training. We’re a few weeks into the process, and here are the top three take-aways so far:
Itemized Deliverables — We started planning for onboarding by vetting out 11 goals and deliverables for the onboarding process, ranging from building-up the disposition for donor cultivation to focusing on efficiency and accountability skills and practices. A sampling of our goals and deliverables include:
Building awareness and vocabulary around the impacts of children’s museums, play, and interactive learning.
Forming a view of “visitor experience” as the foundation of carrying out the museum’s mission.
Developing the Executive Director mindset: practices, habits, and tools of the successful ED.
Strategies for creating a culture of accountability and growth. How can we empower staff as play workers to learn, grow, and excel? This includes starting a plan for on-going all-staff training and professional development.
Time for questions and dialogue, affirmation, and emotional support.
Face Time — We’re currently chipping away at these goals by meeting each week for one hour. We started by reviewing an 11-point “Jump Starter Questionnaire” to center our time together on the 11 goals and deliverables. The questionnaire established a baseline for each onboarding goal and helped us craft a framework for progressing through our deliverables. For example, the questionnaire prompted a far-ranging discussion of the make-it or break-it points behind visitor experience. From that foundation, I can provide resources, support, and next steps for developing up a more comprehensive view of visitor experience and its relationship to mission. Importantly, these meetings give us time for dialogue and a space for the ED to feel safe to share their fears and anxieties in their new and challenging role. It gives us an opportunity to be reflective, vulnerable, affirming, and supportive in our work together.
Strategic Action Planning — One of the phenomena of the first several weeks and months as a new Executive Director is the “drinking from the firehose” effect. There is just simply too much to do every moment of every day. This often leads to a sense of being overwhelmed and can quickly slide into a toxic stress situation of decreased productivity and increased misery. Often, museums try to prioritize and organize their work through the typical strategic plan process, which may take months and look out over years. In the onboarding situation, something much more pragmatic and action-focused is needed. It makes me think of growing up on a dairy farm – you can never get to all the work, so you prioritize the most important tasks hour by hour, day by day, week by week, season by season.
Next up, I’m going to facilitate strategic action planning with the ED and the Board of Directors to frame-up the work in front of them. We’ll be leaving this planning session with a “Strategic Action Plan,” a working document that prioritizes the museum's goals and objectives and applies actions toward those goals over the next six months. It assigns roles and responsibilities, timing, and resources. I’ve done this type of action planning with other clients, and while it’s an imperfect process like any strategic planning, it does a good job of providing focus, realistic expectations, and clearer next steps on the most important priorities. That should help the new ED drink from the hose without drowning.
Be sure to check back to What’s New In Museums blog as my adventures in ED onboarding continue.
BONUS: Check-out this article from the First Round Review on how Warby Parker makes the most of onboarding as part of the employee lifecycle: https://review.firstround.com/how-warby-parker-makes-every-point-in-its-employee-lifecycle-extraordinary.
