Onboarding Curiosity: Crafting a Learning Program that Treats Every New Employee like Your Future CEO

There’s a small but significant chance that someone you’ve onboarded at your company… will become its next CEO. Isn’t that the point of hiring, training and developing any employee? To get the maximum value of their skills while helping them become the best version of themselves? To help us craft learning programs that treat all new starters as future CEOs, we’re joined this week by Toby Newman. Toby brings insight from a 20-year L&D career, including his current role where he leads onboarding, wellbeing and learning tech at CH Robinson.

Difficult conversations about management and wellbeing at work are often handled with recycled platitudes. “Speak up if you’re not feeling well.” “Feedback is encouraged and accepted 100% of the time!” “Autonomy is important to employee growth.” But anyone who has ever worked knows that these things are easier said than acted upon. To help us add some actionable nuance to these conversations, we invite Toby Newman as this week’s guest on L&D in Action.

Toby has worked in training and development for 20 years, including a happenstance start as a trainer at Blockbuster. Since then, he has worked in the outsourcing, IT services and logistics industries, in various L&D leadership capacities. As lead of onboarding, wellbeing and learning tech solutions at CH Robinson, it’s Toby’s goal to ensure that every new starter is given the resources from day one that could lead to that individual becoming CEO one day.

Join us as we discuss:

The delicate balance between guidance and autonomy during onboarding
The importance of establishing earnest discourse among employees about thought-provoking–even controversial topics
“The art of feedback” and how to set up dedicated systems for sharing and acting on it
Some helpful ChatGPT prompts and how to deploy those among your people
How to teach your people about wellbeing, rather than just encouraging them to be well
The importance of considering all types of diversity among people in your workforce

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Episode Resources

Toby Newman on LinkedIn
Toby Newman website
getAbstract website
getAbstract on LinkedIn

L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders releases every other Tuesday, bringing you conversations from the best minds in Learning and Development.

Previous guests include: Simon Brown of Novartis, Ravin Jesuthasan of Mercer, Michael Lee Stallard of Connection Culture Group, Michelle Weise of Rise and Design and Dr. Nigel Paine of Learning Now TV.

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