As a new hire at a company, especially as a leader, it’s easy to fall into a trap of “I need to change things in order to seem valuable”. This is a highly dangerous mentality and I’ll explain why.

This isn’t your house. You didn’t spend years of your life building it with long long days and literal blood sweat and tears. Change isn’t an easy thing to swallow, especially for people that have worked at the company you joined.

“But change for change’s sake can be more damaging to your efforts towards creating an engaged and inspired workforce than no change at all”

John F. Kennedy

It’s the old adage of a bull in a china shop. It never works out well for the bull or the china shop.

Don’ts

• Don’t introduce a new technology right away
• Don’t introduce a new technology and have no business case for it
• Don’t introduce changes as “this is what I want to do”
• Don’t respond to “why?” with hostility
• Don’t blame existing issues on existing or even past team members
• Don’t suggest changes then put the burden of proof on someone else

So how do I assimilate as a leader

I’ve been thinking about how I would assimilate to another team lately, especially with what I’ve learned about how not to assimilate into a company and I think my approach, after understanding the product, team, and technology would be to:

Understand the current pain points

You want to help make a difference as quick as possible? Understand the pain points a team has. By collecting problems, you can start to form solutions. By having solutions, you can choose low hanging fruit that can provide value with smaller efforts. Many teams have these tasks, but fall into a comfortable pace and don’t get back to them, despite them causing them pain.

Collaborate

This is the big difference between a bull in a china shop and a true team player. You have ideas, but how they fit into the current architecture and systems can be hard to determine when you are new. By collaborating with members embedded on the team and existing leaders, you can incept your ideas to where they aren’t your ideas but rather our ideas. It can make change less jarring.

Overcome resource issues

Teams are usually already running at 100%. Implementing change when there’s no more bandwidth is an uphill battle. Some ways to combat this are to:

• Provide the tasks to the project managers and pose the updates/fixes as velocity increasers. It may take time now but it will save X time in the future
• Do the task yourself! (of course don’t push it to production, but if you can fix little pain points, it’ll score points with existing members)
• If work allocation is a pain point, think about how to rearrange teams for better distribution of work

In the end…

In the end it’s all about empathy and understanding. New leaders are hard to deal with, especially ones with great ambitions. Gain a team’s trust little by little. Make their lives easier, not harder, and mesh your agenda with their needs.