Perfecting a people puttanesca

Shamelessly building on Erica Hughberg 's truly excellent post on pasta engineering, but from a people perspective. Particularly, a team perspective. Well, actually, an adding-new-people-to-a-team perspective.

Puttanesca is a pasta sauce which has a load of different ingredients and flavours. Combined well, it's absolutely amazing. Combined badly, you want nothing to do with it.

You can probably see where I'm going in relation to teams here.

This week on the Human-Centric Engineering Substack, we have John Durrant on leveraging the "new person effect". Or "how to successfully add capers and make a puttanesca you are proud of".

I'm getting mixed up in my own metaphor here.

Here's the start of the article from John

Note: The full article is available to read here

Bringing a new person into a team will change the people and the dynamics within the team. The new person will also change as they acculturate to their new environment. When the chemistry works, the effect can be transformative.

This article is inspired by a few events that have popped up for me personally this week, and the title is directly inspired by a LinkedIn post from John Cutler:?

We cannot know in advance how the new person and the team will gel together and what the outcome will be. Whether the new person will lead the way in inspiring change, or whether the new person will be compromised through their need to fit in with the pre-existing culture.

Individuals and how they interact in teams is complex. The performance of the overall team cannot be determined by looking at the skills and experience of the individuals, it's their emergent behaviour as they work together to form relationships which will determine their overall capabilities as a team. Injecting a new person into a team is like a chemistry experiment that has never been done before. As chemicals react and crystalise in different ways according to the prevailing conditions, so do team members. Leveraging the new person effect and the resulting chemical reaction is more art than science. This article explores some of the many factors worth considering when playing with team chemistry through the introduction of a new person into the team.

Ripples and waves

A new hire will make ripples or waves.

Having dabbled in flatwater marathon kayaking in the past I’ve experienced both the enabling and disabling power of people making waves. We have a term ‘wash hanging’ to describe the enabling effect of positioning your kayak in the wash of the person in front of you, pulling you along with less effort. But flatwater kayaks are thin and very unstable - a group of flatwater kayakers will hang off one another’s wash - a little like geese flying in formation to conserve energy.

However, if you’re in the vicinity of several powered boats churning up the water around you, the choppiness of the water means you’ll have to work very hard to avoid a capsize.

A new hire will likely make ripples or waves when they join. They might have the potential to make huge enabling waves, changing mindsets and propelling people forward - or their potential may be stifled to ripples, depending on whether the ‘new person effect’ can be leveraged. If they turn into a bad hire, or if the environment turns them bad, they’ll make disabling waves. The stakes are high.

Below are some of the many ways of looking at the new person’s experiences and whether they might produce ripples or waves.

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To keep going, take a look at the full article, especially looking at how you can help to improve time-to-productivity by breaking it down into:

1. Time-to-mastery
2. Time-to-autonomy
3. Time-to-purpose

Read the full article which is freely available here