You just inherited a new team.
What happens next will have a massive impact on the trajectory of your career.
If you nail this transition, you're highly likely to get more responsibility in the future.
Fail here and you could be circling the career cul-de-sac for a while.
I have been through this transition many times in my long career. I've made mistakes, I've learned from those mistakes, and now I want to save you the scars by sharing the steps that I learned are essential to nail this transition.
Let's imagine I just inherited a new team. Here's exactly what I would do.
Right out of the gate, day one, I meet with my new team. They will be sizing me up immediately.
I let them know that I'm eager to work with them and I'm looking forward to learning from each of them in the coming days.
In this first meeting I like to share my leadership philosophy and the operating system that I use. I learned these from Jocko Willink and I adapted them to fit my own style and the culture in my company and teams.
First, I explain what I mean by “ownership”. Quite simply, everything that happens with this team is my responsibility. When something goes wrong I will not be pointing fingers, I will not be making excuses. I will take responsibility, explain the impact of what happened, and explain what we will be doing differently going forward.
Next comes my leadership operating system. Jocko calls these his four laws of combat.
Cover and Move (Mutually Supportive Teamwork)
Simple
Prioritize & Execute
Decentralized Command
I will spend a little bit of time explaining what each of those means but I am conscious of the fact that I am already talking too much. In these first few weeks with the team I want to be mostly in listening mode.
Step 2: Get aligned with my boss, my peers, and key stakeholders.
I understand that getting aligned with my new boss is the single most important factor in deciding whether I will succeed or fail in this new role.
I will immediately clarify the following with my new boss:
Situation. What is the current state of the company, my boss's org, and the team I just inherited?
Expectations. What are my team and I expected to deliver in the next 90 days and beyond?
Style. How does my boss prefer to communicate with me and make decisions with me?
Resources. What is available to my team in terms of budget, head count, and executive sponsorship, and what constraints do I need to be aware of?
Early wins. What could the team and I deliver in the next 30 to 90 days that would show that we're on the right track?
I will have similar conversations with my new peers and with key stakeholders from other teams and functions.
Here I need to achieve two goals:
Ensure every person on the team understands the company's goals and objectives, our broader organization's goals and objectives, and most importantly the outcomes that our team is expected to deliver.
Next we will discover a shared sense of purpose and meaning by exploring this question: “What is it like when everything is going exactly the way we want it to go?”
I will do this in a workshop format preferably in person and preferably off site.
Step 4: Assess and shape my team.
Now that I'm clear on what we need to deliver and I've gotten to know the people on my team, I need to do an assessment of whether we have the right roles on the team to be able to achieve our objectives and whether we have the right people in the right roles.
As a real world example, I once inherited a team that had three non-technical people for every one technical person on the team. By doing the work in steps one through three above, I realized to deliver what was expected of us, that ratio actually needed to be reversed. We needed three technical people for every one non-technical person on the team.
I opened new technical roles and committed to not back-filling non-technical roles until we were at the ratio that we needed.
As part of my assessment I will be discussing with each of my direct reports these three questions:
What are you especially good at?
What do you love doing?
How do those align with the needs of our team?
I have found that even having this discussion dramatically improves employee engagement. It seems, perhaps, no previous manager has ever asked them what they love doing.
Step 5: I build trust through weekly one-on-ones.
Very early on I will already have set up pre-scheduled one-on-ones with every direct report. I have found this to be, without a doubt, the most effective tool for building trust, improving engagement, and ensuring clarity and alignment with every direct report.
These one-on-ones are:
Prescheduled
Every week
30 minutes
Protected. Very unlikely to be canceled or moved.
These are not status update meetings. I write in the meeting invite: "This is your time. You may use it however you like."
I want to know what is top of mind for each person. My primary goal is to build trust and deepen the relationship.
Step 6: I establish cultural norms of giving feedback and debriefing.
Our goal as a team is to get better, to be our very best. I quickly establish a culture in which it feels safe to talk about what's not working and what we'll do differently going forward.
I establish a routine of giving feedback, both positive and corrective. These feedback discussions are very brief, not more than 30 seconds. They are focused only on behavior and they are forward looking. I don't really care what happened in the past. I only care about how we will do things going forward. I give far more positive feedback than corrective feedback, a ratio of at least three to one, but hopefully much higher.
I establish a routine of debriefing after every meaningful event. These could be: customer meetings, partner events, project completion, milestones reached, products shipped, any key action, big or small.
These debriefs happen immediately after the event. They're short, ideally 15 minutes or less. We ask ourselves:
What went well?
What didn’t go well?
What did we learn? Are there things that went well and we should lock in for next time? Are there things that didn’t go well and need to change next time?
Step 7: Teach my team to be decisive and take action.
I cannot be the decision maker for every decision my team faces. This is not scalable. I would become the bottleneck. And this disempowers the team. It's the opposite of creating ownership in the team.
So I need to establish decision boundaries so the team understands when they can make decisions and take action and when they need to escalate to me for decision approval.
I will instill in my team a bias for taking action. No analysis paralysis. We're not getting jammed up by the big decision. Instead we consider a small decision we could make in the direction we believe we need to go. We take that step. We get feedback. We re-evaluate our position and then we take the next small step.
Are you feeling the energy yet? Can you see how this team is set up to learn and grow and become their very best?
Realistically, it will take me six months to get all of these steps established. It will take even longer for the team to become proficient at all of them.
If you're reading this and you're thinking you missed the window because you're already 30 or 60 or 90 days into the new team, I want you to recognize that it's not too late.
What do they say? "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second best time is today."
Also, realize that this process never ends. We will constantly be revisiting and reinforcing each of these steps. This is not just a playbook for a new team. This is a playbook for a winning team.
I’m wishing you all the best!
Jeff
P.S. If you just inherited a team and you want to invest in your own onboarding program, book a complimentary call with me. I want to hear what your biggest challenges and fears are, and what your ideal outcome looks like. I’ll get you pointed in the right direction. These spots go away fast. Schedule a call here.
