This is Part 2 of a series on what it actually takes to lead an inherited team. In Part 1, we talked about why the picture new executives receive before stepping in is often incomplete. Here, we get into what to do about it — starting with the instinct most leaders get wrong.

Every instinct in those first weeks of leading an inherited team pushes you toward action. You were hired to make change. You can already see what’s broken. The pressure to demonstrate value is real.

Resist it.

Your first job is to listen — genuinely — and make sure every person on that team feels heard. Not so you can gather evidence. Not to confirm what you already suspect.

Because people who feel seen in the early days are far more willing to partner with you on getting to the future state.

The Competing Narratives Problem

Here’s what nobody tells you about the listening phase of a leadership transition: you’re going to hear competing narratives. Loudly, confidently delivered by smart, well-intentioned people who have completely different reads on the same situation.

One leader will tell you the real problem is process. Another will say it’s people. A third will say it’s both — and also something you haven’t thought of yet.

This is where your intuition matters as much as your analysis. The data will catch up, but in those early weeks you’re pattern-matching in real time. Trust what you’re noticing.

Diagnosing Who’s Actually On Board

One of the most important — and underrated — skills when leading an inherited team is learning to distinguish genuine buy-in from lip service. Fast.

The person who says all the right things in the room but never follows through on anything small? Take note of that. The one who pushes back on you directly with an informed perspective and is first to execute? That’s someone to invest in.

You’re not just diagnosing a system — you’re reading people. And when inheriting a leadership team, the two are inseparable.

Watch for behavior, not words. Who shows up prepared? Who follows through on the small asks — the ones nobody’s tracking? Who is still talking about the old way of doing things six weeks in?

These signals tell you more about your real coalition than any one-on-one conversation will. Don’t wait too long to act on what you learn.

Overcommunicate. Then Do It Again.

I remember getting genuinely frustrated at times — feeling like I had said something clearly, said it more than once, and still wasn’t breaking through. The temptation is to move on, to assume people heard you.

In my experience, just when you think you’ve communicated enough is exactly when you need to double down.

People need to hear the same message multiple times, in multiple ways, before it lands as real. What feels like repetition to you feels like consistency to your team.

The “why” behind a decision needs to show up in the all-hands, in the one-on-one, in the way you frame a question in a casual hallway conversation.

Silence from a new executive leader gets filled — and rarely with the most generous interpretation. Overcommunicate the direction. Overcommunicate the progress. Overcommunicate the reasoning.

Part 3 of this series gets into the three patterns we see most consistently in inherited teams — and why they’re harder to fix than they look.

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.