💥Co-worker collisions

What are some strategies to help make sure newer hires feel included by their peers on a smallish team? The old guard at my organization is very tight knit, which is often nice (everyone gets along!), but it can lead to somewhat of an “us vs. them” mentality when new folks join the fold.

Context: 20-person staff in a public sector organization; the split mainly boils down to staff hired by new leadership vs. those who were there before a pretty big transition.

📣 Dawn Whitfield, HR Specialist at IncentFit:

We have a team of less than 20 employees on a Hybrid Work Schedule. One way that has helped any new employees connect with others is for the new employees to have a “Sit With” with everyone at the company during their first week.

During the “Sit With,” the employees can talk about anything, company-related or personal hobbies/interests, etc. This helps the new employees make connections and feel more comfortable with their colleagues. So far, it has been very successful for us.

📣 Sondra Norris, OD/OE Consulting:

If there is still hiring going on, part of the problem is that new leadership has to earn the trust of the old guard, preferably before hiring new people, but still a worthwhile exercise to prevent further us vs. them fracturing. So, what can they do now?

#1: New leader integration process:

• Acknowledge the success of the old leadership
• Acknowledge that they’re new, that they need to earn the trust of the employees – they’re under scrutiny, so look for small promises they can make and deliver one every 30-45 days.
• Have conversations: what needs fixing? what’s going well? what are people worried about with new leadership coming in? etc.

#2: Remember the human process you’re trying to affect:

• New people need to earn the trust of the old people. Dawn Whitfield has a great suggestion to help encourage that process because it humanizes everyone.
• Pair up or do small groups where the old guard is responsible for bringing new people into the fold – how it works around here, weekly lunches/coffees together. Helping new people get to independent performance faster. Provide conversation guides – these can be about “here’s the job I do here.” “My 2 favorite things about working here.” “How leadership proved (any of our espoused company values).”

NOTES: When it’s the old management team bringing in new people, those new people are almost automatically “let into” the existing employee group. The complicating factor is the new management team. The old guard protects itself from “infiltrators,” with higher standards for being let into the group. Watch out for new hires engaging in old guard-esque bad behaviors to be let into the group.

How do you confront narcissistic behavior in the workplace when it has a long-standing history, with multiple reports, when the individual is a high-performing employee? Knowing that their work is incredibly important and top management does not support the discipline of said individual.

Context: 70+ year-old woman that is incredibly rude and demeaning to people. Has multiple reports about her behavior and because she knows she is a good worker and is valued by top management, continues to treat people badly.

📣 Sondra Norris, OD/OE Consulting:

#1: Stop using words like “narcissistic.” Framing behavior in that or similar ways (“entitled,” “toxic”) sends your thoughts, feelings, and actions in a non-productive direction from the very start. It also makes it hard to zoom out and objectively observe behaviors with no qualifications or attributions, which is one thing that needs to happen here.

#2: This person is not a high-performing employee. High-performing employees don’t behave this way. She may be “high-producing.”

#3: To the leadership: Remind them of what they espouse as the culture of their company/function/team and how this person is threatening, eroding, negating what they are trying to create. This threatens and erodes the trust of the many for the protection of the few. This sets the tone for what is acceptable behavior under their leadership. Left unmanaged and unaddressed, when this person is gone, what will be left?

(Note of irony: it’s amusing how some people are “completely replaceable” and others are “completely irreplaceable.”)

This problem may not be solvable. It may be a case of outlasting and preparing to do damage control after she’s gone.

The requirements to solve the problem are steep and difficult, and don’t change much once she’s gone:

• You’re asking leadership to willingly acknowledge and change how they’ve been behaving for however long they’ve permitted this behavior to go on. That is a hard mental hurdle – one that they believe means admitting they’ve been wrong, they’ve made a mistake.
• It is tremendously difficult for leaders to face and conquer the fear of possible business decline, if this person materially contributes to the bottom line. They must perceive a greater fear of not managing the problem or a much greater reward to manage the problem.

So, keep those roots of the problem in mind. And be ready for continued unwillingness to take action.

Some suggestions:

1. Present leadership with engagement survey data, specifically anything that reflects a declining level of trust in the leadership.
2. Talk about post-this-person: what plans do we need to have in place to mitigate for the business’s loss of their performance, and for rebuilding trust from the employees?
3. Determine if there is any realistic risk of a lawsuit for allowing a hostile work environment to persist under their leadership – this can be very expensive.
4. Start sending the people who are impacted by her to them after you tell them that your objectives are at risk because of how much defending and counseling you are having to do every time she flexes.
5. List very specifically and objectively what this person accomplished and produced in their work over a specific time period, and list the cost of those accomplishments.For example: ACCOMPLISHMENTS: quarterly numbers were great; COSTS: Turnover, reduced productivity in other parts of the business (including time spent talking with people who were negatively impacted by her behavior), new processes and systems that were delayed, lack of bench strength.

📣 Patricia Wortham, Head of Operations at Cypher Tech Inc.:

What Sondra said! I would like to include something as well: Ensure that her institutional knowledge is not only stored with her. Find out if it is documented somewhere or if someone knows exactly what she does and how she does it. How are you moving forward without her knowledge and experience if she leaves?