How to lead the team you inherit?

As a science graduate, I’m always impressed by the beauty of nature.

Intro

We rarely set up teams from scratch in organizations. Often, we inherit an existing team from someone else. If we are setting up a new team, there are already some frameworks to follow. How about being successful with a team you inherit? You know that you can’t get all the legendary people worked with you anywhere to work with you always. Mostly, you need to work with the existing team. It’s not that easy to replace people with new ones, or transform the organization in a way you think will be successful. So we need to learn how to manage the team we inherit. In this post, we will have a look at models which can help you successfully handle the situation, and grow from there.

Role Model

Let me introduce one of those leaders who are successful wherever they go, and here is his transfermarkt profile. Mourinho holds 4 times World’s Best Club Coach award. What makes him special? He knows the rules of football, and he knows the techniques to be successful on the pitch. Read more about the talents he developed on this Quora post.

Why José Mourinho? He develops the talent further, and make them elite players everyone admires. This is an example from sports industry. Besides that, I have a scientific background, and similarly, in academia, the professors are proud of by their number of PhD students and submissions to the international newspapers. When I look at the tech industry, leaders make me crazy by following a completely irrelevant way. I haven’t worked with anyone who is good at developing people, and dedicate him/herself in this leadership position. I hope you know at least one, and send him kudos after this post. Most of the time, people just develop themselves, and I’m one of them. Many leaders just remember how bad was their boss, and try not to be the same. Does this make you someone better? No. But how to be like José Mourinho? How to make good people great, and great teams to champions?

First Principles

If you want to make the best decisions ever, it doesn’t matter where you are, you need to have deep understanding on anything, and the base is to have a strong foundation of knowledge and understanding. Here we touch mental models. If you haven’t read this post about mental models, it’s time to read it.

Most geniuses — especially those who lead others — prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.
~Andy Benoit

There are many footballers who lived their prime performance under the leadership of José Mourinho. Why? He managed to create an environment where players can show their best part. As a leader, this is absolutely the first thing you have to provide for your team. Knowing their strengths, weaknesses, and harmonize them in a way to be successful on the pitch as a team. As a people manager, it’s your job to know those people, and develop them further if noone had ever told you to do!

If you don’t ask yourself daily, what can I do for X, Y, Z? You are just another failed, bad leader in the market. If you ask, but unable to change the reality, then most likely your organization created unnecessary amount of titles to promote people without power. This is not our focus today. Let’s assume you are powerful, and you ask yourself, but maybe not have an answer, and it’s okay. This is where exactly you also need to develop yourself. Being in a leadership position doesn’t make you stop from growing. We saw the consequences of having bad board members at OpenAI, they were about to kick Sam Altman from the CEO position! Finally, someone with leadership experience jumped in, and stopped them. He was Bill Gates.

Confidence

If you have never organized an event to hold 50 people together, your management experience will most likely suck at the beginning. Some people experience it for the first time at work, and it’s hard for them. Why? Because I was personally involved in many situations where I have organized 300+ players to be more successful as a tribe, 50+ people to go to camping, 25+ people to a day trip etc. People around me felt safe, and guided towards the journey. In these and many other experiences, I developed good confidence in myself. I was naturally leading them, and they were showing their support on this journey, and enjoying our companion.

Without good leadership experiences, you may tend to see others as a threat to your position as well. Because without a mindset shift, you will also not enjoy in your position, then make yourself and others crazy. If you are confident, first thing is to get the support of people around you, start building the team and transparency. It’s super difficult to hold people together if you don’t tell what is coming or where we are going. As a leader, you need to know how much you share, and when! Especially highly educated people are hard to manage. They will just not follow you if they sense something stupid. If you fail here, you will fail to develop a good system, culture later.

Just because you carry a leadership title, this doesn’t make you someone who knows everything. That’s why you need to start adjusting the rituals, responsibilities, accountabilities, whatever comes to your mind to get the best out of each person in a new system which might be different from the previous systems in other organizations.

Like José Mourinho, if you have 30 people in your squad, you need to determine the top 11, set the surrounding processes, train the squad before going to Champions League. Real life, real business competition is much harsher than you can imagine. Many businesses already had gone bankrupt since AI is in. If you don’t develop them to play for the top position, then it’s super exhausting for you to climb to the top position by yourself and carrying the team. You will fail 100%. This is where also business agility arises. You should not only pay attention what’s happening under you, also above you, hierarchically. Then let people play their game, and you focus on more visionary, strategic topics with the board. This could be your another failure case if you don’t pay attention. Keep your team playing national games, but also prepare them for Champions League.

Your confidence brings inspiration, influence, motivation, and empowerment to the people. They are not waiting your approval to try out things, because they developed good self awareness, and good judgement skills. If you succeed, you don’t need to manage them. Because they feel already part of the organization, own the surrounding things, and proactively involve in to be sure that they are playing for #1 position. They will only come back to you when they need additional support. This is where you need to show your support. If things get paused or worse when you are not involved as a leader, congratulations. You managed to fail an entire organization with your management style.

Most likely, as a new leader, your leadership style won’t be a match with some people, and/or you won’t be able to make some people great neither in your team nor in the organization. Instead of running a toxic, non-supportive culture which can spread, make them a generous offer to leave the company. Good and bad things are part of our lives, trip, and work experiences.

Another side note here, to be able to succeed in leadership, your emotional quotient plays an important role. To learn more about it, read this post. High EQ is the first thing to get promoted in organizations. A person might be excellent at his/her own circle. As long as people don’t get the benefit of his/her skills, in other words, s/he won’t be able to make others better. This should be clearly stated to everyone in the organization if they want promotions. As a leader, you also develop yourself if your lead doesn’t develop you. At this point, you need to develop a high strategic quotient. High IQ will get you hired, high EQ will get you promoted, high SQ will take you to the board. Of course, IQ, EQ, and SQ are not enough. To climb the latter of success, you need to develop multidisciplinary perspectives e.g. technical skills, decision-making capabilities, and the ability to manage ambiguity.