I've inherited a team and I don't know what they should be working on.

What to do when you have inherited a team and don't know what they should be working on

Autumn two thousand and six. Ford Motor Company is losing seventeen billion dollars a year, and the analysts think bankruptcy is a question of when, not if. Alan Mulally has just arrived as CEO — a Boeing engineer with no automotive experience, which on the face of it is absurd, and which in practice turns out to be the point. He isn't wedded to the way Ford has always done things. He doesn't know what they are.

The first thing Mulally does is institute a weekly meeting. Business Plan Review. Every senior leader, every Thursday morning, presenting their division's status against a simple colour code. Green means on track. Yellow means at risk. Red means in trouble.

The first few weeks, everything comes back green. Every division. Every leader. All green. Ford is losing seventeen billion dollars a year, and every number on the board is green.

Mulally knows this is a lie. Everyone in the room knows it's a lie. And the culture that produced the lie is exactly the culture Mulally has inherited — a company where showing red got you punished, so nobody ever showed red, which meant nobody ever got help, which is how the company ended up losing seventeen billion dollars a year.

Then one week, a senior executive named Mark Fields presents his division. And one of his numbers is red.

The room goes silent.

Mulally starts clapping.

Not sarcastic clapping. Real clapping. He stands up and applauds the first person in the company who has told him the truth about where they are. From that meeting on, the culture of Ford starts to change — because honesty has stopped being fatal.

Ford turned around without government money. GM and Chrysler took bailouts. Ford didn't.

So let's go to the office and work through it.

"I've inherited a team and I don't know what they should be working on."

The feeling is blind.

You've got a group of people who are either capable and waiting, or competent and stuck. You can't tell which yet. And until you can tell which, nothing else you do will stick.

First work out whether they are waiting or stuck

Two ways this usually shows up.

When capable people are waiting for orders

Choice one: they're waiting for orders. Capable people who've learned, under whoever was there before you, to hold still until someone tells them what to do. In that case the move is counter-intuitive. Don't tell them what to do. Hand them a blank document and give them thirty minutes to draft their own ideal version of how the team should work. Not a critique of the current setup. A fresh draft. People place disproportionate value on things they've built themselves, and a team that designs its own workflow defends it harder than any workflow you could impose.

When competent people are stuck in old routines

Choice two: they're stuck in routines. Competent enough, but running on rails that were laid down before anyone currently in the room joined. In that case the move is a disruption — swap one of your people out with someone from a different department for a week. Not a favour to them. A disruption for yours. The outsider sees what the team has stopped seeing, and the team sees themselves through someone who has no reason to play along.

You could hand them the document, or you could swap one of them out. The choice is the first move. Get that right and the rest follows.

How to build the team's operating system, in order

Once you know which choice you're facing, there's a sequence. Three tools, in order. Build the operating system from purpose outwards.

Agree in writing what the team can say no to

The first is

Team Charter.

The Team Charter emerged from organisational development work in the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties — Edgar Schein on culture, Dick Beckhard on team-building, and the consultants who codified the practice for project teams over that period. No single named source; a working tradition.

The reason the tool exists is that most team dysfunction isn't about personalities or process. It's about unexamined assumptions — about why the team exists, what it owns, who decides what. New managers inherit those assumptions intact and run on them for months before they crack.

The unique insight is that the charter is a refusal-document, not a mission statement. Its primary use isn't to inspire the team. It's to let the team say no to things. If you can't say no to a request because of the charter, you don't have a charter yet. You have a list of nice-sounding words.

What you get is a team that has agreed, in writing, what it's for and what it isn't. The arguments about scope move from invisible to explicit.

So. How to run it.

Setup. The whole team in the room. Two hours. A whiteboard. Frame it openly: we're agreeing what this team is for, before we agree what we'll do this week.

Purpose. Three questions, answered together. Why does this team exist? Who do we serve? What does success look like in six months? Don't accept the first sentence on each — push twice for sharper.

Scope. The harder questions. What's outside our scope? Whose work depends on us, and whose do we depend on? This is where the dysfunction surfaces.

Finish. Write the charter on a single page. If it doesn't fit on one page, the team hasn't decided yet.

Consolidation. Pin it where the team works. A charter that doesn't get pointed at in the first month is a charter that didn't land.

Settle who owns each task, one role each

The second is

RACI Matrix.

The RACI Matrix has its lineage in linear responsibility charting, developed in the nineteen-fifties — Robert Tannenbaum at UCLA, refined through the project management literature into the four-role acronym now in common use. Responsible. Accountable. Consulted. Informed. One role per person per task.

The reason the tool exists is that most friction inside a team isn't about disagreement on what to do. It's about disagreement on who's doing it. People think they're accountable when they're consulted. They think they're informed when they've been made responsible by accident. The friction is the gap.

The unique insight is the constraint of one role per person per task. The temptation is to give everyone two roles to keep them happy — responsible and consulted, both — and the temptation is the failure mode. Two roles is no role. The discipline forces the team to decide.

