New leadership team

Leadership team alignment:
a new team, on one plan.

Leadership team alignment is when every member of a leadership team names the same few priorities, knows who decides what, and has agreed how the team will work, even on questions they argued about first. It is shared understanding, not unanimous agreement. A new or reshaped team usually gets there in one structured session of half a day to a full day, held in the first weeks after the change, with each member's views collected anonymously beforehand.

By Tom Olajide · FounderLast reviewed September 24, 2026

TL;DR

Length: Half a day to a day and a half. One full day is most common.
When: In the first four to eight weeks after a new leader or a big change to the team, then a short check every quarter.
Who attends: The leader and every member of the team. Optionally, the leader's own manager for the opening.
What you leave with: The same short list of priorities, a name on every key decision, a few working agreements, and one scoreboard.

Build your alignment agenda.

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When is it?

What leadership team alignment means

A leadership team is aligned when its members share the same picture of three things: what matters most right now, who decides what, and how they will work together. It does not mean they agree on everything. A team can argue hard about a choice, settle it, and then all act on it. That team is aligned. A team that nods in the meeting and then does its own thing is not, however calm the meeting looked.

Michael Watkins, author of The First 90 Days, describes alignment as a team agreeing on four basic questions¹:

What will we accomplish? The goals and the few numbers that show progress.
Why should we do it? The reason the goals matter, and the incentives behind them.
How will we do it? The strategy and the plans that carry it out.
Who will do what? Roles and responsibilities.

Watkins notes that leaders are usually comfortable with the goals and the plans, and that the "why" is the part that trips them up¹. In new teams the fourth question is also easy to leave vague, because naming who decides can feel like taking power from someone. A good session answers all four out loud.

Alignment, agreement and consensus

	What it means	What it costs
Agreement	Everyone thinks the same choice is best	Rare on hard questions, and not needed
Consensus	Everyone can live with the choice	Slow. Each person holds a veto
Alignment	Everyone understands the choice, knows who made it, and acts on it	A fair process and a clear owner. This is the goal

Research on fair process explains why alignment is possible without agreement. W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne found that people will commit to a decision, even one they disagree with, if they believe the process used to make it was fair². Fair meant three things: people were involved and could challenge ideas, the final reasoning was explained, and everyone knew what was expected next². So how the team decides matters as much as what it decides. They are clear that fair process is not consensus. The leader still decides, and the merit of the ideas, not a count of votes, drives the choice².

Alignment session vs team building vs new leader assimilation

	Team building	New leader assimilation	Alignment session
Purpose	Relationships and trust	The new leader and the team learn about each other fast	Agree priorities, decision rights and how the team works
What you leave with	A better feeling in the room	The leader knows the team's questions and worries, and has answered them	Written decisions, owners, working agreements and one scoreboard
When	Any time	The first weeks of a new leader	When the team forms or changes, then at regular checks

A new team usually needs the last two together: first learn about each other, then decide. The new leader assimilation section below covers the first half, and the rest of this guide covers the second.

Why leadership teams think they are aligned when they are not

Most leadership teams believe they are more aligned than they are. Donald Sull, Charles Sull and James Yoder studied 124 organizations for MIT Sloan Management Review in 2018. In the typical company, just over half of senior executives named the same list of strategic priorities, and only 28% of executives and middle managers responsible for carrying out the strategy could list three of their company's priorities³. The authors add that top executives often assume the whole company is on the same page, and that the assumption is usually wrong³.

An earlier study by Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, published in Harvard Business Review in 2015, surveyed 7,600 managers in 262 companies. Just over half of top team members said they had a clear sense of how the major priorities fit together⁴. In one firm they describe, 84% of staff said they were clear on the top priorities. When the chief executive's own management team was asked to list the top five, fewer than a third could name even two⁴. Feeling aligned and being aligned are different measures.

The gap can start with something more basic: who is on the team. Richard Hackman, Ruth Wageman and colleagues studied more than 120 senior teams around the world. Almost every team believed its membership was clear. When members were asked to describe their team, fewer than 10% agreed about who was on it⁵.

