Successfully leading an inherited team
In my work, I often support leaders who are taking on the challenge of leading a team that already existed before they arrived. It is an exciting yet delicate moment that can shape both the leader’s own journey and the evolution of the team he has inherited. In this article, I want to share a few keys to help you make a good start and take on this challenge successfully.
Sometimes this happens after a promotion or a change of role within the same organisation. At other times, it follows a move to a new company, where the leader assumes responsibility for a team that was already operating before him. In both cases, one metaphor comes to my mind:
Taking over the leadership of an existing team
is like relieving the driver of a train still moving.
Business cannot stop, and the new leader needs to take the controls while understanding the route, getting to know the people travelling with him and beginning to decide where to go and how to move forward.
Leaders often begin with enthusiasm and the drive needed to take on a new challenge. They arrive with a mandate and expectations from the organisation, as well as their own expectations, and probably some ideas about what they want to accomplish. But beware: he is not boarding an empty train.
The team has a history that predates him. It is made up of people with different capabilities and expectations, has its own way of relating, established habits, and shared successes and difficulties. It is also part of an organisation that largely shapes what happens within it.
That is why, before making decisions, it can be helpful to broaden your perspective and observe the team through four dimensions that coexist at all times.
These form two polarities that a leader must learn to balance:
tasks-people and inside-outside the team.
Placing excessive emphasis on tasks, goals and results can leave people feeling unseen and valued only for what they produce, with a corresponding impact on their motivation and commitment. But swinging the pendulum to the opposite extreme does not work either: a team that focuses solely on people‘s wellbeing, while losing sight of its results and purpose, will struggle to remain viable.
Placing excessive emphasis on inside, with trust, strong relationships and excellent dynamics, yet still fail to meet the needs of the organisation, its customers or its stakeholders. Conversely, a leader who is overly focused on the outside and constantly trying to satisfy the demands of the wider environment may lose the connection and commitment of the team. The challenge is not to choose one side or the other, but to hold both and find the balance the team needs at each stage.
We may have a team of outstanding professionals whose relational dynamics nevertheless make collaboration difficult. We may have strong relationships but unclear objectives. Or we may have a team that is perfectly aligned internally but has stopped paying enough attention to the needs of those it serves.
Leading a team you have inherited requires learning to consider these four interconnected dimensions simultaneously. But where should you begin? Here are seven keys to help you start successfully leading the team you have inherited:
1. OBSERVE AND UNDERSTAND BEFORE INTERVENING
The arrival of a new leader usually creates expectations at every level of the organisation. Senior management expects results, the team watches every move, and the leader may feel the need to show quickly that his arrival will bring change. That is precisely why it is important not to fall into the trap of acting too quickly.
The early days should be used to listen, observe and understand. Speak individually with each person, learn about their experience and expectations, and discover what they believe works and what should be improved. But also observe the team in action: how decisions are made, how information flows, what happens when someone disagrees, who takes up the most space, who barely participates, which conversations take place and which seem to be avoided. Understanding the team also means understanding its history. Some current dynamics will probably make far more sense once you discover where they come from.
This observation should cover all four dimensions mentioned earlier, not only what happens inside the team but also what happens outside it. Speaking with other departments, internal or external customers, and relevant stakeholders will help you understand the impact the team is having beyond its own perception of itself.
The incoming leader will probably be eager to roll up their sleeves and start taking action. This is not about postponing decisions indefinitely, but about avoiding major decisions based on a reality you still know very little about.
2. FORM YOUR OWN VIEW OF PEOPLE
When we join a new team, we rarely do so without prior information. We may already have been told that uone person is difficult, another has enormous potential, two team members have never got along, or someone is absolutely indispensable. All of this information can be useful. Listen to it, but do not let it become the lens through which you interpret everything you see.
First, remember that labels have a remarkable capacity to confirm themselves: when we expect to see a particular behaviour, we tend to pay more attention to whatever confirms that expectation.
Second, remember that new leadership also offers an opportunity to see people through fresh eyes. Your arrival introduces a new element into the system and, when one element changes, the dynamics within the system change too.
This does not mean ignoring existing information or naively starting from scratch. It means listening without immediately turning what you hear into a verdict, and allowing your own experience with each person to complete, confirm or challenge what you have been told.
3. REINFORCE THE PURPOSE BEFORE DISCUSSING GOALS
Once you understand the starting point, it is worth returning to an essential question: why does this team exist? It may seem obvious, but you would be surprised by how often, when working with real teams in organisations, I have found that not everyone has a sufficiently clear and shared answer.
Before redefining goals, indicators or responsibilities, we need to ensure that people understand the contribution expected from them as a team. Knowing my own job perfectly does not necessarily mean understanding why we are together.
