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How to build trust when you join a new team
Teams are tiny foreign nations
I’ve been thinking recently about how to successfully onboard with a new team. A team is a group of people with a shared purpose and a collective culture. Teams have a way of doing things that make sense to them, especially if they have been working together for any length of time.
If you find yourself joining a team, it’s not unlike walking into a foreign nation where customs, norms and language are likely different from what you are used to. It’s also possible that the things that a team does may look and sound familiar, but are actually vastly different.
I lead a team of project managers. We hire, move folks around and see a variety of team level changes that move teams back into the forming and storming stages of team development.
Slow down to listen and don’t take everything at face value
I’ve noticed that when members of my team onboard with new teams, the people who are most successful are the ones that that take a uniquely long period of time to listen to how the team does things.
They are inquisitive. They get curious about how and why things are done the way they are. They listen for pain points and seek to understand what’s causing them.
