Don't Let Your Ambition Slow You Down

 

Leaders often want to make an immediate impact when taking over a new team.  Their intention is to improve performance and validate that their boss made the right pick.  While well intentioned there are unintended consequences that can occur as a result.  New leaders should be ready to share their vision and philosophy with their new team but should hold off on making changes to existing processes and procedures until they have a better understanding of the existing team.  

 

Recently in an organization we consult with, a leader took over a new team.  This leader thoughtfully reached out to each team member prior to coming on board to talk and get to know the team members and express their excitement to work for him.  They assured each team member that they wanted to learn from them and would not make any changes to their existing processes.  At 8PM, the night before their first day with the new team, they called a team member and asked them to make 4 significant changes to a presentation for a 9AM meeting.

 

The team had worked together for years and were fairly close knit.  As soon as the first team member got the request, they passed it along to their peers.  As you can imagine the team members quickly pointed out how the leader had just promised that they would not make changes and instead broke that promise by making changes as their first official act with the team.  Before this new leader had even set foot in the office, their new team felt that they had broken trust.

 

What the new leader lacked was the context to understand why these changes were not already present in the meeting materials.  The team had previously included these materials with this content on a regular basis but found that there wasn’t value in the content.  The intended audience had goals that were aligned differently and there was no pressure from their leadership to chase these metrics.

 

During the post meeting debrief the leader’s new team voiced their frustration and asked why these changes had to occur.  Confused, they explained to their team why these metrics were important and needed to be shared with the meeting participants. Their team walked them through what they had learned in the past and explained why they removed them.  They further explained the dynamics of the intended audience and discussed the importance of gaining alignment with the audience prior to reporting the compliance metrics publicly.

 

We worked with the leader on a new strategy both with driving the important business metrics and with repairing the relationship with their team.  With our consultation they were able to both gain alignment with their audience on achieving performance targets as well as rebuilding the relationship with their new team.  Currently their team is producing some of the highest results in the entire organization.

 

Are you taking over a new team or challenge and aren’t sure how to go about managing change?  Tell us all about it in the comments below!