I was chased for a job once. They kept asking me to apply, but I really wasn’t sure if it was the right move for me. But they persisted and in the end the flattery got the better of me. So, I went for it – full steam, because that’s the only way I know. And then the strange signals started. Yes, they wanted me, but I’d need to be on probation. Yes, I was a great fit, but the promises made began to fall away. Overall if left a bad taste in my mouth. What was this all about? Suffice to say, the job didn’t work out well in the end. And unfortunately, it was a long road that left me pretty wrung out.
Looking back on it now, I marvel at how I missed the signs that all was not right. At how often I blamed myself for not meeting expectations or knowing how to make it work. The dissonance was there from the start – being invited in and then rejected every day in small (and sometimes big) ways. I recognise it now as a type of group dysfunction – the ties that keep an existing group together also makes it hard for it to evolve and allow new people in. Without explicit work, they were not capable of really accepting me, even if they said that’s what they wanted to do. That would involve some kind of breaking in order to re-build and that was too scary.
In an early training on Team Coaching, I read about the need to make sure that ‘this is the team’ before you start. The idea was that there’s no point in spending hours on vision and ways of working if some people are about to leave or join. I understand this at one level, but my experience over the years has been that defining ‘this is the team’ is a fool’s errand. Because change is constant. People come and go, willingly or not, the world changes and demands new configurations of the group. Life is messy and it gets in the way.
So, what can we do to give our teams the chance of adaptation and survival?
🕰️ Acknowledge the past. To get ready to receive new people and really make the changes you say you want, it’s important to name and honour what has gone before. Otherwise, those who are bridging the ‘old’ and ‘new’ team can feel torn or left somewhere in limbo. Talk about who has been and gone. Recognise what they gave the team and the journey that you have been on.
🏗️Understand the challenge. Explore the pressures that demand change in the team. Unpack what’s driving the need for new and different perspectives. Align on why these matter – what’s really at stake? – and make sense of the need to adapt and the contours of the new direction.
🤗 Create space. Allow breathing room for new joiners to understand what they are coming into and create opportunities for them to tell you what they see. Treat their fresh perspective as a gift 🎁not a judgement, even if you disagree with some of it. Find ways to have open, courageous conversations about the new thing that you are creating together.
🐾 Take small steps. You don’t have to be completely aligned straight away. In fact, if you are then you’re probably not really changing much. (It should hurt a bit, like building new muscle). If you can’t reach agreement on the shiny vision, just try to take small steps together, one at a time. That’s usually the only way to get anywhere, anyway.
Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and call out what was happening in that old job. I could have saved myself a lot of pain. But being ‘in’ it means you often can’t see it. If we’d had a team coach we might have done better!
