Your New Team Is Thinking About You
To all you Leader-Bosses with fresh appointments and new departments: there are questions running underneath nearly every interaction you have with your new team for the first several months. Questions like is she competent? and does she have a good vision for the department? are certainly there, but there are other questions underneath all of that that are simpler and much more personal: Is she going to see my value? Do I matter to her? Will my star (which has been rising, thankyouverymuch) continue on its fabulous trajectory?
What do those questions mean for you, new Leader-Boss? Every change you make, every conversation you have about someone’s work, every question you ask, and every reaction when something inevitably goes sideways is helping your team answer that question, whether you realize you are answering it or not. Your team is paying attention because you have just become a person who has the potential to significantly affect their working lives. Of course they are paying attention.
So, this means that the actual job of the first hundred days in a new leadership role may look a little different than what everyone has told you it should.
Ignore "hit the ground running" for now
“Hit the ground running” is probably some of the most common advice you will hear when you step into a new leadership role, and there absolutely is a moment when you need to do exactly that. But is it Week 1?
Before you start telling people things, editing the strategic plan, and certainly before you start tinkering with work schedules or committee structures, put yourself in the seat of the people you are about to lead. They are already working there, after all, and they have probably been running their own version of a story about you since your appointment was announced.
You have been on the other side of this. We all have. Those days between the announcement of a new boss and that person’s actual arrival are full of chatter, presumptions, questions, and predictions about what this new person is going to be like. There is also, in just about every office I have ever known, some version of the running bet about that one person everyone privately agrees is not pulling their weight: How long until she figures it out?
Your new team is doing all of that right now, which is useful to remember when you walk through the door. And kinda? For the first weeks.
Your inner phenomenological researcher shows up
While you are providing some much-needed reassurance in those early weeks, you also get to become a researcher. And since you ended up in higher education administration, I bet that idea is pretty shiny and fun.
When clients in new roles are thinking about “culture” and their new team, I lean heavily here on Amy Edmondson’s psychological safety model from The Fearless Organization, a resource I recommend to clients constantly, particularly when we are in the middle of trying to understand the culture of an organization or team. I do want to clarify what I mean when I use “psychological safety,” because it has become one of those terms we use often enough that its actual meaning can get a little fuzzy.
Psychological safety means people can operate across four levels, inclusion, learner, contributor, and challenger safety, without fearing retaliation, retribution, or the silent withdrawal of opportunities that matter to their careers. It still allows for accountability, disagreement, consequences, and the reality that people are not always going to be nice to one another. Psychological safety gives people room to participate, learn, contribute, and challenge without wondering what it is going to cost them professionally.
During those first weeks, I would use those four levels as a loose grid rather than a rubric. You are not grading anyone, and you certainly do not need another spreadsheet. You are simply paying attention to what happens around you, particularly when people are not consciously trying to show you something.
As a person who’s stepped in to this exact scenario, here’s what I’m watching for:
How people show up
Start with something simple: How do people show up?
Do they show up at all, and when they do, are they on time, enthusiastic, and open-minded? Do people willingly hand things off to one another, or does information seem to pool in certain corners of the organization and move very slowly everywhere else? Can someone state a problem out loud when they see one, or does the room become quiet and shifty the moment something uncomfortable surfaces?
This is inclusion and learner safety showing up in real time, and those everyday interactions will tell you an enormous amount about the team you have inherited. Pay attention to whether people can comfortably say, “I don’t know,” or “I made a mistake.” Pay attention to whether meetings feel like places where people can think and learn together, or whether everyone seems focused on demonstrating that they already know what they are doing.
These dynamics developed long before you arrived, and you are probably not going to change them overnight. For now, your job is to notice what you are walking into.
How the group handles conflict
How a team actually acts while negotiating disagreement gets missed or underestimated constantly because we tend to focus so much on the conflict itself. Disagreement is normal. People have different priorities, departments have competing needs, and almost every team has that one colleague whose way of operating creates friction with everybody else’s. What you really want to understand is what the group does when those disagreements inevitably show up.
Do people avoid conflict and allow it to calcify over time? Do they kibitz around it, with a concern traveling sideways through a colleague instead of directly to the person who actually needs to hear it? Does the real conversation happen in the parking lot after the meeting has officially ended, when everyone finally says what they were unwilling to say around the conference table? Can people work through disagreement directly, like a group of adults who trust the room they are in enough to tolerate some discomfort?
How a group handles conflict will tell you an enormous amount about how that group understands authority. When people can disagree directly, in the room and with the people involved, you are seeing contributor and challenger safety at work. When disagreement consistently travels sideways, you are learning something equally important about where trust begins to break down.
Where the social influence actually lives
One of the more entertaining things about joining a new organization is discovering just how little the org chart sometimes tells you about where the actual power lives.
Some people carry significant weight because they are the institutional legacy. They have survived three reorgs, four strategic plans, and enough leadership transitions to know that if they wait long enough, whatever everyone is currently panicking about may eventually pass. People defer to them because they know things, they have history, and they understand how the institution works.
Others carry influence because they are genuinely kind, trustworthy people, and colleagues know they can count on them. That is its own form of currency within a department.
And then there are people who have built influence through strategic alliances and information control, which admittedly makes the whole thing sound a little bit like Survivor. You want to understand that kind of influence early, too, because informal influence can shape a team in all sorts of ways.
Find your informal leaders, particularly the people others naturally orient toward without ever being told to do so, and then watch what they do with that pull. Do they use it to help the group move forward? Do they use it to protect their own position? How do other people respond to them? This is often one of the most useful pieces of intelligence you can gather during your first hundred days, and I promise you that no org chart is going to hand it to you.
Building the feedback loop
All of this observation becomes much more useful when you give yourself a way to capture what you are learning.
I encourage new Leader-Bosses to keep a brief journal during this stretch, and let it be easy. (Don’t have a journal habit? Truly, try it for just this short bit of time – your mind is on overload and recording information helps you retain it. You can stop later, I promise). A few lines after a meaningful meeting or interaction about what you noticed, what surprised you, what you want to remember, or what you are beginning to wonder about is enough. If you are going to spend a few weeks behaving like a researcher, you might as well keep the field notes. I suspect you will be surprised by what they tell you when you go back and read them six months later.
At the same time, begin building ways for people to bring feedback directly to you. Some people are going to find you regardless of what systems you put in place because there are always people who are perfectly comfortable walking into the new boss’s office and telling her exactly what she needs to know. Those are the easy ones.
I would spend more time thinking about the people you are not hearing from. Who has not stopped by? Who is not speaking during meetings? Whose perspective keeps reaching you through someone else? Those absences are useful data…how are you going to reach the people who are not yet ready to reach you?
Then, once you have listened and watched and learned enough to understand the team you have actually inherited, go and do the work.
Your people need you, and some of them are probably much more excited about your arrival than they are quite ready to let on yet. They are watching what you do because it matters to them, and underneath all of those observations is still that question they have been asking since before you walked through the door: Is she going to see my value? Do I matter to her?
The job, all hundred days of it, is to give them an answer. If you do it well, perhaps a year from now they will look back and think: Damn. I’m glad she showed up.
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