18 Mar TSLH #011: 5 Steps To Start Strong As The Leader Of A Team
Read time: 6 minutes
Over the course of my career, I have witnessed countless first-time or seasoned managers take on a new team with “la fleur au fusil” as the French say.
“La fleur au fusil” – literally translated as “a flower in your gunbarrel” in English – is an expression that describes a sense of innocent enthusiasm and a bit of naïveté when it comes to doing something.
Historically, that expression appeared at the start of World War I when most European armies went to the battlefront with a brave insouciance thinking the war would be a matter of a few weeks and a few skirmishes here and there, only to brutally realize that the war would be a massacre at an industrial scale never seen before.
The horrors of a war set aside, many managers set on to become leaders of a new team with the same brave insouciance and naïveté, completely oblivious of the fact that the clock is already ticking for them to make a strong leadership mark with their new team.
Luckily for me, I have also met leaders who had a much more realistic and efficient approach to becoming the leader of a new team. Learning from them and from being coached on occasions where I also had to take on a new team, I have experienced things that work and things that don’t work.
With that, I want to show you 5 steps I systematically use when taking on a new team and that helped me get to a very strong start with my teams.
Start 1-1’s with your direct reports immediately. When I say immediately, please realize I mean not on day 1 of when you start your role, but from the day you are made officially the leader of the team, which depending on your position in the company, may be a few weeks to a few months before your first day on the job.
When you become the leader of a team, and you don’t know that team yet, make sure you get a list of who’s on the team and who will report directly to you. If your team is only direct reports, then, that’s it and you can follow my piece of advice below. If you inherit a large team, you may want to arrange a day (again before day 1 would be perfect) where you meet the whole team and then your direct reports.
In these 1-1’s, you should focus on 3 things only:
- Get to know the person at a more personal level.
- Understand what they do.
- Understand what help and support they need from you.
I achieve these 3 things by asking a few questions. To get to know the person at a more personal level, you can use any question really, talk about an interest of yours and ask about theirs, etc.
For all the rest, here are the questions I use:
❓ What do you do? What does your job consist of?
❓ Do you know what is expected of you in your role?
❓ What works well and not so well for you?
❓ Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?
❓ If you had a magic wand, what would you want to change immediately?
❓ What do you expect from me? What do you need from me?
❓ Do you have the equipment and materials you need to do your work right?
❓ (if that person is also a manager of a team): How are the people on your team engaged and committed to doing quality work?
Once you have gone through the 1-1 with a direct report, and you have had a good discussion supported by the questions above, you should be able to have a few things at disposal:
- You know what makes the person tick at work or in life.
- You know how they feel about their work and their ability to do their work.
- You understand that person’s key pain points.
- You know how to support that person.
- If the person is a manager in your team, you have a good idea of how their team performs.
Establish your leadership philosophy with the team. Whether you have a small or a large team, your first act should be to meet the team as a whole and introduce yourself. This is your best opportunity to talk about you, at a personal level, but also in a professional way.
One thing you want to make absolutely sure you convey in this first meeting is your leadership philosophy, i.e., your beliefs about leadership, the values you lead with, and your red lines not to cross.
You need to think a bit about that one obviously. You want to look at your past experiences as a leader, identify these times where you were at your best, and what values you were honoring then. Also think of times where you had to step up and disagree with someone, and identify what red lines you were then trying to protect.
Your leadership philosophy is really your belief system that guides everything you do as a leader, that comes in support of your decision-making, and that ensures that your behaviors and actions will remain consistent. This is your number one tool to create credibility for you as a leader and trust for you from the team.
My advice here is to work on it before you take the job, and clearly communicate it. Ideally, you need to speak it out to the team, and I also recommend having it on your wall as a reminder for everyone to see.
My leadership philosophy for instance rests on a few pillars. I’ll explain a couple of important values for me, what I believe in when I lead, and what my red lines are.
Identify quick wins and deliver on them. At this stage, you will have had many discussions with your team and your direct reports most likely. Now is the time to start delivering some quick wins. Again, I insist on the fact that you should start identifying these quick wins even before your day 1 on the job. If you’re already in the organization, just switching to a new team, you may even be able to deliver quick wins before day 1.
To identify quick wins, I usually rely on 2 things:
- What I hear from people when I have casual conversations with them.
- My initial discussions with my direct reports (remember the questions around “Do you have all you need to work well?” and “If you had a magic wand, what would you change immediately?”)
Quick wins can be a lot of things, sometimes things that from the outside may look completely irrelevant, not in line with the problems you will have to address. Stay aware though that at this stage, you only have an outsider view of your team.
Once you have identified your quick wins, make sure you deliver on them quickly. This will be your first test of credibility with your team. You can’t fail this one.
A few tips also to make sure you start successfully with quick wins:
- Don’t commit to anything during your 1-1’s with direct reports. Before identifying something as a quick win, you want to check with a few other people that many see a problem the same way, and that it really needs fixing. It would be bad to hear someone say “This process does not work” and you would say “I’ll fix it” only to hear after that the process works for everyone but this person.
- Don’t commit to fix every single quick win you identify. You’ll have plenty on your plate to keep you busy. Take 2 or 3 to start with, fix them, and then see if there is an urgent need to fix more.
- Don’t think that a quick win necessarily has to be something that will change the team or the organization drastically. Sometimes, a quick win is just something small but painful enough for people that they get distracted and cannot do their job properly.
