The first team meeting

Meeting individual team members is great, but you also need to consider the team as a whole.

Team meetings are your regular one-to-many or many-to-ones, and an opportunity for team members to talk to each other. Take into consideration the size of your team and their locations if they work remotely. This gives you an indication of how practical it is to meet all of them at the same time and how often.

As a new starter and especially from a manager's perspective, it's a chance for you to gauge and assess the team as a collective entity:

• How well does it function or not?
• What are the staff dynamics?
• Who is the most vocal?
• Who is the most thoughtful?
• Who is agreed with and supported the most?
• How does the team react to organizational change?

Your first day is the best day to have your first team meeting. Depending on your organization and team's setup, it's also best to do this in person where possible. Meeting someone for the first time over video-conferencing just doesn't have the same impact. For one, you can't even share a handshake, which is, after all, an ancient custom to build trust by demonstrating to a potential foe that you are not holding a weapon to harm them.

By making an appropriate occasion for the team to meet up, it also sets the tone that you value group communication and collaboration.

In my experience, this is best done as an informal and shorter meeting. There is no agenda other than a gentle introduction and opportunity for everyone to learn a little bit more about you and each other.

I'm not advocating a grand entrance where you make a long speech about you and what you think the team should do immediately. That is most certainly a counterproductive way to achieve the goal of building trust and relationships with all colleagues in general, but more specifically with developers, who are typically creatives at heart, and value respect for their work and opinions. Ironically, I have witnessed this first hand on an applications team!