Trish's Blog

Every new team member brings something valuable. Not just skills or experience, but a way of seeing; new questions they think are worth asking, assumptions they haven’t yet been told not to challenge, and approaches that feel obvious to them precisely because they haven’t been shaped by how things are done here yet.

But too often, Leaders unintentionally sand that down. Not through bad intent, but through the persistent pressure of existing culture. The informal rules about how meetings run, which ideas get airtime, what counts as a sensible suggestion. New people learn quickly what’s rewarded and what isn’t. And in adapting to fit the norm, they gradually set aside the very things that made them a compelling hire in the first place.

By the time you realises it, the opportunity has already closed. What could have been a genuine moment of rethinking, (of questioning a process that nobody had stopped to examine, or spotting a gap that familiarity had made invisible), has been replaced by another person who sees the work the same way everyone else does.

Weird Wisdom® at Work is about interrupting that pattern early. It means actively engaging new perspectives before they get onboarded out, treating fresh questions not as naivety to be corrected, but as useful friction worth exploring. It means building teams where curiosity about the way things are done is welcomed, not discouraged.

Because every new voice carries within it an opportunity: to rethink something overdue for rethinking, to reset a default that was never really a decision, and to evolve in a direction you and your team couldn’t have found on its own. That opportunity has a short window. The leaders that know how to use it don’t wait.

How do you engage new perspectives in your team?