Bringing a new person into a close-knit work environment can be tricky. This is true in the best of circumstances, when nobody is feeling crunched for time and all of the proverbial ducks are in a row. But let’s be honest, hiring rarely happens in those ideal conditions — typically the team has an urgent need for the extra hands, which means the focus of onboarding is often to get the new person up to speed on the work to be done, as quickly as humanly possible.
That kind of mindset makes it difficult to create the space and time to understand something far more basic: how, exactly, is this newly minted team going to function? When intentional team formation doesn’t happen, people can develop dramatically different understandings of the work, processes, and approaches that are needed to get things done. In the best case, this creates slowdowns and a few misunderstandings. In a worst case, this results in an environment where teammates cannot actually work together.
At the start of the year when Brook and Claire started Topknot, they worked with their coach to design a new working alliance that existed on top of their existing friendship. Then, earlier last month, the team added Daphne into the mix, which called for another set of conversations and a redesigned alliance. To learn more about each other, they used the foundational coaching competency of awareness to drive discussions ranging from group working agreements, individual and team values, and divisions of areas of ownership.
The team recently reflected on Daphne’s onboarding and the impact it’s had on their team so far.
Who wants to start by defining awareness?
brook: I’ll take it. So awareness is the ability to take in different sources of information and process them in order to notice patterns and find places that should really be explored or dug into more deeply. Awareness is an overarching competency that a lot of other things fall under or emerge from. Unless we are able to process what we’re seeing , feeling, and noticing in ourselves and other people, we don’t actually have access to those steps that come further down the line — like naming or proposing something. It’s the foundational step that a lot of the activities on Topknot, and even our team interactions, are built off of.
Daphne’s onboarding used a foundation of awareness. Where did this push the conversation to a place it might not have gone?
brook: One of the things that I really noticed a lot in Daphne’s first week is that we all entered these conversations with a lot of curiosity. It wasn’t, “There will be a test at the end of this week — hope you memorize all these documents we gave you!” The vibe was very much like “I’m curious to understand how you work and how we work.” The standout conversation for me was the one around shared team agreements. That conversation came after we had done loads of actual work together and talked a lot about who we are as people and how we handle situations. That foundation gave us the space to leverage our curiosity and to say things like “Here is a thought about what seems to be important to you, tell me how this lands.” We took the space to offer up suggestions, explore different paths, and see what made sense. The only reason we were able to do that is because we were leveraging awareness by deeply paying attention to one another over the course of the week.
Daphne: Yeah, I would agree with that — I even noticed patterns in each other and within myself. It was through our conversations that I realized how important autonomy is to me. Now when I look back on my life I’m like, “Duh,” but I just did not occur to me that that was something I valued so strongly. In fact before this onboarding week I had never even sat back and asked myself “What do I value?” I just didn’t take the time and now I’m understanding how important it is to be more aware of these things about myself. Towards the end of the week when we were discussing those teams values y’all were like, “We think this is something that’s kind of important to you because it’s shown up like five times.” Oh, right! I think there’s something incredibly tactical and pragmatic about having these kinds of discussions because you just need to know where you and the person across from you stand and it’s through your values that you can help figure that out.
Claire: I appreciate that pragmatism point. The timing of your onboarding was right after launch. There were a million other potential priorities. I knew that I was going to feel that tension and that it would be hard for me to spend a week doing what feels like a little bit of a standstill. It’s deeply important work and, in retrospect, the only way I would have wanted to do it. Self awareness allowed me to anticipate a feeling I knew I was going to have and then like not have that be problematic.
Where was the most surprising place awareness showed up for you?
Claire: I thought the activity where we showed “Me at my best, me when I’m stressed ” was particularly helpful. Oftentimes we try to generalize and say “Who we are typically?” Putting yourself at those extremes on the spectrum is really quite revealing. [editor’s note: The activity Claire is referring to asked each person to create two slides representing who they are when they are 1/ working at their best, and 2/ working at their most stressed. We each used a mix of visuals including photos, gifs, emojis, and memes. After presenting these slides we discussed what this means for our shared work and team approach. Brook picked up this team building exercise from Sarah Filman, her former team lead at Code.org — thanks, Sarah!]
Daphne: I liked that exercise for similar reasons. How I show up for myself and for the team when I’m at my best versus my most stressed — those conversations were so honest and so important. It makes me wonder why more spaces aren’t doing them. I think it’s actually kind of crazy that I haven’t had that up until this point because they’re so fundamental to how you would work with people, how the team operates. I just can’t see it working any other way now.
brook: I think the thing that I found most surprising was the snowball effect of having a few intentionally placed discussions about who we are and how we show up — the things you both are talking about. Those had this downstream effect on our later conversations. The reason to be aware is so that you dig deeper, and I noticed all of us making connections that I think otherwise wouldn’t have happened. By identifying who we are in these different situations gave us fodder for more interesting conversations about how the product works or where the company’s going or whatever other “real work” conversations.
So why isn’t everyone running onboarding this way?
Claire: I’m really compelled by this question. I think the typical orientation is to get people acclimated to how things currently exist and up to speed on policies. The only thing that we had to go off of is who we are as people. But there’s also this extreme vulnerability that we showed. The notion of bringing your whole self is false because you’re acutely aware that there’s some level judgment. I’m not even sure if seven months ago, when we first started Topknot, I would have been able to go there. It’s just a lot of trust.
brook: Well, and I think that part of that trust came from the fact that we all knew each other already. We knew one another AND we knew that friendship wasn’t enough. This is one of the things that came through both when Claire and I started working on Topknot — being friends isn’t a guarantee that you work in the same way.All that being friends means is that I still want to like you when we’re done for the day. It doesn’t mean that we’re just going to mesh together perfectly.
Daphne: I have experienced situations where you’re working with a friend in a different kind of capacity and you skip those kinds of conversations. And when I look back on it, we really should have had them because maybe then we would have realized sooner rather than later that we actually weren’t compatible to work together on this thing. I could have saved ourselves a lot of time and even a little bit of grief, and in some cases we could have saved the friendship. What I was stepping into with you all, was a different kind of relationship. I just have not experienced this in any other working environment. I understand, too, what’s really difficult is getting this to scale because I think it’s much easier to do it with two or three people than it is with like an org of 100, 500, 1000 people.
This post was originally published on the Topknot blog on Tuesday, October 6th, 2020.