What you get is a map of who's in which role for the work that matters, and the friction you inherited dissolves on its own as people stop pulling against assignments they didn't realise weren't theirs.

So. How to run it.

Setup. A grid on the wall. Tasks down the left column. Names across the top. Whole team in the room.

Assign. For each task, the team agrees one R, one A, any number of Cs and Is. The accountable role is the hard one — only one person, the buck stops there. Argue it out in the room.

Test. Walk down the columns. Anyone with no roles on any task isn't pulling weight; flag it. Anyone accountable for everything is the bottleneck; flag that too.

Consolidation. The grid lives where the team can see it. Revisit when the work changes. RACI that gets written and shelved is RACI that didn't happen.

Surface the boundaries with other teams before they bite

The third is

Cross-Functional Coordination.

Cross-Functional Coordination is less a named tool than a discipline. No single source — the practice runs through systems thinking, organisation design, and the literature on matrix structures from the nineteen-seventies onwards. The discipline is what's worth carrying.

The reason the practice exists is that every inherited team has relationships with other teams — upstream dependencies, downstream hand-offs, shared stakeholders — and the previous manager's version of those relationships is still the operating assumption inside both teams. New manager, old contract.

The unique insight is that the boundaries don't reveal themselves until they bite. They show up as missed hand-offs, blame for delays no one explained, requests that arrive without warning and leave without acknowledgement. The discipline is to surface the boundaries before the bite.

What you get is a team that hasn't accidentally become a silo — which is just a slower version of the problem you inherited.

So. How to run it.

Map. List the teams your work touches. Upstream — who feeds you. Downstream — who needs your output. Sideways — who shares stakeholders or systems. One sheet of paper.

Meet. A thirty-minute conversation with each. Three questions: what do you need from us, by when. What do we need from you. Where do the edges sit between us.

Document. The answers go in writing. Not a formal contract — a shared understanding both teams can point at when memory drifts.

The conversations you don't have in the first month become the meetings you have in the third quarter, with worse stakes.

The Mulally story we opened with is what an inheritance looks like at room scale. Before we close, one story about what the same move looks like at institutional scale.

A precedent: inheritance at institutional scale

Fifth of July twenty eleven. Christine Lagarde walks into the office on her first day as Managing Director of the IMF — forty-eight days after Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned in scandal. The institution has spent seven weeks running without a leader, in the middle of an active eurozone debt crisis, with the predecessor's portrait still missing from the conference room wall.

The unusual thing about Lagarde's response is the timing. Her first move on institutional credibility is made before she walks through the door. Her contract — signed for fifth of July effect — contains explicit language Strauss-Kahn's contract had not. Highest standards of ethical conduct. Avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Twelve days before her start date, while still a candidate, she makes a statement to the executive board, on the record. "I am well aware that recent events have left open wounds."

Her first organisational decision comes a week in. She announces a new deputy managing director post — Min Zhu, the first to hold it — explicitly structured as a signal toward emerging-market representation. Six weeks after that, at Jackson Hole, she publicly calls for mandatory recapitalisation of European banks against the wishes of the European finance ministries who had been carrying that fight inside the IMF's own deliberations.

Mulally inherited a culture where honesty had become fatal, and the move was the clap in the room. Lagarde inherited an institution whose credibility had been broken from the top, and the move was structural — written into the contract before she arrived, signalled in the appointments she made first, demonstrated in the decisions she was willing to take publicly within weeks.

The credibility commitment is sometimes the price of entry rather than the first agenda item.

Two ways the inheritance can land at scale — a culture moved at room scale, an institution moved at the level of the contract. One more story before we close — quieter than both, because the inherited-team situation doesn't always show up as a crisis.

Neil Cresswell. Portainer. The early years.

Cresswell and his co-founder had built a small, capable team around an open-source container management tool that was starting to get traction. And somewhere in the process of trying to become a real company, they'd hired for the organisation they hoped to become rather than the one they actually were. Complex roles. Management layers. Heavy process. All bolted on early, because that's what real companies had.

The artificial maturity slowed them down. It distracted them from the product. It burned cash faster than the revenue could refill it. At some point Cresswell had to admit that the company he'd inherited from his own decisions wasn't the company he actually needed.

So he unpicked the structure. Let go of people who couldn't work in chaotic ambiguity. Resized the organisation to match reality rather than aspiration. The survival came from admitting what the company actually was — not from pretending it was further along than it had got.

Mulally made honesty safe at room scale. Lagarde made credibility safe at institutional scale. Cresswell made the truth visible at founder scale. The inherited team you're walking into is some version of one of those problems — and the move you'll need rhymes with one of those answers.

So. The question from this Playbook.

If your team had to write its charter from scratch tomorrow — how many of you would write the same purpose?

And what does the answer tell you about what you're actually doing together?