If you've just inherited a new team, one of the first things you must do is to create a shared vision of success with the team. 

You need to get the whole team rowing in the same direction. 

You may already be feeling the effects of not having this. Your team's busy. They're putting out fires. Everyone seems pretty stressed out around here, but it's hard to tell if they're really making progress on the primary outcomes that you're expected to deliver. 

You need a straightforward process for getting the team aligned and on the same page about the outcomes that you and your team are required to deliver for the business. 

In addition to the clarity and alignment that they'll gain, this process is going to give them a greater sense of purpose and meaning to what they're doing, making them resistant to burnout and allergic to excuse making. 

Let's start by looking at some common problems.

First, when you inherit a team, you can't assume that they all understand the outcomes that they're required to deliver for the business. Even if they do have some understanding, maybe they don't all see it the same way or they don't have the same understanding of what it means. 

If they don't know what's being asked of them from the business, they could be working hard and doing great work, but failing in the eyes of the business because they're not delivering the expected outcomes.

Second, the team may be siloed. You may have a single person or small groups within the team that are heads down, off on their own, working on something they believe is important. 

By working this way, you're losing the benefit of being a mutually supportive team. The rest of the team is not really aware of what that person is doing. They don't see how it ties into the team's broader mission, and they don't see any way that they could be helping each other.

I often refer to this as a “golf team” style. We're on the same team, but you shoot your round; I shoot my round. There's really nothing I can do to help and support you while you're out there performing, and you really can't help me either. 

That's not a team; that's a collection of individuals that happen to have the same manager. 

The third problem your new team may be facing is that they're so focused on and driven by MBOs, OKRs, and KPIs that they're hitting their goals, but they're running on stress, they're running on fear, and they're well on their way to burnout. 

According to WellHub, in 2025 nearly 85% of workers reported experiencing burnout or exhaustion, and 47% were forced to take time off for mental health issues. 

This is not sustainable. 

This is not how to care for your people. 

And it's not how to get the best from them. 

Okay, so what are we going to do about it? You're going to build a shared vision of success with your team. 

I first learned about this from Dr. Richard Boyatzis in a course that I took from him in 2015. Boyatzis has decades of research on how people and teams create lasting positive change. 

In his model called Intentional Change Theory, he starts with something that a lot of people skip: the vision. 

Not goals. 

Not fixing everything that's broken. 

But the vision.

Here's why that matters, as managers, especially in the tech industry, we tend to lead with the goals and gaps. 

We're leading with metrics that we have to be hit.

We're leading with the problems that have to get fixed. 

That puts everyone into what Boyatzis calls the NEA (Negative Emotional Attractor). 

NEA activates your sympathetic nervous system. It's fight or flight. Urgency. Pressure. It increases fear and lowers trust in your people.

NEA is important and has purpose:

But it is not good for collaboration, it's not good for creativity, and it's not good for innovation. 

And sustained NEA is how you get burnout. 

There's also the PEA, Positive Emotional Attractor. 

PEA activates the parasympathetic nervous system. This is where people feel hope, possibility, and purpose. It's where they imagine a future that they're proud of. 

When people do that, their brains open up. 

They think more broadly.

They connect ideas.

They become more generous and collaborative with each other, and they start operating like a team again.

The first real step here is a leadership choice that you're going to make: Are we going to build our future on a foundation of stress and fear, or are we going to build it on meaning and purpose? If you want sustainable performance, you need to activate PEA. 

Next, you're going to bring your team together in a workshop environment to develop your shared vision of success. Ideally, everyone is together in person. Ideally, you're off-site or at least away from your normal working environment.

The next step is to keep the vision alive. This comes after the workshop. The team is back in the daily grind, but we don't want to fall back into the old way of doing things. 

As the leader, you're going to have to be the one to remind the team of the vision that you created together. 

Every time you revisit the vision, you activate PEA. 

Bring it into one-on-ones, team meetings, and bring it into the decisions that you're making every day. 

You can use it as your North Star when you have priorities that compete, or when you feel morale slipping, and especially when a crisis hits. 

The more that you refer to it, the more it becomes part of the culture of your team. It becomes something that your team lives, not just something that they wrote once, then put away and forgot about. 

You've got to get your team aligned and working together. 

They have to understand the outcomes that you are working toward, but just as important, they have to find a sense of purpose and meaning in the work that they're doing. 

This is how you build a high-performing team, and this is how the team can keep delivering, keep winning, year after year without burning out. 

Wishing you the best!

Jeff

P.S. If you’re a tech industry manager who has recently taken on a new team, I built something for you. It’s a 5-day email course called: The 5 Mistakes Tech Managers Make When Taking on New Teams.