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My new hire quit after 3 weeks. He said we made him feel like a burden.
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That's why it's so important for new managers and leaders, at any level of seniority and experience, who are joining either externally or from another team, to always start with learning from the team and learning how things are done, rather than coming in hot with ego and bravado and making changes to processes that they don't fully understand for reasons they might not have imagined. You see horror stories of managers who have done this far too often for it to still be happening.
Starting a new job is always challenging for anyone, and without the proper support and process to guide a new hire to success, even the most capable candidates can feel frustrated and as if they are falling short. There's a reason why onboarding processes and training are so important and often implemented.
As you sift through documents, flip through slideshow presentations, and endure long and boring training modules It may all seem like a pointless bureaucracy a but as soon as you start your first job at an organization that conspicuously lacks anything passing for an onboarding process and instead simply expects you to hit the ground running and perform, you quickly come to missing the boring presentations that ease you in to things as you instead navigate cortisol inducing chaos and unclear unrealistic expectations.
As a manager tasked with onboarding, it might seem like an impossible task to train a new member while your team is already behind and drowning in the workload due to being short-staffed, but it is so important to invest that time and invest it early, and it almost always pays off. Even if the new hire doesn't quit in frustration, the wasted time, energy, and resources spent retraining something that wasn't trained in the first place will multiply into much larger issues.
This manager described how their small team had hired an eager graduate student. The manager, who was supposed to be training and onboarding the new team member, found themself “too busy” to spend the time necessary during the employee's first few days. The employee was left to “shadow” their busy team members, who were also too busy and hadn't been assigned the task of doing so, leaving the employee instead sitting awkwardly and then frustratingly idle. This eventually prompted the new hire to quit only 3 weeks into starting their new job.
Despite their own clear shortcomings in the situation, this at least caused the manager to pause and reflect and share their own thoughts on this increasingly important workplace topic.
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