Have you recently taken on a new leadership role in a new organization? Congratulations on your new position! It is now time to be strategic and make an impact. As an executive coach, I understand the challenges and opportunities involved in this exciting transition. Making a positive impact quickly is crucial to establish yourself in your new role, and you achieve this with the help of your team. You must establish relationships with the team you have inherited and understand their capabilities and group dynamics to create a productive work environment. Devoting time and energy to identify how you want your team to work is critical. The culture you create will determine how well your team performs.
Here are some helpful tips for navigating this critical component of your transition:
Get to know the team – Take the time to connect with each team member individually and collectively to build camaraderie. Spend time on understanding team members’ experiences, contributions, and aspirations. Understand what the team members think is working well, what excites them, and what they are challenged by. Your willingness to listen will make your team feel valued. Use these interactions as an opportunity to share your vision and values. Showing what you stand for will set the foundation for open communication and transparency.
Assess team members – You will have a lot of demands on your time and attention as a leader; therefore, having the right people in the right roles is critical to driving the organization as you desire. The abilities and competencies required from team members may differ based on their roles. You must define these attributes and be deliberate while evaluating team members. To conduct the assessment, you may rely on one-on-one and team meetings. You may also get input from key stakeholders outside the team, such as customers, suppliers, and coworkers, and supplement your analysis by looking at previous performance reviews. This assessment will also give you a sense of the current group dynamics and set you up to build a high-performing team.
Set clear goals– Ensure that everyone in the team knows what they need to accomplish together and what success looks like. Establish clarity on the group’s purpose and individual team members’ goals and define the measures of success. Inheriting a team does not mean inheriting the goals and success measures. You will rehash them based on the mandate you have been hired to achieve and how you want to run the team. Once you have established a clear sense of purpose and direction, you will have laid the foundation for holding team members accountable.
People and processes – Evaluate the structures and ways of working in the team to see if they effectively deliver results, facilitate information sharing, collaborate, and solve problems. How are decisions made? What is the cadence of operational meetings, and who participates? How are lessons learned, socialized, and internalized?
Incentives and training – Competitive compensation and benefits are necessary but must be augmented with more motivators to energize the team, e.g., recognition, interesting work, meaningful KPIs, adequate resources, learning opportunities, and scope for advancement. As you take on your new mantle, assess if the current incentive and training models work for the team.
Share your why – Just as you are evaluating your team, they are also assessing you, trying to gauge your personality and priorities. It helps to share the why behind your vision, priorities, expectations, feedback, and the changes you are making. Be clear, direct, and respectful as you share the context to make your message more powerful and help the team align with goals.
Summary – To make a quick impact in your new organization, set your team up for success – connect with each team member, assess their abilities, set clear goals, evaluate processes, provide appropriate incentives and training, and connect them with the purpose of what you are trying to achieve. These steps establish a culture of transparency, accountability, and alignment with the larger goal and set the foundation for your long-term success.
PS – Are you looking to establish yourself as a leader in your new role? Book a free exploratory consult with me.