Why it costs so much

Misalignment at the top shows up as broken promises between departments. In the 2015 study, only 9% of managers said they could rely on colleagues in other functions and units all the time. Managers were three times more likely to miss a commitment for lack of support from other units than because their own team failed to deliver⁴. A leadership team is where those units meet, so its members' promises to each other set the pattern for everyone below them.

Shared understanding also changes how teams work. In a laboratory study of two-person teams flying simulated missions, teams whose members held more similar pictures of the task and of each other worked together better and performed better⁶. It is a small study in an artificial setting, but it matches what the field surveys show.

Why a new team is the moment

A new leader, or a big change in who sits on the team, resets priorities, roles and habits all at once. John Gabarro's study of 14 management successions found that taking charge happens in stages that alternate between intense learning and action. The first stage, which he called taking hold, lasted three to six months and often set the tone for everything after⁷. Hold the alignment session inside that first stretch: after the leader has listened to everyone, and before the big changes begin. Held too early, the leader decides without knowing the team. Held too late, the old habits have become the new team's habits.

Two findings sharpen the point. In Gabarro's study, the clearest difference between successful and failed transitions was the quality of the new manager's working relationships at the end of the first year, and the usual cause of trouble was never building shared expectations with key people⁷. Hackman, drawing on studies of teams in 27 organizations that he edited in 1990, adds that what happens the first time a group meets strongly shapes how it works for the rest of its life⁵.

When not to hold one

You are about to change who is on the team. Watkins advises saving early removals for dire business situations, critical roles, or truly toxic behavior¹. If you have already decided, make the change first. People who are about to leave can tell, and the day is wasted on them.
The decision is already made and you want a show of support. People judge the process, not only the outcome². If you have made a call, say so, and use the session to agree how to deliver it.
The real problem is one person's behavior. Deal with it one to one. A group session aimed at one person turns into a trial.
The group is not really a team. If members' work barely depends on each other, a full day on how they work together is poor value. Hold a shorter session on the few shared priorities and the handoffs between them.
You have not met everyone one to one yet. A new leader who has not listened first will lead the day on guesses.
The organization is in a live crisis. Act first. Hold the session when the pressure drops, and use it to agree what to keep from how the team worked under pressure.

When to hold it, and how long

When

A new leader: once you have met each member one to one, usually in the first four to eight weeks, and before the first planning or budget cycle you own.
A reshaped team: within a month of the change, whether that is two new members, a merged function, or a new mandate.
An established team that has drifted: before the next planning cycle, so the plan starts from what the team agreed.

Alignment does not last on its own. Watkins recommends revisiting a team's agreed behaviors any time its membership or mission changes, and reviewing how the team is working every quarter or every six months¹. The full day happens once. The check takes an hour.

Watkins also sorts a leadership team's meetings into three kinds: strategic, operational and learning. Crammed into one recurring meeting, the urgent operational items crowd out the rest, so he suggests giving each kind its own rhythm¹.

How long

Length	Works when
Half a day	The team is small, the questions were answered beforehand, and the main need is decision rights and a scoreboard
One full day	Most new teams. It covers what is in the way, one real decision, how the team works, and who decides what. The sample agenda below is one
A day and a half	A large team, two teams being merged, or low trust. The evening does real work, and the second morning starts from what the first day settled

Where and what it costs

Somewhere away from the usual office, where nobody slips out to a meeting, and easy for everyone to reach. Budget for the room, food, travel if people come from several places, and a facilitator if you use one. The retreat budget calculator prices it. The costly mistake is not the venue. It is arriving without having asked the team anything first.

Who attends

Every member of the team. Decision rights are claimed by name, so anyone missing comes back to a map drawn without them. Settle the membership list before you send the invitation. Given how often senior teams disagree on who is on them⁵, the list is itself a decision. Keep it small. Hackman's rule of thumb is no double digits, because the links between members to manage grow almost exponentially as a team gets bigger⁵.

