There is a critical mistake managers make when we bring someone new onto the team. We focus on the What instead of the Who.
When a new hire starts, the instinct is to drown them in the What. Give them a laptop, a login, a stack of procedures, and a first three week plan mostly with tedious modules and HR videos.
You check the boxes. You feel like you’re onboarding them.
But you’re actually just isolating them.
At the beginning of a new role, learning the new tools and systems takes time.
What really slows people down is navigating the invisible web of the organization. Getting to know who has the historical context, and who can get things done when the official process fails.
So here’s why it gets overlooked. You’ve spent so long at the company that you’ve forgotten what it feels like to be an outsider. Your success is built on a foundation of social capital that you’ve been collecting for years.
New hires have none of it. If you leave them to just sit in a corner and read the employee handbook, you are essentially asking them to build a house without any tools.
And that’s where onboarding fails.
You might think you’re being helpful by giving them space to settle in, but really, you’re just avoiding the emotional labor of facilitating introductions. It’s much easier to point someone toward a document than it is to organize a meaningful connection between two people.
Besides, the checklist feels good. You can see progress as things get completed. Unfortunately, it’s the kind of progress that keeps people busy, not effective.
We say we want new hires to “learn the ropes,” but what they actually need is to understand how things really move. And that won’t happen in a training module.
So, the most effective thing you can do for their long term success is to get them out of their seat and into a conversation with the right people.
One 30 minute coffee with a key stakeholder is worth countless hours of recorded webinars.
If you don't connect them to the right people, they will spend their first six months figuring things out the long way, trying to solve problems that a quick message to the right person could have fixed.
Finally, why are we so afraid to let our new hires be social?
Well, largely because it feels like a loss of control.
As long as a new hire is working through the tasks you assigned, you can see what’s happening. Once they start building their own network, asking their own questions, and finding their own paths, that control starts to fade.
They become more independent. Which is exactly what we say we want.
But not always what we design for.
Cheers,
- - Good Enough