Your New Team: Sizing Up, Investing In, or Trading Out
When New Leaders enter a role they often inherit a team to lead.
While navigating through the onboarding process, New Leaders may need to address concerns about their teams. Three typical approaches are:
- The Wait-and-See Method
- The Trade-Out Approach
- Active Involvement
With our clients, we promote the Active Involvement Approach for a variety of reasons. Unless the Leader's team is in true crisis, maintaining consistency and taking time to comprehensibly evaluate the team and operational culture will likely lead to stronger performance.
A key step is sizing up the team while considering the context of the organization’s expectations, goals and history.
Questions to consider if you've inherited a team that is considered low-performing.
- Why is the team perceived as low-performing?
- Does the organizational structure support effective performance?
- Does the team have access to the needed tools, knowledge, feedback, and training?
- Have they experienced multiple leadership changes (or long gaps without a leader)?
- Have prior leaders explained and clarified performance expectations?
- Are there documented issues related to individual or team integrity?
Need more? Request a copy of: Nine Tips For Sizing Up Your New Team.
In our blog we discuss all three approaches in greater detail.