Insight
Onboarding A New Leader Into Your ELT or Board – Thoughts from an Experienced Executive Coach, Sarah Parr
Our Managing Director, Doug Mackay , recently spent time with one of our trusted Executive Coaches, who help us to support our clients.
We discussed the topic of how to successfully onboard a new leader into an existing ELT or Board.
The Pressure to Perform: Why New Leaders Need a Thinking Partner
Doug – Sarah, you often talk about being a “thinking partner” and a “critical friend” to the leaders you coach. When a new leader joins an SME, they often feel pressure to have all the answers immediately. How does having an external thinking partner in those first 90 days change the trajectory of their integration and early decision-making?
Sarah – That pressure to perform immediately is completely understandable. A new leader wants to justify the faith placed in them. But jumping straight into “fix-it” mode, before they’ve really understood the landscape, can actually undermine their long-term credibility.
What an executive coach offers in those early weeks is something surprisingly rare at senior level: a genuinely safe space to say “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure I’m reading this correctly.” When you’re new to a business, admitting uncertainty to your team or board can feel risky. An external thinking partner means you can be intellectually honest without feeling exposed.
A significant part of that coaching relationship is also helping new leaders get ruthlessly clear on prioritisation. There are always more demands on their attention than capacity to meet them, and not all decisions carry equal weight. Together, you identify which activities and choices will have the most impact in those first 90 days and which can wait.
An executive coach will also provide independent challenge to assumptions. A new leader arrives with mental models shaped by previous organisations. Those are valuable, but they can lead to misreading the current context. Having someone ask “what are you assuming here, and have you tested that?” shifts their trajectory from reactive problem-solving to intentional, strategic leadership.
The ELT’s Role in Successful Senior Leader Onboarding
Doug – We know that a new leader’s success isn’t just down to them; the existing Executive Leadership Team (ELT) plays a massive role. From your experience, what is the most common mistake ELTs make when bringing a new leader into the fold, and how can coaching help them build a more inclusive and supportive culture from day one?
Sarah – The most common mistake I see is treating onboarding as something that happens to the new leader, rather than something the whole team takes responsibility for.
In SME and founder-led businesses particularly, established leadership teams often have very strong personal relationships built over years. That’s a genuine asset, but it can create an invisible barrier for someone new. The team may not be doing anything consciously exclusionary; they simply already have their rhythms and shorthand. The new leader arrives into something that already feels complete.
For founders, this moment can also be genuinely difficult. Bringing in a senior hire often means relinquishing some control and that’s a significant shift worth acknowledging rather than glossing over.
This is where working with a coach can make a real difference to the existing team. Before the new leader even arrives, a coach can help the team examine where the barriers to integration might be and surface any limiting beliefs that could make it harder for that person to settle and contribute. From there, a coach can work with the team to proactively build trust far more quickly than might happen naturally, by explicitly agreeing how they want to work together and what they each need from one another. A new leader should bring positive disruption. Creating those conditions deliberately means they are far more likely to do exactly that.
Navigating Silos Without Alienating Your New Colleagues
Doug – You have a strong background in team development and breaking down “silo working.” When a new executive steps into a business, they often inherit existing team dynamics and potential silos. How can coaching support them to navigate and positively disrupt these established patterns without alienating their new colleagues?
Sarah – The first thing I’d say is: respect the silos. That might sound counterintuitive, but silos exist for very rational reasons. People work best with colleagues who share their context, language and priorities. There’s nothing inherently wrong with functional teams having strong identities.
The risk isn’t the silo itself. The risk is a leader who only ever operates from within one.
A good executive coach helps new leaders understand the distinction between leading their function and leading the business. These aren’t mutually exclusive, but they require a different mindset. Senior leadership means holding both: deep functional expertise and a genuine interest in the health of the whole organisation.
Rather than arriving with a change agenda that implicitly says “this is broken,” coaching supports leaders to start with curiosity. What are other functions working on? Where are their pressure points? What problems do they have that your team could support and vice versa? This kind of lateral thinking repositions a new leader from someone operating within a silo to a genuine enterprise leader. When they model that approach early, it’s quietly disruptive in the very best sense.
Building Psychological Safety From Day One
Doug – In your coaching practice, you emphasise the importance of “intellectual curiosity” and “compassion.” For an SME owner bringing in a senior hire, how can they practically embed these values into the onboarding process to ensure the new leader feels psychologically safe to explore, ask questions, and occasionally fail during their transition?
Sarah – It starts with awareness of what Michael Bungay Stanier calls the “Advice Monster.” SME owners have often built their businesses on the ability to give answers quickly. Their instinct when someone brings a challenge is to tell them what to do. It feels helpful, but with a new senior hire it sends an unintentional message: “I don’t fully trust your judgement yet.”
Embedding intellectual curiosity and compassion practically means shifting from telling to asking. When your new leader brings you a problem, try: “What’s the real issue here?” or “What options have you considered?” This signals that their thinking process is valued, not just their conclusions. That’s how genuine psychological safety is built, not through a policy or an onboarding document, but through the quality of everyday interactions.
It also means being explicit that getting things wrong in the early stages is expected, not just tolerated. A new leader making a mistake while learning the business is very different from a pattern of poor judgement. Making that distinction clear gives them the freedom to decide with confidence rather than second-guessing everything.
Balancing Quick Wins With Clarity in the First 90 Days
Doug – Finally, the first 90 days are often seen as a sprint to prove value, which can lead to burnout or a loss of clear thinking. How do you work with new leaders to balance the need for quick wins with the necessity of maintaining their well-being, resilience, and strategic clarity?
Sarah – The cognitive load in those first 90 days is immense. We make around 35,000 decisions a day, and for a new leader, a high proportion of those carry real uncertainty because everything is unfamiliar. That’s exhausting in a way that’s easy to underestimate.
When that load becomes unsustainable, decision fatigue sets in. Clarity starts to slip. Leaders begin taking shortcuts, defaulting to habit rather than thinking strategically. Quick wins pursued in this state often aren’t as well considered as they need to be.
A skilled executive coach will help a new leader identify when they do their best thinking and protect that time fiercely. Together, you look honestly at what can be eliminated, delegated or simplified in those early weeks, not to shirk responsibility, but to conserve cognitive capacity for the decisions that genuinely need their full attention.
The coaching relationship itself serves a real function here too. Having a regular space to get things out of your head and examine what’s actually important versus what just feels urgent restores clarity in a way that’s hard to replicate internally. The reframe a good coach offers is this: managing your own decision-making capacity is not a luxury. For a new leader, it is arguably the most important leadership skill of all.