Once that shared purpose is clear, it becomes much easier to review the priorities for the new stage and translate them into goals, responsibilities, indicators and success criteria. It also helps identify possible contradictions: tasks that no longer add value, overlapping responsibilities, individual goals that hinder collective ones, or important matters with no clear owner.
Purpose provides the direction; goals and indicators
turn it into focus and results.
4. REVIEW AND ALIGN CAPABILITIES AND ROLES
Only once we understand where the team needs to go can we properly assess whether we have the capabilities required to get there. There is an important nuance here: we should avoid a binary view that divides people into those who are suitable and those who are not.
Someone may have performed exceptionally well at an earlier stage but need to develop new capabilities for the next one. Another person may be bored in a role that does not allow them to use their strengths. There may be untapped potential, poorly distributed responsibilities, or critical capabilities concentrated in just one person.
Reviewing a team’s composition does not necessarily mean letting
employees go. It means finding a better fit between people, capabilities,
key roles, and the needs of both the team and the organisation.
This may involve training, developing, repositioning, expanding or reducing responsibilities, complementing profiles, and creating opportunities for particular capabilities to find the space where they can add the most value.
On some occasions, difficult decisions may also be necessary, including parting ways with a team member. But this should be a carefully considered decision, made only after understanding what the team needs, what that person can genuinely contribute, and what options exist for adaptation or development – not simply as the result of a first impression.
5. BUILD A WAY OF WORKING TOGETHER
Every team has a way of working, even if it has never defined it consciously. It has rules about how decisions are made, how disagreements are managed, how information is shared, how help is requested, and what happens when someone makes a mistake. Some are explicit; many others have simply become ‘the way we do things here’. This is the team’s culture. It coexists with the organisational culture, but it is not necessarily the same.
The arrival of a new leader offers an excellent opportunity to review how the team works. Not to impose a new way of working, which would probably create more resistance than commitment, but to build it together with the team.
This may be the moment to review meetings that continue simply because they have always existed, clarify how different kinds of decisions will be made, agree how information will be shared, create space for strategic conversations, or decide how the team wants to handle disagreements.
It will also be important to identify the “booster” behaviours the team wants to encourage: listening, transparency, keeping commitments, the ability to disagree and shared accountability, as well as the “blocking” behaviours it needs to reduce: withholding information, avoiding difficult conversations, blaming others, creating silos, dismissing different opinions, or systematically placing individual interests ahead of collective ones.
Relationships do not happen on the margins of work. The way we relate to one another largely determines how successfully we work together.
6. ACHIEVE RESULTS TOGETHER
Achieving a few meaningful early wins relatively quickly can have a significant effect. Understanding, clarifying and agreeing new ways of working is necessary, but the team needs to see that all of this translates into results.
They do not have to be major successes. It may be a matter of resolving a long-standing problem, improving a frustrating process, responding better to a customer’s needs, or achieving an objective that requires several people to collaborate.
The value of these results lies not only in what is achieved, but also in th
shared experience of achieving it together.
Building trust within a team requires several ingredients that we will not explore specifically in this article and, above all, it takes time. But seeing in practice that the team can face the challenges ahead together can be a powerful accelerator of that trust.
7. OFFER A VISION FOR THE FUTURE
For a team to be sustainable, and returning to the four dimensions described earlier, it cannot limit itself to working well “inside and in the present”. It must also learn to look “outside and towards the future”.
An important responsibility of the leader is to raise the team’s gaze regularly: to observe what is happening in the organisation, what its stakeholders need, how the environment is changing, and which transformations may affect it tomorrow.
Customer needs change. The organisation evolves. New technologies, new ways of working, new expectations and challenges emerge that may not even have existed a few years ago.
A team that focuses only on its current goals may achieve them and
still be falling behind.
That is why learning, reviewing and adapting should be an integral part of how the team works.
Finally, there is one issue a leader should keep firmly in mind when inheriting a team with major challenges to overcome: not every problem we observe within a team originates inside it.
Some organisations ask for cross-functional collaboration while rewarding only individual performance. They demand agility while maintaining endless approval processes. They call for innovation while penalising mistakes or challenges to the status quo. They ask for accountability but fail to provide enough autonomy for people to make decisions.
When this happens, trying to change the team alone can become an impossible battle. The new leader therefore needs to look in both directions: inward, to work with the people and dynamics they have inherited; and outward, to identify which organisational conditions they need to transform, negotiate or learn to manage.
Taking over a team is not simply about assuming command of something that already exists. It means understanding where it has come from, helping it respond better to what it needs today, and preparing it for what is still to come. And this is precisely the journey on which I support leaders and teams as they build their next chapter together.
