A leadership team tells me it typically takes three to six months for a new employee to become fully effective.
By the time they’ve learned the systems, understood the organization, built relationships, and gained confidence in their role, months have passed.
The natural questions follow.
Can we improve onboarding?
Do we need better documentation?
Should managers spend more time with new hires?
Those are all reasonable questions.
They just aren’t where I’d begin.
At this point, I’d have questions.
Quite a few of them.
What does “fully effective” actually mean?
Is this true of every new hire, or only certain roles?
What allows some people to become effective more quickly than others?
What takes the longest to learn?
Is it the work itself?
Or is it learning how the organization works?
Do new employees understand what they’re responsible for?
Do they know which decisions they can make on their own?
Can they find the information they need?
Do different people give them different answers?
And where does the knowledge they need currently live?
In documentation?
In systems?
In experienced employees?
In the founder’s head?
Or simply in years of accumulated experience?
Because at some point I’d begin wondering whether we’re actually looking at an onboarding problem.
Perhaps onboarding is revealing something about the organization itself.
A small team can operate remarkably well through shared context.
People know what everyone else is doing. They remember why decisions were made. They know who to ask. Early employees may have absorbed the founder’s thinking through hundreds of conversations.
Very little of this needs to be made explicit.
Until someone new arrives.
They weren’t there for those conversations.
They don’t know the history.
They don’t know that the documented process isn’t actually how the team does things anymore, or that one particular employee has become the unofficial source of truth for an entire area of the business.
What looks like slow onboarding may actually be showing us how much organizational knowledge has remained implicit.
So before trying to make onboarding faster, I’d want to understand something more fundamental:
How does someone learn how this organization actually works?
And that would lead me to a broader question.
How does this organization develop capability?
Suppose the team needs another senior engineer.
Why is hiring externally the first assumption?
Perhaps it’s the right decision.
But perhaps it isn’t.
How close are the strongest mid-level engineers to stepping into that role?
They already possess something an external hire doesn’t: organizational context.
They know the product.
They know the customers.
They know the history.
They know the people.
They know how work actually gets done.
Perhaps what they lack is something the organization could intentionally help them develop.
Mentoring.
Technical depth.
Leadership experience.
Greater responsibility.
Now the hiring question begins to look different.
An external candidate may bring substantial professional capability but little organizational context.
An internal candidate may possess substantial organizational context but need additional professional capability.
So perhaps the question isn’t simply:
Who is more qualified?
Perhaps it’s:
What combination of capability and context does this role actually require — and which can the organization develop more effectively?
That question might reveal possibilities that are easy to miss when growth automatically means looking outside the organization.
Perhaps a mid-level engineer could grow into the senior role.
Perhaps a junior engineer could then begin taking on greater responsibility.
Perhaps someone in another department has quietly been teaching themselves to code for years and is ready for an opportunity.
Perhaps the organization already possesses more capability than it realizes.
This isn’t an argument against hiring.
Sometimes bringing in new people is exactly the right decision.
Fresh perspectives matter.
New experiences matter.
But hiring is only one way an organization grows.
Developing the people who already understand your culture, customers, and business is another.
Only after understanding how knowledge, context, and capability develop inside the organization would I begin suggesting experiments.
Perhaps mentorship becomes more intentional.
Perhaps internal career pathways become easier to see.
Perhaps important context gets captured before it disappears.
Perhaps documentation supports not only onboarding, but internal mobility and decision-making.
Perhaps leaders begin looking for overlooked strengths before opening a new requisition.
The goal isn’t simply to make onboarding faster or fill positions more quickly.
It’s to understand how knowledge, context, and capability develop inside the organization — and how that might need to evolve as the organization grows.
On Tuesday, August 25, I’m hosting an Organizational Lab for founders and leaders who want to explore what slow onboarding may be revealing about their own organizations.
Rather than beginning with a predetermined solution, we’ll begin with the actual situations participants bring into the room and work together to understand what may be happening beneath the apparent problem.
The Lab is limited to six organizations.
Every organization is unique.
The situation you’ve just read isn’t a template.
It’s an example of how I approach complexity.
My goal isn’t to arrive with predetermined answers.
It’s to help your organization better understand itself before deciding what comes next.