How to lead when you hire a new team member.

Jun 23

4 min read

Joining a new team or organisation can be a daunting, but also really exciting experience. You’ve probably met one or two people already and have an idea about how it might be. You are looking forward to learning about what they do and how they do it. You’ll often also be hoping you ‘fit in’ and feel a sense of belonging with them.

But it doesn’t always go well.

And there’s one thing I think people often miss when someone new joins them. And that is change.

It might sound obvious, but when someone new joins a group, that group is now different. Just by the presence of someone new the group is changed forever. That’s quite dramatic, but it’s actually quite simple. Although some things in groups, teams or organisations might seem fixed, they are actually always changing, we just don’t always notice it.

And when a new member enters your team, that’s a big change, it’s noticeable, it’s obvious.

The problem is, a lot of the time I notice that the new person is simply brought up to speed, shown how the team currently works. Because once that happens, things will go back to ‘normal’, with that person doing the role they were hired for. There is a fixed approach to inducting new people into an organisation or team.

I hear about this happening a lot when a younger person joins an established team. Grumblings about what they ‘should or shouldn’t’ be doing, about their work ethic or ‘idealistic’ view on the workplace. The thing is, nowadays our young people have so much more than previous generations, more information, more ‘intelligence’ at their fingertips, the world is smaller, things move faster. An ever changing world is what they are used to.

This ‘bringing people up to speed, to get things back to normal’ fixed practice when new people join an organisation was a common approach for decades, when roles were more defined and tasks could be repeated time and time again with the same outcome. There are still some roles like that, in the physical manufacturing world for example. And there are still of course some key foundation elements that all new employees or team members will need to know.

However a large part of what people need to do in the workplace nowadays is hugely dynamic. This comes more naturally to younger people who have grown up in a faster paced world - these more fixed approaches can cause confusion, because their brains are having to do something that isn’t normal for them. Ultimately, many lose confidence and drive to engage and succeed in the workplace because they don’t feel valued.

If you look at the way our workplaces and job roles have changed over the past few decades, job descriptions are becoming less specific, individuals need to have a broader range of skills and people need to work together across teams, departments and sometimes organisations to achieve a common goal, rather than work on their own to complete an individual task.

That’s why recognising the change when a new person joins your team is now so critical. The team has now changed. The new person is an individual, with their own views and skills, which will be different from any person who previously held that role or the person you had in your mind to take the role. They will have strengths that your team may never have had before.

An alternative to the fixed approach is to embrace the change by evolving your ‘normal’, continuously. This might sound like I’m suggesting constant change - and depending on your view of ‘change’, you might stop reading now, but I urge you not to! Continuous evolution, if adopted well, doesn’t overload. It means when something isn’t working, you tweak some small things in the way you work to ease the pain. Because it continuously removes pain, it’s actually quite easy. However, the hard bit can be getting there from a more fixed way of working. Continuous evolution is not something a lot of people are consciously used to, despite the world continuously evolving around us.

Try this:

Get your team together, take the opportunity as a group to reevaluate what the team’s purpose and goals are, perhaps cross checking against a wider business strategy and/or some other teams with whom you work closely.

Build a picture together of the team as it is now (not what it was, not what it should be), and how it achieves and measures those goals.

Over the next few weeks and months, keep checking in with what’s working and not working, not just for the new person, for everyone. Keep your purpose and goals close at hand and invite contributions from every single team member.

Through those few months, you will find some things that aren’t working so well, you’ll find some things that are. You can adapt and tweak the team’s ways of working to suit - therefore continuously evolving it until you find a stable way of working that works for every individual on the team AND helps the team continue to achieve its goals.

Everyday: This is a good pattern to get into generally, not just when a new person joins your team. With the world around your organisation changing at a rapid pace, continually checking in and adapting your ways of working is an easy way to keep up, becoming what is needed of you as a team now, not just when the team was formed.

Unsure of where to start? Get in touch.

Whether it’s with integrating a new team member, or simply helping an existing team or department thrive, I can help.