How great leaders step into new roles

Across all sectors of the economy, there is a lot of churn in leadership right now going all the way to the top. The C-suite and its equivalent in many organizations has become a merry-go-round. When a new leader is hired into a key role, they must quickly get adapted to how things work in order to make positive changes while breaking as few things as possible.

Great leaders have strategies to enable them to engage their new team quickly and institute change effectively. Here are four strategies that are critical.

1. Meet your team

In a leadership role, you are likely to have many teams in your portfolio. In order to do anything successfully, you need to know who you have working for you, how their teams function, and which groups can be relied on to carry out their work.

No matter how much intel you get from others before starting the role, there is no substitute for sitting down with the teams and getting to know them. This can take a while, so it may seem like a waste of time. But, talking strategically and tactically with the leaders who work for you can give you a sense of their capacity to understand, collaborate, and implement your vision moving forward.

High-level leaders can never understand every detail of what every team is doing, of course. But, it is important for leaders to know the portfolios of the people who report to them, the strengths and weaknesses of those portfolios, and the pros and cons to the structure of the organization as it is.

2. Listen first

Too often, leaders come in wanting to prove that they deserve to be in their role. So, they start by issuing orders. The assumption is that good leadership involves information flowing from the leader down to the team.

Great leadership is collaborative. A leader must understand the situation in the organization, where the problems are, and what goals are just about ready to be achieved. That can only be done by asking good questions and listening to the answers.

You want to find out the concerns of your direct reports so that you can develop plans to address them. You also want to understand the ways that the capacities of your teams can help you to achieve goals that are important to you. You’ll only find that out by hearing what people are trying to tell you.

Listening also helps to develop trust. People are more apt to want to follow your strategic recommendations when they are tailored to the strengths and weaknesses of their team. When the teams reporting to you feel understood, they are much more likely to engage and to adopt your goals as their own. Ultimately, great leaders get teams to work with them and not just for them.

3. Find a quick win

Much of high-level leadership involves significant strategic plans that can take quarters or even years to implement fully. In order to get teams to follow you on that longer journey, it is valuable to demonstrate that you can achieve a goal.

Through the conversations you have and the listening you have done to understand your teams, find a short-term goal that would lead to a meaningful step toward one of the major strategic pillars you would like to pursue. Then, engage with the teams that can help to achieve that goal and work with them to help make it happen. Provide the resources and guidance to move the project forward.

The key for these quick wins to succeed is to use your growing knowledge of the organization to merge your strategic vision with the tactical strengths of your teams. That way, the success of the venture feels like something that could not have been done prior to your engagement with the team. That success helps to provide additional trust that longer-term projects will also succeed.

4. Transitions are better than purges

Of course, no organization is perfect, and it is often necessary to move people and positions around. There may be great people playing the wrong roles. And sometimes, there are people on the team who are not contributing enough to warrant keeping around.

There is often an urge to cut people immediately to make a clean break and move forward. And when a team is bloated and has a lot of redundancy, that is often necessary.

But, the management and leadership members of the team are also are likely to have a lot of institutional knowledge that will help you to better understand how to achieve your aims. That is where slowing things down can be helpful.

After all, the new people you put in place may be aligned with your vision for the future, but they may not know which processes in the organization were put in place to keep other demons at bay. Creating an overlapping period of transition can help new people to get up to speed on how to be effective in their new roles while also providing a humane exit ramp to those who will be moving on.

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