Preparedness vs humility: How I look at joining a new team

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Ahoy,

Joining a new team can be really scary.

One of my recent premium editions was all about joining a team that wasn’t necessarily performing.

And that can be a real challenge to try and get the team up to standard.

But what can be equally daunting is joining a new team that are performing really well…

You don’t want to come in and mess things up!

I had this challenge before.

The submarine had been deployed for a significant period of time, and the team was incredibly close.

When you go through a long submarine tour, you cant help but build a close team!

And now I would be joining, a complete stranger… an outsider… being thrown into an extremely tight team.

There are a lot of things I was thinking about:

• Will I be able to integrate into the team?

• How will I overcome the fact that they’re all more experienced than me?

• How can I not cause too much damage early days?!

All thoughts that were rushing through my head in the approach to joining the boat.

So here’s what I did.

I am very bullish on the idea of not being that person that arrives somewhere new and makes a tonne of changes like they’re an expert on the place.

If you’re going to make changes, give it some time, then make small incremental changes over time - This is a topic I’ve talked quite a bit about in the past, so wont go into any more detail right now.

For me, the priority needs to be on integration.

This was especially important to me given how tight the team was.

I needed to work my way into the circle so to say.

The number one way to do that?

• Humility

I knew I hadn’t done what these guys had just done.

I knew many of them were more knowledgeable and more experienced than me.

And they knew it too!

Pretending otherwise would have driven the team further away.

So I needed to integrate by showing humility.

But this doesn’t mean constantly asking for help!

You need to find a balance, you need to prove you are competent, but also not afraid to know where your limits are and ask for help.

If you ask for help with everything, it shows you haven’t prepared, so striking this balance was really important for me, and will be for joining any team.

I worked extremely hard to prove to everyone that I knew what I was doing and I was here to earn my place in the team.

But I also showed humility, I asked for help when I needed it.

And over time, the team trusted my professional abilities more and more and as a result I was quickly integrated into the team.

So the number one lesson here is, show humility when you join a team, but make sure you’re prepared!

As I was writing this, my initial plan was to continue on with a breakdown of some of the other thoughts going through my head when I joined this team. What my approach was going to be etc. But I realised as I wrote this, how important this one point was, so I want to double down on it today.

What specifically did this look like for me?

One example of how I implemented this was in defect reporting

While I had a foundational level of knowledge on all the equipment we were responsible for in our department, I was not the specialist on any on bit of kit.

However, it was expected that I had a reasonable level of knowledge.

Therefore, I did my homework before even arriving on the boat, and would continuously spend time learning about the kit.

That way, when it came to defect reporting, I could write out an initial assessment of the defect.

I could then go to the expert and say something along the lines of:

“Hey as you know, we have this defect. I’ve written out this initial report. As you’re the expert, could you take a look through it and make sure I haven’t got anything wrong and let me know if there is any more detail I can add.”

By doing this, I’m proving a certain level of competency before asking for help.

But I’m still recognising the knowledge and expertise of the team.

Finding the balance can be awkward and it looks different for every environment but I hope you get the idea!

As always, have a great day.

Reece