3 Teams New Leaders Can Inherit – How You Can Succeed

You have just been touched.  Your boss has come down, placing their hand on your shoulder, and anointed you the next leader within the organization.  You are to be given a team to inspire, manage, and lead into the growing future of your company.  Congratulations!  Do you know what team you are getting?

It is an important question that you need to answer before you take the promotion.  The type of team you get will determine the type of leadership you need to provide.  Each one has pluses and minuses that you need to be aware of.

The Team In Crisis

You have been chosen to take over a team that is falling apart.  The last leader either quit or was fired.  Dysfunction reigns supreme!

The great thing about stepping into this position is that any change you bring will most likely be good.  It will seem to be too easy to turn things around building upon easy results.  Yes, while no one really wants to jump feet first into confrontation, taking over a dysfunctional team can build a strong reputation for a new leader.

Conversely a dysfunctional team can destroy you.  Victories will come easy at first because this team needs them and desires them.  Yet, without a clear-cut plan to turn the team around, those victories will only serve to shore-up the already entrenched habits that are making the team fail.  A leader who does not possess the will to be decisive and believe in a vision for success will be eaten alive by the dysfunctional team.

The Successful Team

The previous leader has moved onto bigger and better things.  You have been brought in to lead a high functioning smooth operating dynamic team of successful people. Unlike the dysfunctional team, this is a group that does it right all the time and has luck on their side.

The beauty of leading a team like this is that everyone is proactive and working together for results.  As a new leader, you cannot ask for an easier assignment.  You simply have to build upon the team’s strengths and tweak their weaknesses.  You are like the pilot of a ship charted on the right course: you just have to keep the bearing.

Or, if you are not careful, you fall into a caretaker mentality and not offer any real leadership at all.  The glue that held the successful team together dissipates allowing for individual goals, egos, and unproductive desires to tear the team apart.  This happens because you – the new leader – do not provide leadership.  The best example is seen in sports teams time and again.  A successful coach of a championship team moves on and their successor runs the team into the ground in a few seasons.  Why? The new coach does not provide leadership to keep the team focused on a common vision.  Do not be that guy!

The Expansion Team

Your company is growing by leaps and bounds! They need you to form a new team for the IDon’tKnowWhere District.  You get to pick your team as opposed to having one handed to you.  This is a rare opportunity that you can use to truly set your leadership apart!

You do not have to inherit a history; you get to create a legacy in building your team.  Each member you choose is picked by you and immediately loyal to your vision since there is none other to follow.  You get to make your mark on the foundation of success.

The bad news is that there is no history to build upon.  You are charting a new path and each failure is yours to own outright.  While each successful team member you choose is a testament to your leadership, so is each dysfunctional member you hire.  The heat is really on here.  Your company created this expansion and wants results.  The pressure to get it right is worse than inheriting a team because each decision you make is magnified.

Successful Leadership No Matter What Team You Get

Any of the three types of teams you step into are stones for success or pitfalls for failure.  The key to making them stones of success is to have a plan, a vision, a method, and be decisive.

• Having A Plan. Whether you operate in 30-60-90 day intervals when it comes to planning, or longer, you have to know where you want your team to be at the end of a specific time period.  With the expansion team, you might want to be fully staffed in ninety days.  With your successful team, you might want to have conducted a capabilities review within sixty days.  Lastly. with your dysfunctional team you may want to have reassigned a few bad apples within fifteen days.  These are all examples of plans that can be executed to make any team you take over a success.
• Having A Vision. People, no matter what their backgrounds are, rally around visions.  Your job as a leader is to get your team to rally around one that inspires them to improve each day.  Regardless of the type of team you take over, it must have a vision or it will have no reason to follow your plan or follow you.  Get your team to invest in a vision of success and you more than 50% of the way to being a great leader.
• Have A Method. In a previous posting, I talked about having a method to making decisions.  The same applies with the three teams you can inherit with the addition to
  

  I am in charge. Follow me!

  having a method that describes your leadership.  I worked for a leader whom I admire to this day.  His method was to hire, train, motivate, and promote (either up or out of the organization.)  His teams are always successful and never the same.  He hires talent that he knows will work hard and that he can train. He trains his team to execute the fundamentals every day and strive for improvement.  He motivates his team to exceed the standards he has laid down.  He promotes the members of his team to everyone around him, always placing them as the centerpiece of his team’s success.  If there is a bad apple… he gets them quickly out of the organization.  This leader has taken over bad teams, successful teams, and launched expansion teams.  He has never failed to achieve success.

• Be Decisive. You are the leader.  Time to step up and make decisions.  Teams that are failing look for leaders that can make decisions to turn them around.  This can mean letting people go or changing direction completely.  Either way it has to be decisive.  Teams that are successful got that way by following the decisions of their leaders.  Those leaders were decisive.  You have to be too or you will inject doubt into the team.  Expansion teams have no history to build upon.  They are looking for you to guide them and chart the new territory you’ve entered into.  This is not a time to second-guess or it could lead to confusion.  Evaluate the information that you have and make a decision.

Congratulations on your promotion to being a leader. Whether you posted for the position or you were chosen, you better know what type of team you are getting into before you take charge.  A failure to know what you are getting into can lead you to failure.  When you fail as a leader it has an effect that reaches across multiple lives.  Are you sure you still want that promotion?

What other teams do new leaders get promoted into that I might have missed?

About the author:

Erroin A. Martin is a Business Advocate with the Von Gehr Consulting Group, LLC, a business coaching and consultancy provider for business owners, executives, and entrepreneurs. He has fifteen years experience working within the pharmaceutical, manufacturing, natural resources, medical devices, software, technology, business services, and agriculture industries in various levels of leadership across six continents. He has led diverse teams in sales, marketing, planning, and in the Army.  He currently coaches business leaders and physicians in the tools needed, like social media, to plan for their success. Learn more about the Von Gehr Consulting Group, LLC at www.vongehrconsulting.com or call +1 203 433 8079.  You can follow him on Twitter at @Erroin

The Von Gehr Consulting Group, LLC, was founded by Erroin A. Martin to provide business coaching, business consulting, and other services to companies both large and small.  The primary goal is to have his clients be passionate about their business and reach the unachievable.