Your First Big Call With A Team You Did Not Build

The decision in front of you cannot wait for the relationships it needs.

Your First Big Call With A Team You Did Not Build

Week three. The issue nobody mentioned at your interviews is on the table.

Around it sits a team of individuals you have met, some of them several times, one or two you may have known a little for years, but you have not really experienced them as a team. You know their names and their roles. You do not yet know how they really think and work, what they actually do, or what they are capable of. And they are watching you.

You read the faces, or try to. Fear. Excitement. Resistance. Pressure. Worry about getting it wrong. And behind those, something you sense but cannot label, because the people showing it do not know you either: is it curiosity, and a little scepticism, about whether you are up to the job and what you will be like to work with?

The decision in front of you cannot wait for the relationships it needs. That is the whole situation, and it is one of the most common situations when in a new senior leadership role, and one few are well prepared for.

Deciding before trust

This is the lens: deciding before trust. The uncertainty in it runs both ways. You must decide before you know the team. They must follow before they know you. Neither side can resolve the other's uncertainty first, and the first consequential call arrives before either has tried.

There is a layered version of this that the simple version hides. The call you are about to make draws on more than the room. It draws on the leadership team you now sit in, the organisation around you, the teams you will need across functions, the team you lead, and the individuals in it, all at once, and all interrelated. A new leader has usually begun building trust in one of those layers. The first big call spends trust in every one of them.

And underneath that sits the reason first calls go wrong when the strategy was right. The strategy and the results are the visible half of the work. The individuals, and the sense of us that does not yet exist between them, are the invisible half. Set the strategy without understanding the people and building the relationships between them, and the subjective will often unpick the objective, a few months later, in ways the plan never saw coming.

You have not really begun to be a team until you have decided something of consequence under pressure. Until then, you are working on guesses and assumptions about how the team will perform.

What you cannot yet read

Knowing individuals is not the same as knowing them as a team. It is one of the traps of an inherited room: you have met these people, some of them may even be friends, and the familiarity feels like knowledge. Then the first hard item lands and you discover you know the people and not the team. Who goes quiet under pressure. Who digs in. Who defers, and to whom. Who says yes and does not mean it. All of that is unknown, and all of it decides how the call will actually be carried once you have made it.

The blindness is mutual. They do not know how you decide either: what you listen for, how you feel and what changes your mind, when you close and move, how you receive being challenged best. Most new leaders believe they have shown this. Most have shown their intention, or described their version of it, which is a different thing. You can invite challenge sincerely, and the invitation lands on the relationship, not the words, and in week six there is not yet a relationship for it to land on. The room hears the invitation and stays reluctant, and that reluctance is information about where you are, not just about who they are.

The gap

Often the first weeks go well. The team is up for the journey, and so are you. Then the first big call reveals what the interview could not: a gap between what the business needs and what this team can yet do.

It is one of the hardest things an entry can surface, because the response, stop what is not working or worse harming the business, change how the work is done, teach what the role requires, rebuild from the ground, arrives as pressure on people who did not choose you and have not yet decided to trust you. Pressure does what pressure does. It often raises fear. And fear, in a room where trust has not yet formed, can turn the team you were invited to lead into a team deciding about you and defending themselves.

Here is a health warning worth carrying into every entry. Support secured in advance for the hard version of the call, from the board, from the top, is a promise about a future they have not yet felt. It is retested the day the call becomes real and the people it affects have faces, hearts and families. Do not mistake the initial mandate as a guarantee of support for the follow-through.

And one more thing the gap teaches: the parts of the organisation that need results will want them fast, and if the foundations are not there, you need total ground clearance before you can even begin to build the infrastructure that would enable results. If you have not made that visible, their impatience will read as your failure, and it will arrive from outside the room while you are still working inside it.

I have inherited teams several times across my career. I approached each one, I thought, openly, wanting to learn from them, encouraging challenge to my thinking. Some entries went well. Not every one did, and the ones that did not shared common factors: I had built trust in one or two layers and needed it in all of them, I had underestimated how much taking people with me was the work itself, and I had made the scale of the change and challenge clearer to myself than to anyone who would judge the results.

What this asks of you

1. Discuss how you decide before you all need to know it.  What you will listen for, what will change your mind, when you will close, and how you will handle a gap between what is needed and what is possible, if one appears. Share it early, when it costs less, so that they can read your first decisions against what you shared with them rather than against their assumptions. Ask them to share their ways with you. Do your own work privately: notice the pull to look decisive early, and the speed it wants, and do not let it set the pace. Then let them see it rather than hear it: if you change your mind when someone brings you a better solution, do it visibly and early, and take the first worry you hear seriously, in the room. Trust starts with what they watch you do, not with what you tell them about yourself.

2. Test capability before the strategy assumes it, and secure the mandate for the hard version early, knowing and accepting it will be retested.  Understand what the team can do before you commit to a plan that depends on it. Get the backing you would need for the difficult path while the path is still hypothetical, and treat that backing as a first reading, not a guarantee. And before you judge the gap, give them the means to close it: the teaching, the support, the time, and the honesty about what is being asked.

3. Choose where to start, and in what sequence.  You cannot work every layer first, the leadership team, the organisation, the cross-functional teams, the team, the individuals. Do not privilege one at the expense of the others, and do not pretend the sequence chooses itself. Deciding the order is one of the tough calls, and it is dependent on many factors, but it is your call, make it wisely.

4. Take more people with you than feels necessary, inside and outside the team, and make the scale of the change visible.  Listen deeply as an absolute minimum. Watch the pressure you are loading onto people who have not yet chosen you, and name it out loud when you see fear replacing effort; pressure the team can see coming is pressure it can carry. Communicate what you are doing and why, in terms the people who need results can see and understand, and involve them where you can. If the ground must be cleared before anything can be built, say so before they judge the empty site and lack of visible growth, and find some important quick wins that buy the time the foundations need.

5. Review the first big call together, as the founding story it will become.  Whatever it was, the team will tell a story about it. Decide it with them, and afterwards examine it with them: what you each learned about how the other decides. That review is the moment your perspectives and assumptions start becoming actual knowledge and connection.

A leadership reality

You have not really begun to be a team until you have decided something of consequence under pressure. Until then, you are working on guesses and assumptions about how the team will perform.

The first big call with an inherited team is among the highest-risk decisions a leader makes in a role, and the one made with the least knowledge of the people it depends on. That gap cannot be closed in advance. It can be managed: declared, sequenced, tested, and reviewed, and the leaders who do this well are not the ones who wait for trust, they are the ones who build it as part of the deciding.

One question worth carrying

What does this team know about how I decide, and what do I actually know about how they do?

Two lists. Write them both, and notice the differences: which is shorter, which is less clear, and what you will do about that.

It is a wise leadership move to decide your first big call with an inherited team as if trust were still being built, because it is, and in the making of the decision is where it begins to get built or lost.

May you always find wise judgement when certainty is unfindable.