Integrating new members into a team

I find it shocking that new team members in any organisation can just be thrust into a group they have never met, not been really briefed about (and who are rarely briefed about their new recruit either!) with very little by way of readiness.

One such team I coach  at least had the good sense to retrospect about it and we came up with a checklist that I thought would be useful to share.

Ideally this checklist is owned by HR, failing which – the team manager or failing both, the team.  In other words, the team is the last form of inspection before chaos and waste ensure. Each member of the team must be aware of it and know to refer to it if they are aware that an individual is being just dumped into their group.

If you are in a team or coach a team where this has happened (new members are just dumped in) then you might improve by using this simple questionnaire:

  1. Who is this new person?
  2. What  can they do?
  3. What have they been hired to do (or added to the team to do)?
  4. Do we really need those skills?
  5. Do we need them now or can it wait till later (i.e. is this the best time to take on a new member)?
  6. What do they need, to be able to do what we need them to do (training, equipment etc)?
  7. Where do we get what they need from?
  8. Do the business realise that we will lose some velocity by trying to orient them (at least for a short time) and are they prepared?
  9. When do they start?
  10. Who is responsible to assisting them to settle in (this was more an internal ‘who will be their buddy’ in the team question)?

As I write, other teams at this client are incorporating these questions into their new member packs (which they didn’t have  either – they are new).

I know many teams don’t have these issues, but I suspect there are more that do than we realise and as more organisations latch on to ‘agile’ (for better or worse) such behaviour will become more prevalent and come more strikingly in conflict with the ideals of the agile manifesto.

Think about sharing this with others.

Good luck and carpe diem.

  • http://paircoaching.wordpress.com YvesHanoulle

    yes +
    I want my team members to evaluate (aka interview) he upcoming new team members.
    Hire slow.

  • http://www.teamsandtechnology.com David Harvey

    Hi Mike – good points. Except I’d keep it away from the HR department. In my experience the good ones will tell the teams to deal with it themselves (which they should), the bad ones will take your questions, turn them into a process that fits nobody, then add the outcomes to the meaningless annual appraisal cycle, then wonder why no-one’s doing it…

  • http://spretturmarimo.is Dadi Ingolfsson

    Hi Mike,

    Good post. What I’ve been doing in my coaching work is to start teams off with a 3 hour facilitated session that has the following agenda:

    1. Personal Histories (Lencioni) – ca. 1 hour.

    2. Team Dialogue (Avery) – Together or individually answer the following questions:
    * What’s our collective task?
    * What’s in it for you to be on this team?
    * How do we want team members to behave? (Team agreements).
    * What do you bring to the table?

    I find that this works _really_ well for teams when I’m kicking them off on an their agile journey.

    I also think this session would work really well for a team that has had a new member added to it. I aim to try that at the next opportune moment.

    Cheers,
    Dadi.