Integrating new people#
Integrating new people into teams always brings with it struggles: for both the team and the new people involved. I think sometimes not enough emphasis is put on integrating new people, which can make them lose interest in your team and your project.
I’ve seen this in my experiences managing both officers and members of Mines ACM, and in our OreCart app. But also just at a level of being integrated into teams myself. If you’re a human being, at some point you were integrated into a team or group. What made you stay and/or what made you leave? What made you feel valued? These are important things to reflect on when you have your own teams.
The best way I saw at ACM to integrate new people into a community [1] was to simply go and talk with people and break down the twos. Most people would come to the club with someone they knew, and then awkwardly just sit in the back eating pizza and not interacting with anyone but themselves.
I saw this as an opportunity: I would go up to them and talk to them. I’d ask what’s going on in their classes and why they were interested in ACM. Or, if that wasn’t the right vibe, I would act silly. I’m not saying this in a manipulative way, but typically, cracking some awful jokes makes you seem a lot more human to others. There’s obviously a balance so that you don’t lose all of your credibility, but if you can make the newcomer smile, they’ll remember you. And if you can remember their name, they’ll make an effort to get to know you and remember yours too [2].
In the OreCart app development, we were always looking for more hands on deck [3]. Finding interested people was hard enough, but then when we got them into our meetings, it was really difficult to get them truly involved in the product and the development process. I’m not saying I was perfect or successful by any means. I’ve just learned from my mistakes.
One mistake I made was assigning busywork. It’s pretty easy for someone to sniff out that they’re doing irrelevant things. We thought it was necessary to get them in with the codebase, but ultimately their interest would fizzle out and we wouldn’t bother because we had bigger fish to fry. If I could do it again, I would get them involved closer to the heart of the product and have someone mentor them more closely.
Another mistake was not communicating well. I think our “core team” communicated very well and I’m proud of that, but our newcomers were an afterthought. None of us had enough time to mentor [4] and so we couldn’t give the newcomers the time of day and the support that they needed. Invest, literally and metaphorically, into your newcomers. They’re the future of the product and your teams.
Even if your team doesn’t communicate well, be the glue that sticks everything together. People can come to you and you can redirect what they have to say to the right person that needs to hear it. Often, I think this is my best skill on a team: it’s balancing two (or more) fires and holding everything together, like that scene in Captain America: Civil War [5]. It’s the ability to clarify things between everybody and make everyone around you more productive and successful.