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When Half the Team Is New: Building Trust in the First Two Weeks

6 hours ago

8 min read

On a hard day in our operation, the radios crackle without pause, the queues grow faster than anyone can clear them, and the weather has already ruined the plan. More than once on days like that, someone has come to me with tears in their eyes and said they did not know if they could keep going.

I lead a large seasonal operation with hundreds of seasonal staff. Every spring, many of them arrive new. A good number are young, and some are in their first real job. Within days they are expected to meet frustrated guests, find lost children, handle broken equipment and sudden rain with warmth and judgment. Teenagers step into shift-leader roles they have never held before. Guests arrive having saved for the visit. There is little room to negotiate, and almost no time for trust to grow on its own.

That is the setting in which I have learned how much the first two weeks matter. When half the team is new, culture does not travel on posters or kick-off slogans. It travels in what people see leaders do when the day is still confusing, when a mistake is still fresh, and when someone has to decide whether to ask for help or hide.

Why the First Days Decide so Much

Most teams form once and then settle. In a seasonal operation we form again every year, with a few weeks rather than a few months before the gates open. Bruce Tuckman described groups moving through forming, storming, norming and performing. We go through that cycle every spring, with people who may never have worked together before.

I arrived in this role in February 2023. The organization had struggled with high sickness absence, few seasonal colleagues returning, and an unclear vision. A new CEO had already begun turning the culture, and my work was supported from the top.

I had made one promise to myself before I started. Years earlier, in a warehouse, I had tried to control how the work should be done before I understood who I was leading. It cost me months of trust. This time I would start with people. Theories helped — Amy Edmondson, Simon Sinek, Brené Brown — but what rooted the culture was the behavior people saw when things got tough.

Slogans fail a shifting roster because they describe a wish. New people watch for something smaller. Will my leader listen if I say I am lost? Will a mistake become a lecture or a repair? Will anyone still be standing next to me when the queue is longest? Those answers arrive in the first days, long before anyone remembers the welcome presentation.

Make Expectations Visible

After one week in the job I gathered my closest team. We had no slides and no agenda. We sat in a circle and asked two questions I had first used years earlier at IKEA: what behaviors make you feel safe in a team, and what behaviors break trust?

Out of the answers we wrote ground rules: trust each other and treat each other's time with respect; protect the person who is not in the room; dare to say what we feel and listen when someone speaks; stand as one front until we say otherwise; take ownership of what we take on.

Then I asked each of them to share who they were as people, without titles or CVs. Because I could not ask for openness without offering it first, I went first. I told them about loneliness, about working several jobs at once, about going bankrupt and getting up again, and about my fear of not being enough. One by one they told their own stories. In a single afternoon we learned things that would normally take years.

Sharing personal stories only works if it is voluntary, if the leader goes first, and if what is said stays in the room. The aim is to be understood, not exposed.

Later we used the same method with wider teams and turned values into short agreements: tell the truth even when it is uncomfortable; repair conflicts quickly; ask before we assume; speak to people, not about them; ask for help early; admit mistakes without shame. Everyone signed. Once a month we read them aloud and asked where we had lived up to them and where we had fallen short.

Clarity, in my experience, means making it easy to do the right thing. When half the team is new, unspoken rules are invisible walls. Visible agreements give people something to hold onto.

Make Honesty Normal

Psychological safety is easy to misunderstand. It does not mean everyone agrees, or that standards are lowered. Amy Edmondson describes it as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking: saying you disagree, saying you do not know, admitting a mistake, asking a question that might sound naive. Her grid helped me see my own blind spot. High safety with low standards becomes a comfort zone. High standards with low safety become an anxiety zone. Only when both are high do teams reach the learning zone. For a long time I had been creating comfort and calling it safety.

People do not decide whether it is safe to speak by reading a values poster. They watch small, repeated signals. Are your reactions predictable? Do you meet bad news with curiosity or with judgment? Do you admit your own mistakes out loud? What happens to the person who tells the truth? If honesty leads to a cold shoulder, the whole team learns to stay quiet. If it leads to thanks and a next step, the whole team learns to speak.

