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“Connections That Count”—Empowering Employees by Nurturing • 133

mavens, but their own extensive personal connections allow new hires to
more quickly locate the resources they need to complete important tasks.
New hires’ managers should also create more individualized stakeholder
maps to ensure that new hires understand who in the firm can best help
them succeed in their roles. Managers should also instruct new hires to
create their own maps over the course of the first year, drawing on the
firm’s strategy and the nature of their roles for guidance. That way, new
hires can one day serve as connectors for future classes of new hires. As
we’ll discuss later, these maps can also serve as valuable tools for the teach-
ing of strategy.

Best Principle #4: Make it interactive.
It is not enough to circulate lists of contacts or post information on
the Internet; you have to make social relationship building, well, social.
Mentoring and buddy programs offer an excellent beginning; not only can
new hires gain the mentor or buddy as social contacts, but these individ-
uals can take steps to help new hires engage with others (e.g., by arrang-
ing meetings with other employees or pointing new hires to other
employees, leveraging existing opportunities for socialization). Lunch and
Learn events with experienced employees allow new hires to interact up
the organizational chart, developing contacts potentially useful not only
for the performance of future work tasks but for future career development
as well.
For their executive hires, John Deere pre-schedules meetings for the
first three to four months with key functional heads throughout the organ-
ization. Bristol-Myers Squibb likewise organizes meetings between new
hires and important colleagues, using HR and an outside consultant to
monitor progress during Year One. With such mechanisms in place, hires
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get to ask the point people any questions they might have, and they also
become familiar with the stakeholders who make decisions. PepsiCo tries
to make acculturation and strategic insight learning fun by having new
executives participate in an informational “scavenger hunt”—an intricate,
daily/ weekly challenge that executives handle by tracking down individ-
uals who possess the right information. By participating, new hires estab-
lish a network across the company, and they learn the specific roles of
network members. As a result, they can soon call on the right people to
help with future real business problems.