How to Lead a Team You Did Not Get to Choose
- Raffles Jakarta
- Aug 5
- 8 min read
The first morning fantasies are always the same. A newly promoted or recently hired manager walks in to lead a team that they did not help build. One member had applied for the same position that the newcomer had recently obtained. Two others have been working together for a decade and share a shorthand and history that the new leader is unfamiliar with. Someone is quietly skeptical, while another is outspoken.
And somewhere in the back of the new manager's mind is the age-old wish of leadership: if only I could bring in my team. They can't, and they probably never will. This is the team. The important question isn't who the manager would have chosen in an ideal world. It is what they will do with the people in the room, because they are the ones who do the job.
We tend to believe that great leadership starts with great selection and that if you hire the right people, everything else will follow. It is a comforting, but mostly incorrect, idea because it describes a situation that most managers almost never face.
The normal condition of management is inheritance rather than selection: you take over a team after being promoted, reorganized, or joining a new company, and you lead the people who are already there. The classic rookie mistake is to view inheriting a team as a temporary setback to be endured until the roster can be reshuffled, and research indicates that this approach misunderstands where a leader's true leverage lies.
You will almost never choose your team
Begin by accepting the premise; resisting it wastes energy that you could use to do actual work. Becoming a manager is not, for most people, the act of assembling a dream team; it is a difficult transition into leading a group of people you did not choose and some of whom did not choose you.
The transition from individual contributor to boss is significant because authority no longer comes from your output but from your ability to build relationships and influence with people wherever you encounter them (Hill, 2007).
The desire to choose your own people is frequently a way of avoiding the more difficult task of leading those you already have.
The manager waiting for the perfect team is not preparing to lead. They are waiting for a permission that is never going to arrive.
How to lead a team you did not get to choose: Start with the situation, not the roster
The first step is to understand rather than act. The most widely used framework for leadership transitions emphasizes that a new leader's first task is to accelerate their learning and diagnose the situation they have inherited before seeking solutions, because the right approach in a turnaround is the wrong approach in a stable, successful unit, and vice versa (Watkins, 2013).
The inherited team comes with a history, context, and an unwritten map of who does what and why, and the leader who begins rearranging before reading that map tends to break things they had no idea were load-bearing.
So, the answer to leading a team you didn't choose starts here: Resist the temptation to prove yourself by changing things immediately. Learn the terrain first. Understand the team's history, its strengths, and its current situation before deciding what needs to change. You earn early credibility by accurately understanding the team rather than redecorating it on the first day.
The research is blunt: who is on the team matters less than you think
This is the truly liberating part for anyone leading a team that they did not create. Research indicates that the paramount determinants of team performance are the leader's facilitative conditions, persuasive direction, explicit structure, and encouraging context (Hackman, 2002), rather than the personalities or behavioral styles of individual members. Later studies confirmed and expanded on this conclusion, adding a shared mindset to the list and finding that these conditions are more important than ever (Haas & Mortensen, 2016). The implication is clear and encouraging.
Your leverage as a leader was never primarily in selecting members; it was in the conditions you created for whoever was present. When Google set out to figure out what made its best teams great, it expected the answer to be talent and composition—the smartest people in the right mix—but was surprised to discover that these factors were far less important than how the team worked together.
The leader's inability to choose their people is irrelevant, because the decisive variables were always under the leader's control anyway.
The first condition to build is safety
Of all those conditions, the most important is the one an inherited team requires from a new, unproven boss. Psychological safety, defined as the shared belief that the team is a safe place to take interpersonal risks, admit mistakes, ask questions, or disagree without fear of humiliation, has been shown to drive learning behavior, which in turn drives team performance (Edmondson, 1999).
According to Google's research, this quality is the single most important predictor of team effectiveness. Safety does not come naturally to a team that has recently hired an uninvited leader; team members are watching to see if candour is welcome or dangerous. The new leader intentionally creates this safety by responding to the first piece of challenging news with curiosity rather than blame, admitting their uncertainty, and making it visibly safe for team members to raise the issue.
Do this early, and the team will begin to tell you the truth. If you fail to create this safety, you will be leading without visibility, mistaking silence for consent.
An inherited team will not tell a new leader what is really going on until it is safe to. The leader's first job is to make it safe.
You cannot lead people who do not trust you
Underneath safety is trust, and a new leader arrives with none of it saved. The encouraging news is that trust is not a mystery; research has identified three drivers of it. People trust you when they see the real you rather than a performance (authenticity), when they have faith in your judgment and competence (logic), and when they believe you genuinely care about them rather than just your agenda (empathy); when trust fails, it is almost always due to a flaw in one of these three (Frei & Morriss, 2020).