The leader's own manager, for the opening only. A chief executive for a new division head, or the board chair for a new chief executive. They set the mandate in ten minutes and leave. If they stay, the team talks to them instead of to each other.

A people partner. Someone from human resources who knows the team, to help it keep its working agreements after the day. Not to take notes on individuals.

Do you need a facilitator?

A new leader is part of the subject, which makes it hard to run the day and take part in it. A facilitator helps most when the leader was promoted from within the team, when there is open conflict, or when the team inherited a history the leader is part of. You can do without one when the team is small, the questions were answered anonymously beforehand, and the leader is willing to speak last.

If you hire one, ask how they collect views before the day, how they keep answers anonymous in a small team, and what the team will have in writing at the end.

Questions to ask a new leadership team

Throughline asks the leader four questions about the decision, then asks the team to answer anonymously on their own devices, in about two minutes. These are the questions it uses.

For you, the leader

What must this new team land in its first hundred days?
What has this group inherited that it must not reopen?
Which decisions are whose, and which are unclear?
Who picks up the plan after the day, and how many teams run it?

For your team, anonymously

Each rated 1 to 5. Nobody sees who said what, including you.

I am clear on the decision this retreat needs to make.
This team behaves as one team, not several.
I can say what I really think with this team.
I am confident we will follow through.

Then one open question: what is the most important decision this retreat has to make?

Who to invite

Every member of the new teamdecision rights are claimed by name
The leader’s own manager (optional)sets the mandate
A people partnerhelps the team hold its behaviours

Why ask before the day

When a group talks, it spends most of its time on what everyone already knows. In a classic experiment, groups given all the information chose the best option 83% of the time. When the same facts were split among members, only 18% of groups found it⁸. Views collected privately before the discussion bring the unshared facts into the room.

A new team has a second problem: people do not yet know if it is safe to be candid. Amy Edmondson defined team psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. In her study of 51 work teams, it went with the learning behavior that drove performance⁹. Google's study of 180 of its own teams found psychological safety the most important of five team dynamics, with "structure and clarity" third¹⁰. A new team cannot build that trust in a week. Anonymous answers give the team candor before it has trust.

How to use the answers

Send the questions a week or two before the day, and give people several days to answer.
As the leader, answer first. Then compare your view with the team's. The widest gaps are your agenda.
Read the spread, not the average. A 3 out of 5 can mean everyone is lukewarm, or half the team says 5 and half says 1. Those are very different days.
Cover the parts of trust. Watkins lists six for a leadership team: confidence that each member can do their job, open sharing of information, belief that promises will be kept, safety to disagree, confidences kept, and unity once a decision is made¹. They make a useful checklist for the questions you ask.
Add two private exercises to set a baseline. Ask each member to list the top three priorities in their own words, and to write who decides five decisions the team makes often. Keep the results. They are how you tell later whether it worked.
Write silently before talking on the day, too. Having people write ideas alone before any discussion is the core of the nominal group technique¹¹, and it keeps the first speaker from setting the course.

In a team of four or five, people can guess who wrote an answer from its wording. Share themes and counts rather than quotes, and never try to work out who said what.

Preparation timeline

When	What happens
6 weeks before	Team membership settled. Date set. Facilitator chosen, or not.
4 weeks before	One-to-ones with every member finished, for a new leader.
2 weeks before	Questions sent. The leader answers first.
1 week before	Answers in. Agenda built around the widest gaps.
2 days before	Short pre-read sent: the results, and the decisions the day will make.
The day	Run it. Record each decision as it is made.
Within 2 working days	The written record sent to every member.

New leader assimilation, without the outside facilitator

In a classic new leader assimilation, a facilitator interviews the team without the new leader, gathers what they want to know and what worries them, and brings it back anonymously. It works because nobody has to say it to the new boss’s face.

Throughline does the same job before the first session. The team answers anonymously on their own devices, the leader answers first, and the leader sees where their own view differs most from the team’s before the day. Nobody sees who said what, including the leader.

