This blog is part three of a three-part series. Be sure to check out Part I on identity work here and Part II on resetting the team here.
If you’ve been following this series, you’ve done two things. First, you spent time figuring out who you are as a leader now, not who you were before or who your predecessor was. Second, you turned outward and began reshaping the team in a way that aligns with your identity work. That could mean shifting communication styles, building new processes or even creating psychological safety that lets people move forward now. As discussed before, change is hard. Full stop. The resistance to it…is not all about you (and let that set you free).
Now comes the part that feels less concrete, which is creating an operating system. A lot of people will stall here. Not because they lack the ability, but because the first two phases had a clear focal point — yourself, then your team. This phase is about how your leadership shows up across the organisation. It’s structural, not personal. And that makes it harder to see, even when it’s working. And if your team hasn’t seen this in the past, you need to educate and build buy-in there, too.
Set your communication rhythms before they set themselves
If you don’t design how information flows, it will flow the way it did under the predecessor. And you’ll wonder why nothing feels like yours yet. The harsh reality is status quo isn’t just an ‘ain’t broke why fix it’ laid back mentality. Status quo is what people are (sometimes shockingly) attached to because the familiar has a fierce gravitational pull on us.
Obviously, this isn’t about sending more emails or scheduling more meetings. It’s about being intentional with your changes, and providing context. How often will your team hear from you? Why – is this planned with an agenda? Or are you a quick huddle keep-them-in-the-loop person? More importantly, what existing meetings should continue because it still makes sense? And the hard question: which meetings exist simply because they always have?
Most leaders skip this because it feels administrative. It isn’t. It’s architecture. Think about who is in meetings, and what information they were privy to. Are they accustomed to a one-on-one weekly with the boss? If that meeting doesn’t feel important, you might not be wrong. You might also get resistance for the obvious reasons. But you see how even meetings reveal the history of a team.
As I laid out in my Executive Leadership Report, communication is one of the most critical leadership skills in today’s environment. The what, when and how of your communication tells people what kind of leader you are. Not your title. Your rhythms – by which I just mean your workflow, your process, your communication style – all of this is the output of your identity work. And implementing with your team came next.
If you’ve been living like this for 90 days (or six months, whatever it takes to establish this new rhythm), it’s time to integrate this new version of the team into the larger organisation.
Hopefully, the team itself is becoming a functional reflection of your leadership and their strengths. Building it into the fabric of the company will reveal the final, but vital, adjustments.
Build a team that works first. Then bring it online to the broader company. By this stage, your team is starting to trust you. (If you feel like they don’t – either you have more work to do on steps one and two. Or, you do have their trust and you just don’t recognise it. Figure out which, then proceed accordingly.)
But the people your team works with — adjacent leaders, cross-functional peers, other departments — are likely still reading you. You especially, because you are the novelty, but also the team more broadly around what has changed. That’s simply because people notice what’s new or different. So if the team begins to reflect changes, that is what will likely require new trust building.
It’s also worth noting that this step also counterbalances when a team is too inward facing – tribalism can become its own problem. (I wrote about this in Harvard Business Review here.) This step therefore revises team dynamics that keep strong functionality without becoming insular.
Cross-functional trust isn’t about being liked. New leaders might think they are fighting the likeability of their predecessor. Sometimes. Often, they are fighting trust in what has always been. But you have to break the predictability or you’re locked into the status quo set by your predecessor. But you can build back the trust you lost there with context, more communication rather than less. People need to learn how you make decisions, what you prioritise and that you won’t surprise them. You will become predictable, and that will grow into trust.
In the Leadership Report I discuss adaptability and expanding your world view as an essential leadership value. Your team can’t operate in isolation, and your leadership identity has to translate outside the room where you built it. If you’ve done the identity work and you’re clear on your purpose, that clarity helps build credibility with people who don’t report to you. Clarity usually translates to predictability, and humans love certainty. We are built to trust reliable, repeatable outcomes.
The work started with you. Your team reflects their new leader. Now everyone else understands who you (all) are.
This series was framed around what I call successor integration architecture: identity work, then team reset, then building the operating system. The sequence matters. You can’t build an operating system on a team that hasn’t reset. You can’t reset a team when you haven’t done the identity work.
Don’t get too hung up on the rough timelines. Often, I hear leadership teams expect a new leader to be up and running in 90 days or so. That’s fine for the identity work. But changing a team? Depending on the size of the team and the length of the prior leaders tenure (because the longer the history, the firmer it is) then another 100 to 180 days could make sense. For this last stage another 6 to 12 months might make sense.
But the point was never about a specific schedule. Maybe you got through identity work in 60 days. Maybe the team reset took longer because the inherited dynamics were entrenched. The sequence is what matters.
The goal is to build something that doesn’t depend on you performing leadership every minute. An operating system that runs when you’re not watching it is the one that works. That’s the difference between managing a transition and being on the other side of it. More or less – change is messy and gradual and non-linear. Know that now, embrace it. But also know that this period ends. The old way fades, some parts faster than others.
And then one day, people don’t question or challenge the process, just the decisions (that’s always a good thing). The mechanics of how you and the team operate become unremarkable, predictable, running more smoothly than not. You become the status quo. Congratulations.
In terms of my background and expertise, I have spent my entire career working as a trusted advisor to senior leaders wanting to improve the effectiveness of themselves, their teams and their companies. Prior to starting my own consulting firm, I led the global executive assessment and development team for Cisco. Earlier in my career I held leadership roles with RHR International, PepsiCo, Ashridge Executive Education, Hult International Business School and the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.