For a leader inheriting a wary team, this approach is a practical first step. Show them the real you, demonstrate your competence, and, most importantly, make it clear you care about their success rather than just using them to advance your own.
Knowing which of the three is your personal weakness is worthwhile because it is the one most likely to bring you down. In a matter of weeks, a stranger transforms into someone the team is willing to follow by intentionally building trust across these dimensions.
Expect the team to re-storm, and do not panic
One more thing will happen, and knowing ahead of time prevents a costly misreading. Teams do not progress smoothly to high performance; they go through predictable stages of formation, storming, norming, and then performing (Tuckman, 1965).
The arrival of a new leader effectively resets that sequence, and the friction, testing, and jostling that ensues are normal developmental stages, not evidence that the leader is failing or that they have, after all, been assigned the wrong people.
Many new managers misinterpret this early turbulence as evidence that the inherited team is broken, and they rush to reshuffle.
The more consistent reading is that the storm is the team readjusting to a new leader and that patience, rather than panic, is part of the job.
The teams that achieve genuine performance are typically those whose leaders did not flee the storming stage.
This is a learnable discipline
None of this comes naturally, which is why it is worth intentionally developing. The ability to lead people through a transition, quickly build trust and safety, and create the conditions for a group to perform is a set of leadership and social-influence skills that are now among the most important capabilities identified by the world's largest employers (World Economic Forum, 2025). It can be studied and practiced, just like any other skill, ideally before a manager walks in to lead a group of strangers.
Where managers learn to lead the team they are given
This area is where a serious business education demonstrates its value, and it is important to be specific about what it provides. It does not promise managers an ideal team. It develops the more difficult skill of leading whatever team is assigned to them, diagnosing a group's true situation, establishing trust and safety, and creating the conditions under which people who did not choose to work together do their best.
That is a central concern of the Raffles Jakarta MBA, in which organizational behavior investigates and applies these dynamics, motivation, trust, group development, and team effectiveness.
The program is also, quite literally, an exercise in the skill it teaches: an MBA cohort is a team that no one gets to choose, and learning to lead and collaborate within it is a practice run for the inherited teams that a graduate will lead throughout their career.
It is a one-year Master of Business Administration program taught entirely in English on Jalan M.H. Thamrin in Central Jakarta, with four intakes per year in January, April, July, and October, and the option to study on campus or in a hybrid format that allows working professionals to continue their careers while studying.
As part of Raffles Education, which was founded in Singapore in 1990 and now operates 16 colleges in 14 cities across nine countries, a degree earned here belongs to an international network rather than a single market.
The team you have
The manager who spends their first months wishing for a different team is not being discerning; rather, they are being absent, withholding leadership from those who require it while waiting for a roster that will not arrive.
The desire to choose one's own people suggests high expectations. It is usually just an avoidance of the actual work. The best managers make quieter, harder moves. This approach empowers leaders to shape their teams.
It is all about leadership, and doing it well is one of the clearest ways to think beyond the roster you were given (Raffles Jakarta, 2026b).
Marketing Manager
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References
Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
Frei, F. X., & Morriss, A. (2020). Begin with trust. Harvard Business Review, 98(3), 112–121. https://hbr.org/2020/05/begin-with-trust
Haas, M., & Mortensen, M. (2016). The secrets of great teamwork. Harvard Business Review, 94(6), 70–76. https://hbr.org/2016/06/the-secrets-of-great-teamwork
Hackman, J. R. (2002). Leading teams: Setting the stage for great performances. Harvard Business School Press. https://www.amazon.com/Leading-Teams-Setting-Stage-Performances/dp/1578513332
Hill, L. A. (2007). Becoming the boss. Harvard Business Review, 85(1), 48–56. https://hbr.org/2007/01/becoming-the-boss
Tuckman, B. W. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384–399. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0022100
Watkins, M. D. (2013). The first 90 days: Proven strategies for getting up to speed faster and smarter (Updated & expanded ed.). Harvard Business Review Press. https://hbr.org/books/watkins
World Economic Forum. (2025). The future of jobs report 2025. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/
Raffles Jakarta. (2026a). Master of Business Administration. https://www.raffles-indonesia.com/mba
Raffles Jakarta. (2026b). Think bigger: The Raffles Jakarta MBA 2026. https://www.raffles-indonesia.com/think-bigger-mba-jakarta