How a classic assimilation session runs

The leader opens and leaves. A few minutes of introduction, then the leader steps out.
The team answers a set of questions with a facilitator, who writes the answers down without names.
The facilitator briefs the leader privately on what the team said.
The leader comes back and answers each point in front of the whole team, including the uncomfortable ones.
A follow-up a few months later checks what has changed.

The questions most versions ask the team

What do we already know about the new leader?
What do we want to know?
What concerns do we have?
What does the leader need to know about us?
What are the biggest problems this team will face in the next year?
What is working now that should not change?

The practice is not new. Gabarro reported in 1985 that General Electric ran assimilation meetings, led by its human resources staff, so new managers and their direct reports could work out expectations early⁷. The evidence for the practice is thin but consistent. Steven Manderscheid and Alexandre Ardichvili observed three assimilations in 2008 and found the leaders learned, adapted and built relationships faster, and the teams learned about their new leaders too. The authors note that three cases limit how far that generalizes¹².

Answering as the new leader

Answer every point, even the hard ones. Where you do not know yet, say when you will. Never ask who said something. The first time a leader tries to find out, the team stops answering honestly.

Answering a hard point

One concern is that I will bring in my own people and push this team aside. That is fair to worry about. Here is what I will do: nobody's role changes before I have worked with you for three months, and if I change a role, you hear it from me first.

A sample leadership team alignment agenda

A full day for a new or reshaped leadership team, laid out by the same rules Throughline’s planner uses, before the team has answered anything. It clears what is in the way before it asks the team to decide. Full day, 09:00 to 15:40, breaks and lunch included.

09:00
Welcome 10 min
09:10
Warm-up 10 min
09:20
Opening brief 20 min
Method: Read the brief, then talk
Done when: Everyone has reacted to the brief and named what they want to leave with.
09:40
What's in our way 30 min
Method: Start, stop, continue
Done when: Each column has entries and at least one Stop has an owner.
10:10
The hardest problem 30 min
Method: Name the real problem
Done when: The crux is written in one sentence the room accepts.
10:40
Clearing the air 30 min
Method: Work through the disagreement
Done when: The tension is named openly and the room agrees how it will be resolved.
11:10
Break 15 min
11:25
The decision 30 min
Method: Make the decision and pick the priorities
Done when: The call is made and the priorities are ranked.
11:55
Lunch 45 min
12:40
Budget allocation 30 min
Method: Fund the chosen priorities
Done when: The allocation sums to the actual budget, not to a wish.
13:10
Warm-up 5 min
13:15
How we work together 25 min
Method: Agree how we'll work
Done when: A short list of behaviours is agreed and the keepers are starred.
13:40
Break 15 min
13:55
What we need from each other 35 min
Method: What each of us needs from each other
Done when: No request is unanswered and no answer took longer than a sentence.
14:30
Decision rights 20 min
Method: Whose call is it
Done when: Every listed decision has a claimant or a dated contest.
14:50
One scoreboard 25 min
Method: Are we watching the same scoreboard
Done when: One scoreboard is agreed and the competing measures are listed beside it.
15:15
Close and commitments 20 min
Method: What, so what, now what
Done when: The third round produced something with an owner.
15:35
Who made today work 5 min

Make one for your own situation Planning two days? The free planner builds both from your team’s answers.

Why the day runs in this order

The morning clears what is in the way, names the hardest problem, and brings the main tension into the open before the team makes a decision. The afternoon then turns to how the team works. That order is deliberate: a working agreement is easier to write once the team has made one real decision together, because everyone can test the agreement against the morning.

Half a day or a day and a half

Half a day. Keep the welcome, the opening brief, "Clearing the air", "How we work together", "Decision rights", "One scoreboard", and the close. That runs just under three hours with one break. It suits a small team that answered the questions beforehand and has no single large decision to make.

A day and a half. Run everything through "Budget allocation" on the first day, giving "Clearing the air" and "The decision" more time than the sample does, and hold a dinner that evening. Open the second morning with a short recap, then take "How we work together", "What we need from each other", "Decision rights" and "One scoreboard" while everyone is fresh, and close before lunch.

