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How to Join a New Team
September 24, 2021
Strategies for successfully joining and leading a new team.
Whether you’re in the military or civilian world, you’ve likely encountered a time where you’ve had the challenge of joining a new team. Becoming part of a new group can be stressful. Human beings are highly social animals, and we depend on others to survive. While most modern humans live in highly sophisticated and ethical societies, we are still adapted to equate cooperation with our survival. In the past, not getting along with the people in your tribe was about more than not getting a job or losing social media followers. Being disliked by others could have significant physical consequences. With that being the case, it’s no wonder that joining a new team can feel like a life or death experience.
Luckily, it doesn’t have to be that way. Joining a new group can be as easy as implementing a handful of simple tactics. In this OA guide, we’ll give you three tactics that you can use to go from outcast to teammate in record time!
Tactic 1: Have Reserved Confidence
When you join a team that’s working towards a goal, people expect you to help them reach it. You must either have the existing skills required to assist the group, or you must be competent
enough to learn them. The first step to successfully joining a team is to display humble confidence in your abilities. You must show people that you are capable while also being a team player. In other words, you must be confident – not arrogant.
We discussed the difference between confidence and arrogance in a previous OA guide, How to Control Your Ego. But here’s the abbreviated version of how to distinguish between the two: Confidence is reserved while arrogance is loud. When you’re confident, you have faith in your ability to handle any situation that might arise. When you’re arrogant, you’re trying to mask your fear and lack of legitimate confidence behind a wall of loud pageantry.
The best way you can show confidence when joining a new team is to be calm, collected, and only speak when spoken to or when absolutely necessary. The biggest mistake that many people make when joining a new team is trying to immediately adopt the group’s vernacular. For example, if team members casually insult each other for fun, the new individual will try to become part of the team by exhibiting the same behavior. There’s only one problem: they haven’t earned the right to behave like that yet. When first joining a team, stay confident and keep quiet. It will pay huge dividends down the line.
Tactic 2: Underpromise and Overdeliver
As the new guy, all eyes are on you to perform. You’re the unproven outsider, and the team will look for reasons why you don’t belong. The solution: Consistently outperforming targets while maintaining the confidence we mentioned in the previous tactic.
The best way to achieve this regularly is to get a bit daring with how you set expectations on the team. When you’re given a task to complete, be humble and underpromise the standards to which you will complete it. For example, if you think performing the task will take you 15 mins, tell the team that you can get it done in 20; then, overdeliver on your promise by completing it five minutes sooner than the deadline! By consistently surpassing the group’s standards, you’ll develop trust among your new teammates (even if it was your discreet plan all along).
Tactic 3: Recognize the Team’s Influencers
Every human society, group, or collaborative effort involves a hierarchy. Presidents and prime ministers run countries, monarchs run kingdoms, popular kids run schools, the list goes on. When you’re joining a new team, you are an outsider trying to embed into the group’s hierarchy. If you want to do this effectively, you must recognize who leads and influences the group.
At a glance, this task might sound simplistic – the group’s leader or captain is obviously at the top of the hierarchy, right? That’s not always the case. Just because an individual is officially in a position of authority doesn’t mean that they truly control the team. To determine who’s at the top of the team’s hierarchy, you must find out who the group’s influencers are.
The term “influencer” has gotten a bad reputation ever since kids started using social media to show off their awkward dance moves. But all it really refers to is an individual who can control the behaviors of those around them. They are often the loudest and most influential people in the group and command the attention of others. You don’t have to kiss up to the influencers once you identify them. But knowing who they are will help you navigate the team’s hierarchy more effectively.
Knowledge is power. The more you know, the more perspective you will have when making decisions or overcoming obstacles. In the SOF world, having adequate understanding and skills can make the difference between life and death. There’s only one problem: the internet is full of misinformed, bad advice that can ruin your chances of becoming an operator. That’s why we created the Operators Association. When you become a member, you get instant access to our explosive resources like SOF podcasts, live Q&As, operator livestreams, accountability groups, and a community of hundreds of current, former, and future operators. Click here to browse our membership packages
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