Inheriting a team that isn’t working yet

I keep having versions of the same conversation at the moment.

Someone’s moved into a new role, they’ve got a team they didn’t pick, and a few weeks in they’ve started noticing that something isn’t quite right. Not dramatically (although in some cases dramatically). Nobody’s falling out, the work’s getting done more or less, and if you asked anyone on the team whether things were okay they might yes, mostly.

It is just a lot harder than it should be. Maybe decisions take longer than they should. Or there’s clearly some history bubbling under the surface that everyone understands except you. You might see people being perfectly reasonable in the meeting but the gloves come off in the kitchen afterwards. Or maybe you’re getting polite agreement to things but then nothing is actually happening.

What strikes me is how rarely any of this gets discussed, and I think that’s because it doesn’t always feel serious enough to make a fuss about. It just feels like the job being harder than you expected it to be. The problem is that it stops you having the impact you could as a leader and it stops your team delivering to their full potential.

If that’s roughly where you are, you’re not imagining it and it is a reasonable thing to be concerned about. It’s a lot of what I’m working on with leaders and their teams this year.

Some questions you might want to sit with:

• which voices are loud in your ears?
• which voices are absent?
• what do you currently believe about this team, and what of that is actually validated?