For a short warm-up that does real work, try: "One thing about how the last team you were on made decisions that you want this team to copy, and one you want it to avoid." The retreat icebreakers page has more.

Running the day

Ground rules. Agree three at the start: what is said in the room stays in the room; on contested questions the leader speaks last; and once a decision is recorded, nobody reopens it in private.

A common vocabulary. Many teams already know Patrick Lencioni's model from The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results¹³. It is a business fable and a useful shared language, not a research finding. Use it to name a pattern in the team, never to label a colleague.

Argue about the work, not the person. Allen Amason's 1996 study of top management teams separated disagreement about the task from disagreement that turns personal, and found they pull in opposite directions on decision quality and on how well the team accepts the result¹⁴. A new team needs the first kind. When it turns into the second, stop and restate the choice being made.

Settling who decides what

This block matters most for a new team, and it is where sessions most often stay vague. Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko of Bain & Company argue that when decision roles are unclear, decisions get stuck inside the organization¹⁵. At one carmaker they described in 2006, 83% of the marketing team said marketing decided which features were standard, while 64% of product developers said that call was theirs¹⁵. Bain's RAPID tool names five roles in a decision: Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input and Decide¹⁶. You do not need the full tool. You do need one name in the "decides" column for each decision.

Watkins describes a simpler habit: for each decision, the leader says up front whether they will make the call, open it to a small group, or look for full-team consensus¹. Agree that split for the team's recurring decisions on the day.

Decision	Who decides	Who must be asked first	Who is told after
A price change	The commercial lead	Finance lead	The whole team, before customers hear
A hire onto this team	The leader	Every member who will work with the person	The whole organization
Moving budget between teams	The leader, with the finance lead	Both team heads affected	The whole team
A launch date	The product lead	Sales and operations leads	The whole team

Where two people both claim a decision, do not force it on the day. Record it as contested, with a date by which the leader will settle it.

Disagree, then commit

Some choices will not reach agreement. In his 2016 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos described asking colleagues to "disagree and commit": to say they disagree, and then back the decision anyway¹⁷. It works when the fair-process conditions hold: people were heard, and the reasoning was explained². It fails when "commit" means "go quiet and do your own thing later."

What the leader can say

Opening the day

Before today, you told me where you agree and where you do not. I have read it, and I answered the same questions myself. We will spend today on the gaps. By the end, every decision on this list has a name next to it.

Naming what is not up for debate

Two things are settled and I will not reopen them today: the budget total, and the move into the new region. Everything about how we deliver them is open.

Asking for challenge

I have given my view, so it is the easiest one to agree with. Priya, you know this market better than I do. What am I missing?

Closing a decision

So pricing changes are Lara's call. She tells this team before customers hear, not after. If we reverse two changes in a quarter, we come back to this. Does anyone see it differently before I write it down?

When a settled decision comes back

We agreed this in the session, and it has an owner. If something has changed, bring it to the next team meeting and we will look at it together. Until then, it stands.

What the new team leaves with

Who decides what, how the team will work under pressure, what each person needs from the others, and one scoreboard everyone agreed to.

Every decision is recorded with an owner, a date and what would reopen it, so new joiners do not reopen it.
The plan drafts itself from what the room decided, and each team gets its own part of it.
Owners check in from an email in one click. A missed check-in counts as off track, and their manager is told.
Follow-up all year on how the plan is holding up. Or take the plan with you as a PDF or Markdown.

What the written record should hold

Send it within two working days, while memories still agree. Keep it to decisions, not a transcript of who said what. It needs four parts:

The priorities, three to five, in words every member would use.
The decision map: each recurring decision, who decides it, who is asked first, and anything still contested with the date it will be settled.
The working agreements: a handful of behaviors, each specific enough that anyone could tell if it was broken.
The scoreboard: the few numbers the whole team watches, with the competing measures listed beside it so nobody quietly keeps their own.

