From the course: Coaching New Hires

Pilot: Identify small experiments for your new hire to tackle while onboarding

From the course: Coaching New Hires

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Pilot: Identify small experiments for your new hire to tackle while onboarding

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- The third stage of the pivot method is pilot, small experiments that you can work with your new team member to set up related to projects that you brainstormed during the scan stage. Pilots and stretch assignments help create a sense of psychological safety. Think about a pilot episode of a TV show. It's a test to help the network determine whether to pick up the full series. At Google, we had a saying, launch and iterate. Pilots allow you to explore smaller projects for your new hire that can become bigger initiatives if successful, both in terms of their interests and strengths and impact to your team's core goals. A strong pilot helps somebody identify three Es. Do you enjoy this area? Can you become an expert at it? And is there room to expand? In terms of onboarding, pilots could include shadowing a team member for half a day or asking someone they haven't spent much time with out to lunch or coffee, both of which could be virtual if working remotely. To give an example of a project pilot, when I went through coach training in 2008 while working at Google, it had nothing to do with my role on the AdWords product training team. The career development team didn't even exist yet, so I jumped into a 10% project helping make one-on-one coaching free and scalable to any Googler. One year later, when a role on the newly-formed career development team opened up in people operations, I had proven my interests to move on to it, expanding my coaching capabilities and co-creating the Global Career Guru Dropping Coaching program, one still in place today.

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