A team working at pace with ten things to fix will usually get most of them right, but some things can still slip. These tend to be the ones nobody had time to look at twice. Ordinarily the team would manage their work comfortably. When a remediation starts or a programme build goes live, there often aren’t enough hours in the day, and extra hands make sense.
Despite this, that help can feel critical, or just not useful. I’ve been on both sides. I’ve been brought in to support a team at crunch time, and I’ve been the person receiving that help. The reaction in both directions had little to do with the quality of the help on offer.
The setting varies. A group function supporting a local entity. Second line looking at a first line process. A secondment. Someone brought in for the duration of a remediation programme. The labels differ. Handled badly, the reaction tends to be the same.
Why help arrives as judgement
In my experience the reason is simple. The person or team arriving has no defined place, and can only contribute by finding a way in. They read the work, they form a view, they offer it. Offered from no particular position, that view can be hard to tell apart from criticism, however carefully it’s framed.
Seniority can make this reaction worse. Someone with more experience than the team, and no clearly stated reason for being there, invites the two unwelcome questions. Is this a judgement on what we did? Is this person here to replace me? Both are reasonable, and often have little to do with the person or team that arrived.
What gets scoped and what does not
Programmes are scoped carefully. Workstreams, deliverables, milestones, governance, reporting lines. The arrival of the people brought in to help doesn’t always get the same treatment. Bringing someone in because the team will benefit from that experience is a reason. It isn’t a scope.
Bringing someone in because the team will benefit from that experience is a reason. It isn’t a scope.
Where that happens, the new person often has to look for work rather than being given it, and the focus tends to land where they happened to look rather than where it was needed. The in-house team may take the input as optional, or as a threat, depending on how their day is going. Such defensiveness isn’t insecurity, it’s a reasonable response when the pressure is high.
The part that is easy to settle
The fix should be easy, a proper scope of work, written down and agreed. What are they there to do? What are the deliverables? Who do they report to? Who is responsible for the work in BAU? And how is that input absorbed by the team?
That last question gets the least attention, and the scope of the work is only half the design. The other half is deciding where the input lands, who has time to receive it, and who turns it into a decision.
The part that matters most when it is missed
Often, the thing that gets missed is time. The team receiving the input needs room in the week to take it in. Anyone who has run these types of programmes knows that time allocation is where even good planning struggles. Plans tend to assume nothing will go wrong, that nobody needs upskilling, and that no post sits vacant. Where that is how the schedule was built, there is no room in it for somebody else’s view, however good that view is.
I have been on the wrong side of this as the internal. Working on a large project with a full workload, a team carrying vacancies and no slack at all in the schedule, we weren’t gracious about the people brought in to support us, and I doubt we gave their work the attention it deserved. The decision to bring them in was sound and well intentioned. With no capacity to absorb it, it felt like an additional burden.
Absorbing that input is a leadership job rather than an individual one. Someone on the receiving side has to take it in, decide what it changes, and pass on what the team needs from it. Left to individuals to pick up when they can, it tends to disappear. The person arriving should be helping to define that rather than waiting to be placed. Anyone senior enough to be worth bringing in has seen how this goes wrong before, and is usually well placed to agree with the sponsor what is needed to ensure the extra support is useful.
What it costs to leave it open
That gap, not ensuring the extra input is absorbed, can get framed as a question of team dynamics, which undersells it. An institution buying senior expertise is buying judgement or capacity it does not have in the building. Judgement only becomes a decision if it reaches the person who can act on it, in a form they can act on.
The way this gets accounted for afterwards rarely helps anyone. The person brought in can be judged not to have delivered, and the team judged not to have made use of the extra capacity. It’s just like blaming somebody for not following a procedure, rather than asking whether it could be followed. Neither reading is fair to the people involved.
Most of this comes back to the same place, a short conversation before the work starts, about where this person sits and how their input is meant to land. In my experience it is a conversation the incoming party should be opening with the sponsor rather than waiting, since they are the ones who have seen how it can fail. The expertise is the straightforward thing to buy. Making room for it is the part that has to be designed.