How to Win Over Your New Team and Make Big Relationships!

How to Win Over Your New Team and Make Big Relationships!

It’s always difficult when you start a new organisation and meet your new team. As leaders, we are often concerned about what our staff expect from us, what their previous experience of leadership has been and more importantly if they will believe in us and will work with us.

Likewise, a change in senior management can be an incredibly disconcerting experience for staff and the approach you take; can be the difference between an easy start or an experience from hell. Change is never easy and particularly for staff because new leadership creates uncertainty, causes staff to worry about their security which means they can become incredibly defensive, and spend their time protecting themselves rather than playing to their strengths which is what you want as you start building your relationship together.

As leaders, we need to manage that change for our new team as best as we can.

Here are five things you might want to consider doing when you first meet and engage with your team.

1. Meet the Team - When you first join a new organisation, in a senior leadership role, you can easily get caught up in the ‘job’ when you first start and as much as you might want to meet the team, other things can sometimes get in the way and it can be a little while before you get the chance to wander out of your office to meet them. The sooner that you meet them, the quicker the relationship you will eventually develop will start so the first piece of advice is… get out and meet them in your first week. Staff will already be wondering when they will get a chance to meet you and if they haven’t met you within the first week in your role then it will take longer to build that ever-important relationship so start as soon as you can and settle in early. One of the things that a lot of leaders do straight away is to set up a meeting in which everyone will attend where you will all be introduced at once and sometimes this can work effectively. It's also been my experience, however that this can set up a division between you and your new team, so where possible; invite them to a less formal setting in small groups where you can get the opportunity to talk to them more intimately and get a feel for what they expect and need from you and you can get a sense of who they are and how they will react to you and your leadership.

2. Make sure you know their names - Meeting people for the first time is always daunting and there is always pressure as leaders to make an impact straight away. I find that the best way to do this is to make sure that I memorise or remember their names. Making each encounter personal and unforgettable by using their names, will make sure that you leave an impact. There is nothing worse than when you’re working with someone and they keep asking you your name. I know it might not seem important to you, but remember this isn’t about you; it’s about them, and it will show them that if you care enough about them to remember their name then when they experience difficulty, then you will care enough about them to take the time to listen to them. I know that not everyone has a photographic memory and that a lot of people struggle to remember names and there are a few tricks that you can do such as office plans with staff names or even name badges in the early days to help you to remember them. You might not remember everything from that first meeting, but make sure you make their first meeting memorable by remembering their names.

3. Find out what motivates them – Understanding what makes your new staff tick can help you to determine how best to lead them. Some people need constant praise and reassurance in the early stages, whilst others prefer less management and more meaningful work that stretches and challenges them. Motivating staff can require you to consider not only your staff’s professional capacity but also their personal lives, it can mean looking at the way they integrate into the team, their openness for promotion but also their purpose in life in order to really work out what inspires them to deliver their best results. You’ve often heard the saying ‘Treat people the way that you would want to be treated’ but actually that doesn’t always work with staff. Instead you have to understand and then appreciate how they need to be treated in order to get the very best out of them. Now that doesn’t translate into allowing them to behave in an inappropriate way, or pander to them in an effort to get them to do their work. Instead you have to respect the way that they want to engage with you and the organisation and influence them with your own behaviour to get them to work at their very best which is what you need if you want to succeed.

4. Make change gradually – many new leaders when they start a new job, seek to change things straight away. They perhaps feel the need to do this; to demonstrate the impact they believe they need to have, early on. Making changes when you haven’t necessarily got a full understanding of what is happening in the organisation is risky. It not only opens you up to the inevitable criticism of ‘I told you so’ if things don’t go to plan but more importantly; it also loses you the opportunity to engage with your staff to seek their opinions on things. People like to be considered and involved in decision making, it makes them feel important and valued, but it also creates a culture in the organisation, where staff feel they can speak up and be heard. So even though you might feel the need to make a statement by making a change, make sure you do so after you weighed up the situation appropriately and you’ve given your new staff the chance to show what they can do!

5. Make sure you treat them fairly - When a new leader joins the organisation, one of the things that staff will often judge them on is not just how they treat individuals but specifically how they treat all of their staff. Making sure as a leader that you are fair and consistent in the way that you deal with staff is crucial to winning over your team. Fairness is one of the key components cited in psychological safety in organisations’ and it is one that can be the difference between being able to continue to work with your staff or not. Fairness is at the heart of every person’s moral compass and if they feel that they have not been treated fairly then it can result in them not only disengaging but in some instances completely disappearing from the organisation. Treating staff fairly will develop respect from your team and will ensure that everyone is engaged in working towards the same goals. It is very easy when we start to focus on certain people and that’s usually because these people will often be the ones to offer to undertake work, to help you and provide you with support when you request it. So, it’s natural that you will tend to lean more towards these individuals but sometimes staff take time to ‘warm’ to you and as a result, they may come across as aloof or distant and that might make you try to spend even more time with them to get them more engaged. Make sure that you spend an equal amount of time and focus on all of your staff so that you do not create any divisions within the organisation.

I hope you've got some value from this post and hope it helps you and your new teams to become truly invincible!

Jo C

Senior Leader, TEDx Speaker and Identity Coach, Jo Corbishley works with Senior Leaders to create cohesive teams by helping them to find out who they are and what they love about themselves, their colleagues and their jobs so they can work effectively in harmony.