Working agreements that hold

Too vague to keep	Specific enough to keep
Respect each other	Nobody hears about a decision in their area from someone outside this team
Communicate openly	Bad news reaches the leader within a day, not at the next meeting
Be accountable	Every action leaves the meeting with one name and one date
Support team decisions	Disagreement goes to the room, never to your own team afterwards

Situations that change the plan

You were promoted from within the team. Your former peers now report to you, and some may have wanted the role. Name the change at the start rather than acting as if nothing happened. A facilitator helps here, because you cannot be both a neutral host and the subject.

Promoted from within

Six weeks ago I sat where you sit. Some things between us have to change, and I would rather say so than pretend. What should not change is that you can tell me when I am wrong.

You inherited a team with a history. Watkins frames taking over a team as assessing what you inherited, then reshaping its membership, direction, way of working and behavior¹. Use the second leader question above, what the team has inherited that it must not reopen, to stop the session relitigating old fights.

Two teams are becoming one. After a merger or reorganization the harder question is which of two ways of working survives. The post-merger integration guide covers that day.

The team is spread across places. Hold the first session in person if you can, and give the questions beforehand more time, since the room cannot do as much of the work. Later checks can be remote.

A nonprofit's senior team. The shape is the same. Add one item to the decision map: which decisions go to the board and which stay with staff. For the board's own session, see the board retreat guide.

The strategy itself is in question. Alignment assumes there is a direction to align on. If there is not, hold a strategy reset first.

Did it work? Measure before and after

A good session feels productive. That is not the test. Run the same checks before the day and again 30 and 90 days after, privately and in writing, and compare.

Test	How to run it	A good sign
Same priorities	Each member lists the top three priorities in their own words. Count how many name the same three. This is the measure Sull and colleagues used³	More overlap after than before
Who decides	List eight to ten recurring decisions. Each member writes who decides each one. Count the matches	One name per decision, and fewer contested ones
Who is on the team	Each member lists the team's members⁵	Every list is the same
Candor	Rate "I can say what I really think with this team" from 1 to 5	The spread narrows and the low scores rise
Reliance	Rate "I can rely on the others on this team to deliver what they promise" from 1 to 5, a version of the question behind the 2015 finding⁴	Rises by the 90-day check
Decisions that stuck	Count decisions from the day that were reopened or quietly ignored	Close to none by day 90
Work done	Share of owned actions complete at 30, 60 and 90 days	Most on time, and the late ones flagged early

If the numbers do not move, look first at the decision map. A team that still cannot say who decides what will reopen everything else.

Leadership team alignment checklist

4 to 6 weeks before

Team membership list settled and written down
One-to-ones with every member done, for a new leader
Mandate agreed with the leader's own manager
Date set and every member confirmed
Facilitator chosen, or the decision not to use one made

1 to 2 weeks before

Questions sent, with the leader answering first
Baseline taken: top three priorities, and who decides five common decisions
Things not up for debate named in advance
Agenda built around the widest gaps in the answers
Someone named to record decisions as they are made

On the day

Every voice heard in the first half hour
Write before talking on each big question
The leader speaks last on contested questions
One name on every decision, or a date to settle it
Working agreements specific enough to be broken
One scoreboard, with the competing measures listed

After

Written record to every member within two working days
The same checks repeated at 30 and 90 days
Agreements revisited when anyone joins or leaves the team
A one-hour check every quarter

What new leaders want to know first.

How does a new leader align a leadership team?

Listen first, one to one. Then collect every member’s view anonymously, and hold one session to settle the few priorities, who decides what, and how the team will work. Write it down within two working days, and check it again at 30 and 90 days.

What is new leader assimilation?

A structured way for a new leader and their team to get to know each other fast: the team’s questions and concerns are gathered anonymously, shared with the leader, and discussed openly. Throughline’s anonymous questions do the gathering without an outside interviewer.

Should I run it before or after I have met everyone one to one?

After, or once you have met most of the team. One-to-ones each tell you one person’s story. The anonymous answers, which can go out while you are still meeting people, show you the team as a group, contradictions included. The session itself works best once you have listened to everyone.

Will people be honest with a leader they have just met?

Not face to face, and waiting for trust costs you the months when direction gets set. So the answers are anonymous to everyone, including you, and you answer the same questions first.