Once, when I became the leader of a team, after talking to my direct reports, I identified 3 quick wins that when I fixed them, made people happy and engaged:
- Anyone on the team had to walk completely opposite to their desk location on our big floor to pick up printed documents. Their pain point was the time lost to go pick up papers constantly. Quick win: I got them another printer closer to their desks so they could take that time back.
- The team was wasting hours putting invoices into envelopes and stamping them to send them to clients. Their pain point was really the time lost, which accounted for a full-time person. Quick win: We subcontracted the tasks to the post office at a cost of 10% that of the full-time person.
- The team communication with the sales team was bad, close to non-existent. Their pain point was the constant flow of emails and calls with urgent requests, no acknowledgment of the work done. Quick win: I organized a workshop with both teams and had them work together on addressing their pain points.
Analyze the situation and discuss it with your manager. One of the most common mistake I see happening when leaders take on a new team is that they believe that everything they have been told about the team before is true (for instance, to get them to accept the job, to tell them about the team and its challenges, etc.) In fact this could not be further from the truth.
For sure, some of what you will be told is true and an honest representation of who the team is and what their challenges are. However, never underestimate the fact that people will be biased in a way or another when they give you information. The risk with accepting all facts at face value is that you start working on the wrong things, and your manager and you may be totally disconnected from what the priorities are.
It is therefore essential that you use your meetings with your direct reports, your team, other teams, and your own perception of what is happening to draw your own picture of the situation and discuss it with your own manager to agree on 3 things:
- The exact description of what the situation is, what works well, what challenges need to be tackled.
- Your goals for the next 6 months, 12 months, 18 months on the job.
- The resources and support you need from your manager to succeed in your role.
This should be done in your first month on the job, and again, ideally, before if you have that possibility.
This is the template I usually use when preparing for these discussions with my own manager (not necessarily in that order):
- Make a SWOT analysis of your team.
- State what you understood to be your key goals from your manager and other stakeholders’ point of view. Also go through some of the operational goals you want to set for the team to make sure you stay aligned with what people think the priorities are.
- Call out any pink elephant in the room (aka the problem that everybody knows about but that nobody wants to talk about) especially if it impacts your ability to deliver as agreed with your manager.
- List all the activities you intend to tackle with their expected end dates.
- Ask your manager for what you need.
I then recommend you do a 3-month, 6-month and 1-year review of where you stand with your manager so you can show our progress, and continue asking your manager for support and help.
Meet the team to start shaping it the way you and people on the team want to have it. Let’s start by defining what I mean by the team here. If you only have direct reports who are not managers themselves, then this is your team. If you have a team with direct reports also being managers, then your team – for this exercise – should be only your direct reports.
The key here is to agree on how the team wants to behave, what their shared values are, how they want to engage with each other. Of course, you might say “if I have a team of 70 people, why would I do this exercise only with my direct reports and not with the entire team?” My take on this is you need to focus on the people who will be relays for you first. Once you have engaged these people, you can go to the next level.
When I gather my team of direct reports, this is what I expect to see happening:
- I start by having everyone define the ground rules for the discussion. It usually includes confidentiality (aka what’s done in Vegas stays in Vegas), no judgment (there is no right or wrong), we act as a team, each idea is good to hear, everybody has an equal voice, etc.
- I make a clear statement that anything I will report/discuss with my manager and that touches on the team, I will communicate to them first.
- I want an honest and transparent discussion on what kind of team they are currently. I tell them that at the end of the discussion, I want to be able to tell them what the team strengths and weaknesses are, the challenges I see, and I want them to let me know how far I am from the truth.
- I want to hear from them what works well in the way they work as a team. I also want to hear what does not work, within the team or with other teams.
- I want them to tell me about their shared values and beliefs as a team.
- I want to hear from them about where we should focus our energy to make the team more effective?
- And finally, we also have a discussion on the pain points, the things that should change quickly to make the team more engaged and productive.
You may realize that your team is not able to articulate values, beliefs. This often happens because they never worked on these things. I guarantee though that if you spend time on this activity and discussions, you will start engaging your people in a very efficient way.
Once you have done this work with your team of direct reports, you should also agree on how to cascade down the results of the discussion to the rest of your team. Maybe by organizing a larger workshop.
Remember, you don’t have a lot of time to make a strong impression on your new team. Many say that your first 90 days on the job matter to make that impression. My experience tells me that you probably have less than one month to demonstrate your credibility as a leader and start showing results. If you inherit a struggling team, you might have even less time at disposal.
This is why it is also key to start engaging your team as early as you can. I keep recommending to connect as soon as you have the job (in some situations, this might be more difficult to do). This is because the more you engage with your team before your day 1 on the job, the more you already know, the more you are prepared, and the more you have put yourself in a position to start delivering results on day 1.
When I took on a new team in 2016, my boss told me about the opportunity in the middle of July. In August, I told him I was interested in the job. My start date was set for January 2, 2017. I started engaging the team and meeting with them in September 2016, so almost 4 months before my day 1. I had that luxury of having plenty of time and I used it efficiently. If you have that same luxury, don’t waste time.
I wish you a great read and great experimentation. I’ll see you next Saturday!
TL; DR (Too Long, Did not Read)
5 steps to start strong with your new team
- Start 1-1’s with your direct reports immediately.
- Establish your leadership philosophy with the team.
- Identify quick wins and deliver on them.
- Analyze the situation and discuss it with your manager.
- Meet the team to start shaping it the way you and people on the team want to have it.
Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:
1️⃣ Work 1-1 with me to step up as the authentic leader you aspire to be.
2️⃣ Hire me to help you build a high-performing team.
3️⃣ Start with my affordable digital courses on Mastering Difficult Conversations for Leaders and Goal Setting