This is the final post in a series on leading an inherited team. Parts 1 through 3 covered the gap between the briefing and reality, why listening has to come first, and the three patterns that consistently slow new executives down. This one is the honest part.

Here’s what I’ve observed working alongside executives navigating inherited teams: the problem is almost never that they don’t understand what needs to change. They do.

They can articulate the vision clearly. They’ve read the right things and had the right conversations. They know what good looks like.

The hard part is that building a leadership operating system doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

The Reality Nobody Talks About

It happens while you’re managing customer relationships, hitting financial targets, keeping an eye on work quality, and trying to paint a picture of the future for a C-suite team that wants answers now. 

The day-to-day doesn’t pause while you redesign how the inherited team runs.

And the stakes of getting it wrong aren’t abstract — CEB research shows that when a leader struggles through a transition, the performance of their direct reports runs 15% lower than it would under a high-performing leader, and those team members are 20% more likely to disengage or leave.

Having sat in operations and client services roles myself, I know this tension firsthand. I understood the importance of the right systems and ways of working. And yet, candidly, the client work and the relationships always took precedence.

The urgent crowded out the important, over and over. I didn’t always get that balance right, even when I knew what right looked like.

The Implementation Gap

Here’s what I hear from leaders all the time: you know how important the operating system components are. You’re not confused about what needs to exist.

But before you know it, months have passed. You did the hard diagnostic work — the conversations, the assessment, the clarity on what’s broken. 

And yet the implementation fell short. Some things stuck. Some things moved. But a true system that sustains? That’s a different thing entirely.

It requires a level of dedicated focus that’s almost impossible to protect when the business is demanding your attention every single day.

What Actually Works

Telling leaders what good looks like doesn’t work. They’ll nod in the room and revert to old patterns by Thursday.

What works is having them co-create the operating system themselves. 

When a leadership team defines their own KPIs, names their own owners, and stress-tests their own timelines — they leave the room committed to something. Not because someone told them to be. Because they built it.

That’s a fundamentally different kind of ownership. And it’s the difference between a team that executes because they have to and one that executes because they believe in what they signed up for.

What Close Cohen Works On With Your Leadership Team

Fixing an inherited team isn’t about tearing down what’s there. It’s about building — carefully, deliberately — the operating system, the accountability structures, and the shared language the team never had.

The leaders who get there fastest aren’t the ones who hand down a framework. They’re the ones who co-create it with their team.

Gallup research shows that organizations working on culture change typically see the strongest gains in three to five years. That’s not a reason to feel defeated — it’s a reason to start building the right system now.

The journey from inherited to high-performing is a marathon, not a sprint. 

The gap is almost always in carving out the dedicated time and structure to make it stick — while still running the business. That’s exactly where we come in.

By partnering with your leadership team to co-create the operating system rather than hand one down, we help new executives build something their teams actually own. And that’s what sustains.

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.