Article 5 of 12 — Building Design Teams
Most onboarding, if we’re honest, is just a boring logistics exercise involving the waving of a welcome banner. The laptop arrives, or doesn’t. IT provisions the accounts, well some of them before you go into a screaming rant in a teams call. Then there’s the mandatory e-learning module about phishing and another about fire exits and on and on it goes.
By Friday everyone agrees the onboarding is “sorted,” and the new designer has learned precisely one thing that is carved into the back of their skull - where the company keeps its compliance training. None of that is onboarding - it’s admin. I’m sure we can all agree that admin has never once made anyone feel wanted.
The person sitting through the phishing module isn’t marvelling at the wondrous way this organisation looks after its cyber hygiene. They’re wanting answers to quesrtions a sharepoint page cannot answer: who are these people, how do they actually work when nobody’s on show for the induction schedule. They may be wondering if there actually is room here for the specific thing they were hired to do? The first ninety days will answer that question, whether or not you deliberately tried to produce the right answer or not.
Most of us don’t, and then spend the following year wondering why the perfect new hire never quite solved the problem we identified in the first place.
You hired for a gap. So get in there and prise one open!
Last time, I made the case for hiring the person who fills a gap in the team rather than the one who simply dazzles. That’s the harder half of the job, but it isn’t the whole job.
So, you’ve found the person whose instinct is exactly what the team was missing. Congratulations! You’ve also just created a problem that the interview process was never going to solve for you: a team that has spent months or years optimising itself to work around the gap now has to actually make room for the new person standing in it.
Teams, like most established systems, are definitely not ‘ok’ about newcomers. They have weird habits, off-the-wall inside jokes, and unwritten rules about who gets the final word in a critique (we have someone I jokingly call ‘The Sheriff’). There is a familiar, organic, way of doing things which no one ever questioned because it worked well enough. Then into this walks someone whose entire value, in theory, is that they think differently. The team’s first instinct, not malicious or mean but just very human, is to smooth them out. They explain, kindly, “this how we do things here” until the very difference in the person you hired for gets sanded off.
This is the part of hiring for the gap that nobody warns you about. You don’t just have to find the right person. You have to actively and robustly defend the reason you hired them. Worse still, you have to do this for at least ninety days, against a team that will otherwise absorb them without meaning to. ‘One of us, one of us’ is now chanting in my head…
The two ways it goes wrong
There are two failure modes here and they sit at opposite ends of the same problem, which is why it’s so easy to fix one and simultaneously, accidentally cause the other.
The first is the obvious one: the new graft doesn’t take. The newcomer stays visibly, permanently, apart from the rest. They’re talked over in meetings, their suggestions get a polite nod and no follow-through, but after a few months of this they conclude, not unreasonably, that there was never really space made for them. Some leave. The ones who don’t end up in a worse situation, because they stay and stop trying altogether. The team loses everything it hired them for, through no one team member’s fault, but holistically the game is lost.
The second failure is more subtle, and I think it’s the one that has a more negative effect on design teams, because it looks so much like success. The newcomer, sensing, quite reasonably, that fitting in is the path of least resistance, works out what the team rewards and starts producing exactly that. Within a few months they’re indistinguishable from everyone else. Everyone’s pleased. The onboarding is declared a triumph and the gap you spent months hiring to fill has just quietly reopened, because the reason you hired them, that different insight and approach or ability to ask the awkward question, whatever made them worth the risk, has been sanded down to nothing by a team that was, without any bad intent, trying to be welcoming.
You can hire brilliantly and still lose the entire point of the hire in the first three months, and it will look, from the outside, exactly like things going well.
What actually protects the gap
Protecting against the first failure is the half everyone already half-knows: give the newcomer a real, finishable problem early, rather than either drowning them in the highest-stakes project in the building or parking them on busywork “until they find their feet.” Both of those, in different ways, tell a new hire there isn’t really a place for them yet. A real problem, sized so they can actually land it, is worth more in week three than any amount of onboarding paperwork.
Protecting against the second failure, what I’m calling the ‘sanding-down’, takes something most onboarding plans never mention, which is telling the newcomer, explicitly and more than once, what you hired them for. Not the job description, but the gap. “You ask the question the room usually skips” or “you slow things down in exactly the place we need slowing down” is a completely different piece of information from a list of responsibilities, and it changes how someone behaves in their first critique. Without it, most new designers assume their job is to prove they belong by fitting in as fast as possible, which is exactly backwards. Named early enough, the difference becomes something they’re allowed to keep, rather than something they trade away, one small accommodation at a time, out of politeness.
The other lever, and the one I got wrong for years, is who you pair them with. The instinct is to buddy the newcomer with whoever’s most similar. The same seniority and speciality, the same general interests and attitude, on the theory that like understands like. Resist it!
Similarity produces comfort, not integration; two people who already think alike will happily reinforce each other’s blind spots and call it bonding. Pair the newcomer instead with someone who works differently from them, ideally someone senior enough to have real standing in the room, and ask that person to do one specific thing: notice, out loud, when the newcomer’s different instinct produces a better answer, and say so in front of the team. That single sentence, repeated a handful of times over three months, does more to protect a gap-hire’s distinctiveness than any induction pack ever written.
Ninety days, not ninety minutes
None of this happens in the first week, which is exactly why it gets skipped. The first week is incredibly loud and can be joyfully chaotic. Laptops, logins, introductions, a slightly too-enthusiastic welcome message in Microsoft Teams (yes, I’m that guy). The real work of onboarding happens in the quiet stretch after that, week six or seven, when the novelty has worn off and the team has started treating the newcomer as a known quantity, for better or worse. That’s the moment the gap either survives or doesn’t, and it’s usually happening without anyone in the room actively deciding it.
Ninety days isn’t a countdown to “fully onboarded.” It’s the window in which a genuinely different person either gets folded into a team as themselves, or just gets folded in by becoming slightly less themselves. Only the first version was worth the hiring panel’s trouble. Nobody schedules a one-to-one for the second version and so it just happens, quietly and unremarkably, while everyone congratulates themselves on a smooth start.
Next up: you’ve protected the gap in one designer. Now try doing it across four time zones, three cultures, and a team that’s never once been in the same room. Cohesion gets a lot harder, and a lot more interesting, once “the team” stops meaning “the people near my desk.”
