Sometimes onboarding means helping someone unlearn the workplace they just left.
An employee may arrive in a new role with habits that made perfect sense in their last environment.
They might ask for approval before making small decisions because mistakes used to be punished, overprepare before bringing bad news because surprises were dangerous, or stay quiet in meetings because speaking up used to cost them.
In the new job, those behaviors can look like insecurity, dependence, or lack of initiative, but sometimes they’re just old survival strategies being carried into a different system.
That’s why I think managers need to be careful not to draw conclusions too quickly from early behavior. A new manager may be seeing a response that was shaped somewhere else, and the employee may still be figuring out whether the old rules apply.
The employee’s task is to learn which expectations still fit. The manager’s task is to give them enough consistent evidence to update those expectations.
That means being clear about what mistakes are acceptable, when independent judgment is expected, how disagreement is handled, and what happens when someone raises a concern.
You can’t erase someone’s workplace history, but you can help them discover that the old rules don’t necessarily apply here.
References: Berne E. The structure and dynamics of organizations and groups. 1963.