4 things you need to do when you join a new team

Malcolm Davies
3 min readSep 23, 2018

I was asked an interview question some time ago that I had often thought about but had never needed to articulate before.

How would you make sure you are a productive member of a team, even if you are new to the role?

I loved this question. It immediately gave me a little extra insight into the role I was interviewing for, and also gave me the chance to talk about something I have previously been complimented on (and have also seen handled badly by colleagues).

So here are the four points I gave to my interview panel this afternoon.

1. Know your role

Take some time to get a really good handle on what you are required to do in your new role. What outcomes or deliverables are you responsible for and how often are you likely to have to do these tasks? If the role has a position or job description, you should be able to get your first snapshot from that, but your immediate supervisor or peers in similar roles are going to be able to flesh this out for you properly.

I am sure this seems remarkably obvious to most people, but I have seen new staff unsure about even their basic duties gum up the works for an entire team.

Which leads to my next point…

2. Know how what you do fits into the bigger picture

Once you know the basics of what you should be spending your time doing, you need to know where that fits in the operations of your team and how your work will be influenced by others and vice versa.

Where, or from whom, do the tasks you will have to work on come from?

And when you’ve finished, who, if anyone, do you need to pass your work on to or notify?

This is usually not as well documented in most organisations, (unless you have just started somewhere that regularly maps out all of its procedures) so you will probably have to rely on your teammates spelling out the workflow for you.

While it may sound a little over the top, it can even be worth drawing simple workflow charts for any complex, infrequent tasks early on so you have a reference for the future, but if you’re ever in doubt…

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Malcolm Davies

Communications specialist, content producer, and problem solver at “large corporate entity” (TM).