Taking over a New Team: 9 Pro Tips

Taking over a new team is daunting. If you have no prior knowledge or you have recently joined the business. It can be hard.

I remember some of the growing pains of moving from one organisation to another. I was leaving a place of comfort, knowledge and understanding to move to an environment which was a completely different industry requiring a different skillset and competency level.

Here are my 9 pro tips from my own experience which should hopefully help you navigate either joining a new business with an existing team or perhaps taking over a team within the business you’re already in:

1. Humble - stay close to the core principles of Leadership, humility. Put your hand up, be venerable, ask questions and don’t be afraid to ask for help. No one expects you to know everything and most of the time they were probably in your shoes at one point and only happy to return the favour.

2. Avoid Looking Back - at times you’ll feel discouraged and returning to your old job is really appealing. I recognised this was just me looking for comfort and a feeling of certainty. But remind yourself, there is a reason you decided to move into this new role or take over this team. You wanted a new challenge, more responsibility or to grow. Stick with it. Discomfort is the pain required to grow.

3. Discovery Mode - the first 4-6 weeks or so you should be on a discovery mission. Join existing meetings, shadow 1 to 1s, attend training sessions and get as much visibility as possible. Be in a read only mode where you observe, listen and learn. You should be getting as much exposure as possible so you can begin to really understand the environment you’ve entered into before you beginning to contribute to it.

4. Curious - be super curious. Adopt a child’s mind. How does that work? Help me understand that better? I noticed you were working on this project, what’s important about that? Ask great open ended questions.

5. Make Notes - as you join meetings or have conversations, make load of notes. What are you learning? What’s important right now? What’s not working? Who is this person? Making notes will allow you to absorb more content and be able to reflect back on items if you forget. With so much information it will be hard to retain, so make notes is an important step. Use an old school pen and paper, or start building a digital repository with Notion.so

6. Relationships - you should aim to meet 1 to 1 with everyone in the first few weeks. Once you have met with the people in your immediate team you should then meet with the key stakeholders across other departments. Building relationships with all your new colleagues is critical. It takes time to build and earn trust, start as quickly as possible.

7. The Team - ask the departing Leader if they can provide a handover document. This should detail any projects they were owning, important items and an overview of the team. For each team member a read out on their aspirations, interests, hobbies, skillset and areas of opportunity will serve you very well.

8. Be Kind - whenever you take over a new team or join a business there is a lot to learn. Don’t be hard on yourself. Sometimes you experience information overload, imposter syndrome and feel discouraged, it will get easier once you have some time under your belt and you begin to contribute more.

9. Small Wins - feeling competent and general confidence in your role is really a series of small wins. Getting things right. Getting praised. Seeing the fruits of your labour. Don’t forget to write down your successes and how you’re doing. Your future self will be a different person at Day 90 of your new role than you are on Day 1, enjoy the journey.

All the best

David

Resources Of The Week

• Daily Management Tip - Quick, practical management advice to help you do your job better, delivered weekdays. Sign up here on the HBR site.

• YouTube - Simon Sinek - Play the Infinite Game. Instead of working primarily to hit metrics, let's remember the game of business is infinite. We aren't here just to achieve goals, we're here to achieve something much bigger than ourselves. Recognising this is part of Leadership too can have a profound impact on how you approach your day to day. It’s an on-going journey.

• Book - Daniel H. Pink - Drive - Daniel’s book deep dives into why intrinsic motivation beats extrinsic motivation over the long term. Also covering the surprising truths about what motivates us.

Quote of the Week

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