What is an executive alignment workshop?

A working session where a leadership team agrees its priorities, who decides what, and how it will work together. The sample agenda above is one, laid out for a full day.

How long does the team need to give the questions?

About two minutes each, on any device, with no account and no login. Each link stays open for 48 hours.

Does leadership alignment mean everyone agrees?

No. Alignment means everyone understands the choice, knows who made it, and acts on it. Research on fair process found people commit to decisions they disagree with when they were heard and the reasoning was explained. Agreement on every question is rare and not needed.

How do you measure leadership team alignment?

Ask each member, privately, to list the top three priorities and to write who decides eight to ten common decisions. Count how many answers match. Do it before the session and again at 30 and 90 days. Rising overlap means the team is aligned.

How long should a leadership alignment session be?

One full day for most new teams. Half a day works for a small team that answered the questions beforehand. A day and a half suits a large team, two teams being merged, or a team where trust is low.

What questions should a team ask a new leader?

The common set: what do we already know about you, what do we want to know, what concerns do we have, what do you need to know about us, what problems will we face this year, and what is working that should not change.

What should a new leadership team do in its first 90 days?

Listen first: one-to-ones, then anonymous answers from the whole team. Hold one alignment session in the first four to eight weeks. Then check the priorities, the decision map and the open actions at 30, 60 and 90 days, and revisit them when anyone joins or leaves.

Sources

Michael D. Watkins, "Leading the Team You Inherit," Harvard Business Review, June 2016. hbr.org
W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, "Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy," Harvard Business Review, July to August 1997, reprinted January 2003. hbr.org
Donald Sull, Charles Sull and James Yoder, "No One Knows Your Strategy, Not Even Your Top Leaders," MIT Sloan Management Review, February 2018. sloanreview.mit.edu
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, "Why Strategy Execution Unravels, and What to Do About It," Harvard Business Review, March 2015. hbr.org
Diane Coutu, "Why Teams Don't Work," an interview with J. Richard Hackman, Harvard Business Review, May 2009. The research is in Ruth Wageman, Debra Nunes, James Burruss and J. Richard Hackman, Senior Leadership Teams, Harvard Business School Press, 2008. hbr.org
John E. Mathieu, Tonia S. Heffner, Gerald F. Goodwin, Eduardo Salas and Janis A. Cannon-Bowers, "The Influence of Shared Mental Models on Team Process and Performance," Journal of Applied Psychology 85(2), 2000. doi.org
John J. Gabarro, "When a New Manager Takes Charge," Harvard Business Review, May to June 1985, reprinted January 2007. hbr.org
Garold Stasser and William Titus, "Pooling of Unshared Information in Group Decision Making," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 48(6), 1985. doi.org
Amy Edmondson, "Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams," Administrative Science Quarterly 44(2), 1999. doi.org
Google re:Work, "Guide: Understand team effectiveness" (Project Aristotle). rework.withgoogle.com
André L. Delbecq and Andrew H. Van de Ven, "A Group Process Model for Problem Identification and Program Planning," Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 7(4), 1971. journals.sagepub.com
Steven V. Manderscheid and Alexandre Ardichvili, "New Leader Assimilation: Process and Outcomes," Leadership and Organization Development Journal 29(8), 2008. doi.org
Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, Jossey-Bass, 2002. The model as summarized by his firm, The Table Group. tablegroup.com
Allen C. Amason, "Distinguishing the Effects of Functional and Dysfunctional Conflict on Strategic Decision Making," Academy of Management Journal 39(1), 1996. doi.org
Paul Rogers and Marcia W. Blenko, "Who Has the D? How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance," Harvard Business Review, January 2006. hbr.org
Bain & Company, "RAPID Decision Making Framework," October 2023. bain.com
Jeffrey P. Bezos, 2016 Letter to Amazon Shareholders, April 2017. aboutamazon.com

Written by Tom Olajide, Founder. Survey figures are quoted with the year they were collected. Last reviewed September 24, 2026.

New team, no shared picture yet?