How I prepared to join a submarine

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Ahoy,

I was preparing to join my second submarine.

The unit was deployed when I was told which boat I would be going to. In fact, this was more than just a normal deployment. The boat had been around the world, deployed for the last 9 months.

They were an extremely close knit team that I was going to be thrown into.

Joining a new team can always be a little scary.

• What are they going to think of you?

• What are they like?

• Will you fit in?

But when that team has spent the last 9 months living together, going through tough times, with only each other…

That’s a tough team to jump into.

And to make things even harder (because it wasn’t challenging enough), I was going to be in responsible for a part of the department.

This was a new job for me, with a new team.

I had three big questions swimming around in my head:

1. How am I going to integrate into this team quickly?

2. How am I going to prove to the team that I’m competent?

3. How am I going to get the team winning as quickly as possible?

The first two questions were mainly based around budling my leadership capital quickly.

I always advocate for a “relationship based leadership” approach, which is exactly the approach I took here.

And the third question was a more work focused problem.

I wanted our team to deliver some outstanding results quickly, so my management knew that I was someone that could deliver, and therefore be trusted.

I had flown abroad to meet the submarine in a foreign port. Here we had 5 days of a “run ashore”, before the unit would be ready to start sailing back home.

As soon as we left the wall, I would be in the hot seat.

So here was the game plan.

• Use the time not at sea to introduce myself, but let the team have their time together. After all that time away, they needed time as a team outside of work to decompress. A new boss hanging around is not what they needed!

• Once we left the wall I would make time to casually meet everyone. I wanted to quickly prove I was easy to get on with and no longer a stranger.

• I’d take the time to get to know everyone properly when we were back alongside. At this point I’d book 20/30 minute appointments with everyone to get to know them when they’re not so busy.

• During the limited time at sea we had, I worked overtime to prove I had the competence to operate at sea. And as soon as we get back alongside, I need to present a plan of attack for the maintenance period.

• Once we’re back alongside, we were going to start smashing out maintenance tasks. Prioritising a few easy wins to build momentum and a big project we had lined up.

This approach allowed me to very quickly integrate with the team. I employed almost everything I knew about building rapport with people to help clear the friction that existed by me coming in as an outsider.

On top of that, prioritising quickly delivering results proved my competence to the team and management.

And a team that starts winning quickly can carry that momentum much easier than starting from nothing.

This gave me and the rest of the team breathing space to start working on the big projects.

So when you’re joining a new team, ask yourself these three questions:

1. How am I going to integrate into this team quickly?

2. How am I going to prove to the team that I’m competent?

3. How am I going to get the team winning as quickly as possible?

As always I hope you got something from this email.

Have a great rest of your day.

Reece

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