We needed a ritual for days when pressure stripped away the polite version of the culture. We called it the hard-day debrief. We gather while the day is still fresh, start with what was hard, and ask one question: what made today harder than it had to be? We never ask who. We end with what we need to change so tomorrow is easier for all of us. One sentence became our anchor: we fix the system, not the people.

The clearest example I have comes from a sold-out concert day in our second summer. A system went down as the crowds arrived, and queues grew by the minute. On the Monday after, we gathered the leaders who had worked that day and went through the debrief. What came out was a list of concrete things to fix. Those actions became the foundation for the next big concert a few weeks later. Partway through that day I walked around and saw almost no queues. People asked for help without hesitating and covered for each other without being asked.

As the ritual became ordinary, people stopped dreading the hard days in quite the same way. The work stayed hard, and they knew they would not face those days alone. Trust does not remove chaos. It gives the chaos somewhere to land. In the first two weeks with a new group, I try to go first with humility: I missed that, and that one is on me. I thank people for honesty before I solve anything.

Stand Beside the Team Under Pressure

You find out whether trust is real when someone breaks down behind a kiosk and the team feels as if it is barely holding together. Those are the moments when you show whether what you said on the good days is also true on the bad ones.

One example I often come back to happened in our second summer. The queue for one of our restaurants stretched across the square. I walked in and saw the panic in people's faces. Then my eyes met the restaurant manager's. I did not say a word. I could have marched in as the boss and demanded that everyone speed up. Instead that look said what I felt: I have got you. Focus on one guest at a time, and we will solve the rest together. She went back to the till. I went out into the queue, explained the wait, and pointed guests to other places where they could eat. Then I fetched colleagues from other parts of the operation to keep guiding guests. Out of that day came a role we now call the libero: someone whose job is to help guests get the right expectations about waiting times, or find somewhere else to eat. In the weeks that followed, people started stepping into bottlenecks before I had even noticed them.

Presence takes other forms too. On one of the busiest Saturdays of a summer, someone saw me walking between the units and said, kindly, that I did not need to work in my role. I thought about it for days. If I do not think it is important to be there on a day like that, how can I expect anyone else to? So no, I did not need to work that Saturday. I wanted to. By being there I wanted to show that those days count, and that no title gives anyone a reason to stay away.

When Trust Starts to Flow Sideways

The change that mattered most took a while to notice. Leaders stopped being the only ones who enforced the culture, because the team did it. When someone slipped, the correction came from the person beside them, as a quiet reminder. That is when you know trust has started to flow in every direction.

I have come to believe that when trust only flows from the leader downwards, it is fragile. It depends on one person's mood and stamina, and it disappears when that person leaves. When trust flows between colleagues, from the team back to the leader, and across units, it becomes a force of its own. People hold each other to standards nobody imposed. They step in before they are asked. They tell the truth early, while problems are still small.

You notice it without needing to claim it. Problems arrive while they are still small. Conflicts get resolved in the room instead of in the corridor. Initiative comes from places you did not expect. Mistakes start to sound like: here is what happened, here is what we learned, here is what we will do next. People stop talking about "your culture" and start talking about "our culture."

I want to be honest about what I would do differently. Trust needs time to settle, and I still have a tendency to keep pushing before the organization has caught up. I also once chose not to go in and listen when a few employees told me something felt strange in one part of the operation. I sent an email instead. It still bothers me. The first two weeks are a habit you renew every time a new group arrives.

A Quiet Landing

If you lead a team where many people are new, young, or in their first job, the first two weeks already are the real work. Make expectations visible enough that a new person can act without guessing. Make honesty normal enough that a mistake becomes information rather than a secret. Stand beside people under pressure often enough that they stop protecting themselves and start spending their energy on the guests, the work and each other.

I did not invent these practices. I borrowed, adapted and kept at them on ordinary Tuesdays when nobody was watching. What I have seen is that people tend to mirror the environment they are given. When I showed fear they became cautious. When I showed presence they opened up. Over time, what starts as a behavior becomes a habit, then part of the culture, and finally part of the team's identity. At that point the culture no longer depends on the leader being in the room. That, in my experience, is the clearest sign that trust has taken hold.