Make Lateral Hiring Work
Lateral hires bring new energy and ideas to established teams but often push too hard too fast, then feel excluded or limited by existing team members who can feel threatened by this disruptive energy.
We help the expanded team become more open to finding new ways of doing things together.
What
Lateral hires, both individuals and teams, often struggle to fit in to new cultures. Under pressure to prove their worth, they can fail to understand the environment into which they have landed, and end up making poor decisions, and internal enemies. This leads to underperformance and they often move on quickly.
At the same time, existing people and teams can feel pushed out, overlooked and implicitly criticised as failing. Fearful of the ‘bright shiny new thing’, they can exclude the new person or team, withhold information or friendship from them, and help create the conditions for them to fail. In doing so, they set the path for a more complete failure of the whole.
Why
Integrating new hires requires flexibility in both attitude and working practices. New people often bring new and different energy and enthusiasm, but they don’t usually have all the answers. Better practice comes from blending the new with old, allowing new working styles and ideas to emerge. The new whole really is greater than the sum of its parts.
How
This integration combines many of the elements with which we regularly work. It brings in valuing difference, accepting change, tolerating different ways of being, setting aside assumptions, developing curiosity, and suspending judgment. We work with teams and individuals to enable them to bring their hopes and visions, values and personal purpose to the fore; to help them work together to collectively work out their mission; and to implement it over a period of months, supported by a bespoke coaching process for the people/teams involved.
Recent Engagement
A global law firm needed help to build resilience to the ambivalence provoked by lateral hires on both sides
Lateral hires are the place where hope for change meets insecurities about change
Creating the conditions for lateral hires to succeed is one of the most talked about issues for our clients. A leading law firm client described it thus: lateral hires offer excitement, an influx of new ideas and energy, and the potential to accelerate performance. But too often, we don’t know what to do with them. We fail them because we are unable to be agile enough to bring them on board and enable them to ‘do their thing’. Too often, they’re met with resistance and a ‘that’s not how we do things here’ culture.
This client understood the problem, but found it difficult to shift entrenched behaviours and attitudes amongst existing team members and the firm more generally. Working alongside them, we recognised that the existing team was balancing a combination of useful information – how to get things done, the culture we enjoy in our team – alongside the disillusionment of when things hadn’t worked out, and the sense that the incomers were not respecting existing ways of behaving. The incomers, however, were experiencing frustration and bewilderment at obstacles put in their way, negative attitudes, and the inability to get on with the job they were excited to do.
The route to unlocking these entrenched positions came from building trust between the existing team members and the incomers. Using benefit of the doubt framing, we facilitated group conversations where individuals were able to express their fears and frustrations in the certainty that those listening would be encouraged to respond in an accepting and open-minded way, free from preconceptions. This enabled vulnerability, empathic response and the co-creation of new ways of working more collaboratively going forward.