A Short Story
Read Part I for background information.
Helping the team to accept Allen
Jasmine wanted to avoid a situation where the team – because they were such a highly functioning team – shut Allen out. With the contractor, she hadn’t really spent time getting him integrated into the team. She decided on a two-step approach to avoid the same situation: introducing Allen to the team before Monday and then involving him in a few team building activities on Monday as well as reviewing best practices with the team.
That Thursday afternoon Jasmine reached out to the group to call a special 30 minute meeting for Friday morning. Prior to the meeting, she learned a bit more about Allen so she could talk about him to the group.
During the meeting, she mentioned that there would be a new member joining the team and she wanted to spend the time together to talk about Allen and what he was bringing to the team. Jasmine told the group she was thrilled that Allen was joining. She noted that he had been involved in customer service for over 10 years in a variety of roles – many of which included working on site with customers. He has also been involved in the design of the company’s software so understood the product.
She also shared with the group how the company was growing and more people were needed on the team to support an expanding customer base.
Jasmine then asked for ideas on how Allen might be made to feel welcome into the group. She mentioned that they would be doing a few team building activities at Monday’s meeting and they would each have a chance to introduce themselves to Allen and learn more about them.
One member of the team suggested that she would be happy to be Allen’s “buddy,” helping him to learn how the group works together and to introduce him around to others the group works with regularly. Another member of the team suggested that he would be happy to have Allen shadow him for a couple of days so he could get to know the role and meet some of the customers the team worked with.
Jasmine was thrilled at the response from the brief meeting on Friday.
On Monday, when Allen arrived, Jasmine had his work area all set up and introduced him to his “buddy,” Jacklyn. Jacklyn took him out for coffee and told him a bit about the department. She then introduced him to everyone in the group. At the meeting, Jasmine started with a team building activity that enabled everyone to introduce themselves by telling a brief story. The group then reviewed how they worked together (their processes and procedures) and how they might make some changes as the group has grown and their jobs have gotten busier. After a couple more team building activities and discussions about how the group can continue to improve on the work they did, Jasmine felt that Allen was accepted. Certainly throughout the meeting on Monday the group reached out to him a number of time for his thoughts based on his experience.
As a best practice, when someone new joins a team that has been in place for a while and working together successfully, it is important to spend time in introducing that new member into the team and facilitating the team working effectively with the new member. This takes time to do and does not happen overnight. In this story, Jasmine will need to continue to “check in” to be sure all is going well with integrating Allen into the team.
