When Your Team Changes

Most advice about integrating new team members is generic to the point of uselessness. "Establish clear communication channels." "Build trust." Thanks, very helpful.

Here's what actually happens when someone joins or leaves: the team resets. Not fully, but enough to matter. The unspoken agreements, the shortcuts, the "you know what I mean" moments—those don't transfer automatically to new people. And when someone leaves, they take context with them that nobody realised they were holding.

This is normal. It's also more disruptive than most managers admit.

The real problem isn't onboarding

New hires get onboarding docs and tool access. That's not the hard part. The hard part is that existing team members often don't adjust how they communicate. They keep using references the new person doesn't have. They assume shared context that doesn't exist yet.

I've seen teams where a new person stayed confused for months—not because anyone was unfriendly, but because nobody slowed down enough to explain the unwritten stuff.

The fix is boring: someone needs to explicitly translate. Not just "here's how we use Slack" but "here's why we made that decision last quarter" and "here's the thing that didn't work that we don't talk about anymore."

Departures are harder than arrivals

When someone leaves, teams often underestimate the gap. Not the job-description gap—the informal-knowledge gap. Who knew why that client was difficult? Who remembered the workaround for that system bug? Who was the person others went to when they were stuck?

That stuff disappears quietly. You only notice it later, when something breaks and nobody knows why.

If you can, do a proper handover. Not a document dump—an actual conversation where the leaving person walks through what they know that isn't written anywhere.

Team building is mostly awkward

I'll be honest: most team building activities don't do much. An escape room won't fix a trust problem. But small, low-stakes interactions do help. Lunch. A coffee chat. Anything where people can be slightly off-script.

The goal isn't bonding. It's just giving people enough exposure to each other that they're comfortable saying "I don't understand" or "I disagree" later.

What actually works

A few things I've seen help:

Pair the new person with someone who isn't their manager for the first few weeks. Not a formal mentor—just someone who can answer the dumb questions without it feeling like a performance review.

Slow down in meetings for the first month. Explain context that feels obvious. It won't be obvious to them.

When someone leaves, ask the rest of the team: "What did they know that we might lose?" Write it down before you forget.

None of this is complicated. It's just easy to skip when you're busy.