Onboarding needs to be a celebration, not paperwork. It should create emotional connections between the new recruit and a maximum number of team members.

In short, the average employee is drowning in complexity. And the outstanding employee, the one who has a chance of keeping up, is a much scarcer resource than many managers are willing to acknowledge. We're designing jobs for superhumans, and it turns out our people are flesh and blood.

In short, the average employee is drowning in complexity. And the outstanding employee, the one who has a chance of keeping up, is a much scarcer resource than many managers are willing to acknowledge. We're designing jobs for superhumans, and it turns out our people are flesh and blood.

Verizon needed to hire new people who could help them to learn — a critical distinction in

organizational goals that our colleague Amy Edmondson has articulated.'' And there was no use putting these hires through a three-month training program when the company did not yet know what the job would actually entail.

Here's the basic message: if you're in the service business, you essentially don't know which people are on your team, when they're showing up, and what they're going to do once they get there. And so you need a plan for managing this uncertainty.