How to Join a Leadership Team

Whether you’ve been promoted to a leadership team or have taken a leadership role in a new organisation and are joining a leadership team, it’s important that you build a respected, connected and influential position for yourself. However, getting your head around everything you need to, and feel you need to as quickly as possible, makes it easy to be miss seeing what’s important to achieving this.

Below are four highly effective ways to get your new leadership team membership off to a powerful start that will set you up for success.

You only get one chance to put relationships first

If you’ve been promoted within the same organisation you will have an existing set of relationships with both the people you now lead and the others on the leadership team you’re now part of. Some of these relationships will be close - they may even be former peers in the team you are about to lead - and some casual. To help you in your new leadership role you should reflect your existing relationships and how they may change.

If you’re joining a new organisation you will have a will new set of relationships to establish and build. People don’t know you at all and your new colleagues will need to feel they know, and trust, you before they are prepared to be influenced by you.

It’s easy to be preoccupied trying to make sense of all the newness, making a good impression, demonstrating that you’re worthy of your new role, focusing on taking action, making changes or being strategic. All of these are important but if you put them ahead of your changed or new relationships you’re sending a signal that you think the people around you, your leadership team peers and those who you lead, come second. It’s very hard to come back from that by later focusing on relationships as people know they weren’t your first priority.

Whatever your situation, you only have once chance to put relationships - changed or new - first.

Understand that you’re a reset for the team

One of the fundamental concepts in understanding how teams, including leadership teams, work is that they go on a journey that starts when they form and progresses through phases of the members getting to know how each other works and how they can effectively work together. The journey then takes them, ideally, on to being a high-performing team rather than a collection of high-performing individuals.

Bruce Tuckman captured this in his broadly used framework that identifies that teams form, ‘storm’, norm and perform. Tuckman said that all these phases are necessary and inevitable if a team is to grow, face challenges, deliver results sad operate as a high-performing team.

When a new person joins a team it has the effect of pulling the team back from performing or norming to (re)forming. Depending on the role, ways of working and personalities involved the new person may find their place in the team quickly and the team may re-advance through storming and norming to performing quickly. This isn’t always or automatically the case.

If the new person is the team leader, the rest of the team will be particularly aware of their personality and ways of working and reforming will be a more significant process and likely take longer. If the new person doesn’t fit in with the team quickly or well the team could become disrupted and struggle to regain its former levels of performance. If the new person doesn't fit and is the leader the team faces major challenges to reform and reach high-performance.

When you join a leadership team be aware that you, or the fact that you are new, is triggering a reforming. To help this process, be as open and relationship oriented as you can with your team mates so they quickly get to know and trust you, and work out how to work with you. In this way to can have a major influence on the team reforming and getting to performing … a great way to start your time in the team.

Remember your hat

Members of leadership teams are actually members of two teams - the leadership team and the team they lead. This dual membership is a real challenge because for each team to perform at a high level you must be a committed, active member of it.

When you are interacting with the leadership team it is important to remember what hat you’re wearing. Many leaders, even when they are well established, unconsciously default to wearing the hat of the team they lead. They go into leadership team meeting representing the team they lead. This is entirely legitimate - but not all the time. A leader is in the leadership team to represent their team but also to contribute to the leadership of the department, division or whole organisation that the leadership team is collectively responsible for.

Many capable, experienced leaders always put their team first and the broader group, and so the leadership team, second. This makes it harder for the leadership team to be a team rather than a collection of individual leaders. If more than one member does this the team will find it hard, perhaps impossible, to function as a high-performing leadership team. In this situation, leadership team meetings lose value and the team loses influence. The resulting siloed leadership and operations cannot attain collective leadership and the powerful benefits of diverse, robust thinking and decision-making.

When you are interacting with the leadership team be clear in your own mind what hat you’re wearing; the hat of shared leadership or the representative hat of the team you lead. Bothe are important. At times you may want to overtly refer to which hat you’re wearing to clearly show you are aware of these two perspectives and to help the message you are communicating be understood and respected.

Openly hold yourself to account

With leadership comes responsibility for seeing that things get done and accountability for outcomes, good and otherwise. When we are not in a leadership role we are held to account by leaders. When we are a leader, part of our role is to hold others to account. This isn’t easy and for many leaders one of the more challenging aspects of leadership.

To hold others to account credibly and effectively we should also hold ourselves to account and do so openly.

As a leader, when you publicly hold you self to account you signal you are not above your own expectations and that when you hold others to account you are treating them no differently than how you treat yourself. Allied to the integrity that comes from owning your actions and their consequences, you are more influential.

This is immensely valuable not only to your leadership of your team but also in establishing and maintaining your standing in the leadership team. It will accelerate the growth of your peer’s trust in you and you ability to form meaningful, influential relationships with them.

Leading is complex, rewarding and often challenging. By investing in your leadership team membership in these ways when you join the team, and maintaining them, you will lift your success and that of the whole team.