Making executive onboarding effective by helping leaders deal with being in the spotlight

A global retailer (Fortune 1) promotes new executives every year — many of whom run businesses larger than most companies. The first 90 days set the trajectory of their success or failure. The company had spent heavily on onboarding programs, executive coaches, and content libraries.

"Officer onboarding isn't sticking. Executives are struggling to on-ramp effectively. We need a better program."

The new executives weren't struggling because of skills, knowledge, or capability gaps. Every one of them was operating at a level that got them promoted or hired in the first place. When we dug in, we realized the blocker to their effective on-ramp was something much more personal — many of them weren't comfortable being in the spotlight. The company's headquarters sit in a small town where a huge share of the population is connected to the company in some way. The moment you become an executive, you're visible everywhere. The grocery store. The restaurant. Your kid's school. Every interaction becomes a Company interaction. The job didn't just change at work. It changed at the dinner table and the gas station. New officers spent their first 90 days managing an identity shift no one had told them was coming. The downstream effect was hesitation, over-correction, and stalled momentum in the role itself. No content was going to fix that.

A simple onboarding program built around the spotlight. Peer cohorts of new officers going through the visibility shift at the same time, with deliberate practice in the moments that mattered. They were mentored by tenured executives who'd been through it — telling the truth about what the first year actually felt like, not the cleaned-up version. The shift was naming the real job and the real challenges — being visible, being watched, being the company in human form — and giving people a way to practice that, with peers, before the stakes got too high.