Most advice about inheriting a team starts with day one. This series starts earlier — with what new executives are actually walking into, why the picture they were handed is only part of the story, and what it really takes to lead an inherited team that performs.

You stepped into the role. The team is still there. Everyone’s being polite. But you know there’s work to be done.

Because what looks like stability is actually stagnation. The team isn’t broken — they’re not in revolt, they’re not failing loudly. They’re just operating the exact same way they always have: reactive, anecdote-driven, and not always connected to the broader organizational goals that actually matter.

I’ve spent most of my career in the agency world — working for organizations within Publicis Groupe and Omnicom, and partnering with clients like Molson Coors, PepsiCo, and SC Johnson. 

As you can imagine, I’ve seen this problem from both sides: the agency trying to drive change from the outside, and the client organization trying to make it stick from within.

Across all of it, the inherited team problem shows up everywhere. It doesn’t matter how strong the business is or how talented the people are.

When a new executive steps in, they’re working from a picture that was handed to them — by their new boss, by the executive team, by whoever brought them in. That perspective matters, and it’s given in good faith. But if we’re being honest, it’s also filtered.

It reflects what leadership above sees, what they prioritize, and sometimes what they’re comfortable sharing. The team you actually walk into is rarely exactly the team you were told about.

Research from HBR puts the executive failure rate within the first 18 months at around 50%, and the cost of a failed leadership transition at up to 10 times the executive’s annual salary. Most of that risk isn’t about competence. It’s about context.

What the Team Is Carrying That Nobody Told You About

There’s something that gets overlooked in almost every inherited team situation, and it doesn’t show up in any leadership framework: the emotional weight of transition.

When a leader has been in place for a long time — especially someone deeply embedded in the organization, who knew every client, every product, every corner of the business — their departure lands differently than a typical leadership change.

 Even when the team knows change is right, there’s a loss underneath it. Identity gets wrapped up in leaders who’ve been around that long.

Ways of working, unwritten rules, a sense of stability — all of it shifts at once. As the new leader, you can be doing everything right and still feel resistance that doesn’t quite make sense.

It’s not always about you or your ideas. Sometimes the team is still processing what they left behind.

Give that space. Acknowledge it, even briefly. The leaders who move fastest through a leadership transition aren’t always the ones who drive hardest — they’re the ones who understand what the team is carrying and factor that into the pace of change.

Part 2 of this series goes deeper into what to actually do in those first weeks — and why the instinct most new executives act on first is the wrong one.

Kyle Cleary is a Principal Executive Coach at Close Cohen Career Consulting, working with new executives and their leadership teams to build the operating systems, accountability structures, and strategic clarity that inherited teams are often missing.