You’ve carefully selected the right new manager for your growing business. Now, how do you integrate that person into a leadership team that’s been working closely together from the start? Research from Wharton’s Henning Piezunka has determined there’s one absolutely wrong way to do it.
Inserting the new manager into every business and social activity at the company is a well-intentioned mistake, he said. Founders may think it’s an effective way to bring the hire quickly into the fold, but the established managers perceive the newbie as an intruder. Collaboration breaks down, and the hire usually leaves before the company can benefit from their expertise.
It doesn’t work because the original team has forged “irreplicable experiences” in the struggle to get the business off the ground, and their tight bond leaves little room for anyone else to squeeze in.
“Managers underestimate how special these relationships are and believe they can just onboard someone,” said Piezunka, a management professor who has done related research on founder and CEO succession. “You’re inclined to blame the intruder, but you’re sending them on the wrong mission. The top management team isn’t geared toward having another equivalent member in there.”
This failure to launch is the focus of Piezunka’s latest paper, “Welcome, Stranger.” It was co-authored with Jian Bai Li, a strategy and policy professor at the National University of Singapore, and appears in the Strategic Management Journal.
Piezunka said he wanted to understand why management hires often don’t work out when companies are scaling, despite the obvious need for someone with specialized skills who can help them conquer new challenges. He was also frustrated with the conventional advice about the best ways to build management teams and trust.
“Managers underestimate how special these relationships are and believe they can just onboard someone.”— Henning Piezunka
“An offsite weekend retreat doesn’t replace 10 years of working with each other,” he said. “The advice is trivial. The group has a specific culture to it, specific norms. When we think about trust formation, we typically think one-on-one, but there’s a group dynamic that can be detrimental for the new person.”
After Failure, Firms Tried a Different Approach
Piezunka and Li gathered data on eight private manufacturing firms that were founded in three rural towns in the mid-1990s. A single founder CEO hired all the managers from the local area, and the initial teams worked together to establish successful businesses. Then e-commerce came along. Seizing the opportunity to scale, each firm hired a new manager with online expertise around 2010.
Piezunka and Li conducted deep interviews with the founder, managers, new hires, employees, and indirect observers of the firms. They also attended management meetings, conferences, social banquets, and community events to observe interactions among top managers, mid-level managers, and factory workers. From nearly 600 interviews and 500 hours of observational data, a clear pattern emerged. Each firm initially took an “extensive involvement” approach, injecting the new hire into the wide range of company and social tasks performed by established managers. But the shared history of the original team proved to be too much. In each instance, the newcomer quit within 18 months.
Still needing new expertise, four of the eight firms tried hiring again with a different approach. Instead of insinuating the newcomer into every activity, they tried “selective involvement” with more independent tasks and fewer invites to social functions. It worked. The established team no longer saw the new person as an intruder, and the relationships developed more organically. In an interview, one of the established managers told the professors, “I think collaboration takes time, and sometimes it’s better to let it develop from a distance than to force it by sticking strangers close together.”
Overcoming the ‘Intruder Trap’
For Piezunka, the biggest reveal of the study was just how spectacularly the extensive involvement approach failed. But he didn’t need hundreds of data points from his analysis to understand why. A native of Germany, he knows what it feels like to be the outsider.
“When we think about trust formation, we typically think one-on-one, but there’s a group dynamic that can be detrimental for the new person.”— Henning Piezunka
“As an immigrant to the United States, my English was great, but I didn’t know who Bruce Springsteen was. I didn’t know that Ted Kennedy was very much on the left. I didn’t know what it means to drink the Kool-Aid or throw a Hail Mary pass,” he said. “I’m lacking cultural capital, and I need to build this up. There are experiences I can’t read up on, and even if I could, it wouldn’t get me there.”
Piezunka said the study draws attention to the importance of organizational design. When operations are scaling, they need to consider the personal relationships, behaviors, boundaries, and norms — not just workflows and responsibilities. Businesses with tightly knit teams can avoid the “intruder trap” through selective involvement of new hires. It’s a gentler way of welcoming the stranger, he said.
He hopes the study will help managers better understand social networks, so they set newcomers up for success.
“It’s been a frustration for me with management research in general that I sometimes think we are not taking the audience seriously,” Piezunka said. “We act as though there are these hacks that suddenly make someone 5% more productive. In my opinion, the best thing we can do is give people a nuanced understanding of social situations and then to allow them to navigate it.”
