When Jacqueline Lopez arrived for her first day on the job as a new program manager at Intel’s Mobile Platforms Group, Jessica Rocha, her boss, handed her a calendar bursting with meetings. These meetings had nothing to do with the usual employee-orientation process, through which new hires learn about Intel’s values and human resources procedures. Rather, Rocha had scheduled face-to-face interviews with people across Intel who had the technical expertise and political “juice” Lopez would need to accomplish her work.

Thanks to Rocha’s foresight, “I ramped up quickly,” Lopez says.

A vital new tool

Rapid onboarding has become particularly vital as workplace turnover rises. In addition, internal restructuring, new competitors and technological advances are reshaping workplace roles and responsibilities—further pressing new managers to learn the ropes quickly.

To address this problem, senior executives must play a more active role. These rapid-onboarding practices will help:

Provide jump-start coaching. One way to get managers off and running is by providing intensive feedback and coaching, says Leigh Branham, author of The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave: How to Recognize the Subtle Signs and Act Before It’s Too Late (Amacom, 2005). During a new manager’s first week, his manager should provide detailed expectations for the first 90 days and ask the new manager to summarize these objectives and measures in a performance agreement.

In a similar vein, Branham suggests conducting “entrance interviews” with new hires to help uncover their strengths and learn which talents they are most interested in developing.

Map out your new manager’s network. “Managers’ effectiveness derives directly from their web of relationships,” says Rollag. With that in mind, map out your new manager’s network before she starts the job. Ask yourself whom she needs to know to carry out her responsibilities. Think about work processes: From whom will she need certain types of information? To whom will she need to provide information? Also consider organizational history: Who has always known how to move projects forward and solve thorny problems?

Some executives also emphasize company values when mapping out a new manager’s network.                               

Also consider network members’ tenure as you build your map. The best networks comprise a blend of long-standing and newer employees, explain Rob Cross and Andrew Parker in The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations (Harvard Business School Press, 2004). Why the blend? You want new managers to benefit from seasoned employees’ wisdom and recent hires’ fresh perspectives.

Follow up. Once the new manager has met all the people you’ve recommended, reinforce these relationships through follow-up.

“Build discussion about the network into regular conversations and status updates,” Rollag says. “Ask, ‘Whom have you talked to? What have you learned from these people? How have you helped them?”’ If the manager has failed to sustain a connection with an important network member, ask why and develop a plan for restoring the link.

As another follow-up strategy, invite the new manager to meetings outside his work responsibilities. Through these encounters, he’ll gain a sense of the organization’s political dynamics and see how the company operates as a whole.

Take advantage of technology. In global organizations, ensuring that your newly hired manager forges connections with the right network members can be especially difficult. When you bring on a new manager, use e-mails to announce his expertise and interests to others. Sign him up for the online discussion groups and mailing lists he’ll need as he ramps up. Show him how to use expertise locators.

If you’re tempted to assume that the sharp manager you just hired can handle his own onboarding, remember that you can vastly accelerate the process. Your reward? A leader who generates better business results faster—and who can strike out on his own sooner.

Lauren Keller Johnson is a Massachusetts-based writer. 

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Use social bonds to fuel collaboration 

When new hires discover that they share interests with others in the organization, they often collaborate more effectively on professional matters. For that reason, when introducing your new manager to members of her network, consider including some personal information about her that she’s comfortable sharing, advises Keith Rollag, assistant professor of management at Babson College, in Wellesley, Massachusets. “Emphasize outside interests or hobbies that might interest other people who aren’t in her group and who do very different jobs.”

Biotechnology firm Genentech (South San Francisco, California) created cross-functional “diversity groups”—each focused on a specific interest—to encourage socializing among staff at all levels. At quarterly networking gatherings for new employees, it encouraged participants to join one or more groups that were of interest to them.

The social bonding in Genentech’s diversity groups has inspired valuable work-related collaboration. For example, when participants in one group learned of an innovative mentoring process developed elsewhere in the company, they implemented a similar process in their own team.

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