What do you expect from a new manager in an existing team?

Get to know the people first. Understand why they are in this job, what their hopes and expectations are both in the day-to-day, and in the long-term for their career path.

Understand that all change is going to have a personal impact of each one of them. Knowing the above will help you know which people will be happy/angry over change, and you can work with them to help them understand the context of why changes are needed, and what the future holds.

And don't make change for its own sake. If you cannot justify how changes are better for the team, the company, the product... then you should not be making changes.

1. Understand the hopes, motivations, needs, barriers faced by the members of your team 2. Learn the expectations and objectives set by your superior in terms of achieving success 3. Bring your expertise in connecting the two. Your team wants a manager they can respect. Be aware of your management style and improve upon it. If your team knows you have their back and can make things happen they will respect you 4. In turn, respect your team members. Set a clear path for their career growth. Nothing sucks more to see a manager who is too busy sucking up to upper management for his/her own good ignoring the people who support him/her

Any time I've had to lead a team in the past few years, I've always done two things first (bottom-up):

* Get to know the people in the team, learn the overall vibe of the group, and how happy everyone is.

* Get the know the people above the team, their motivations for hiring you, and the tangible outcome of your hiring. You say "quality", but what does that mean? Is quality currently low? Do they feel that they could be doing more in certain areas?

From there, I would typically work to integrate myself into the team before introducing any changes. If the average person has been there for 2-3 years they've got a lot of business knowledge that I won't have. In my experience, most teams have a strong opinion of what they want to do to improve processes, but there is a business reason as to why they've not implemented those improvements.

The last time I led a team, I wanted total transparency, so we came up with an internal list of improvements and we focused on incremental and manual improvements to processes. Most of the time I wasn't even the person making the changes - I was picking up the slack so someone else could do the work, or do something they've wanted to do for months. Our processes improved over time, and as a result delivery improved dramatically. This introduced its own problems, but in the grand scheme of things the problems were nothing compared to before.

All I expect from a manager is honesty and consistency in feedback, so when I've been in those shoes I've tried to be as honest as possible, and to be as transparent as possible when my message isn't consistent with what I've said before.

I'd want the opportunity for a clean slate. An amnesty; I can tell you about the state of the project, processes, team, anything and everything, and then I'm off the hook and doing something about it (or not) is your problem, thank you very much.

You can only do this once, and you can only do this at the start of your tenure. It's in your interests to do it, lest you find in six months that your legs were shot out from under you by the previous administration and you didn't even know it.

Getting to know everyone. Probably one on one with every team member which is all you listening. Keep things the way they are initially, identify the problems, come up with a smooth strategy to transition from now to a future state.

Leave your ideas at the door and assess what is good for the team. For example you love Gaant charts and were super successful with them at your last company. Don’t introduce them here unless appropriate and probably not at the start. Unless perhaps everyone else is asking for them and it makes sense. What I am getting at as it shouldn’t seem like you are bringing your ideas and commanding, but you are listening and leading.

You also need to do the same exercise upwards too! What does the boss think the problems are and how will you address them.

Find out what the tension is between the works and the management. There is always something!

First, define what constitutes "success" in this team. This may depend on a combination of the goals of the team members, the leaders (your leaders), the company, and yourself. You won't figure this out on the first day or the first week as it will take some time to understand the context and rationale for different stakeholders' goals. After you get a good sense, ask yourself if your team is sailing in the direction of these goals. Calibrate accordingly and don't change what isn't broken. Fight the urge to revert to tools/techniques/mindsets from previous teams that you might be more familiar with. If things need to be changed, be VERY sure to have a good reason for it or you will lose the respect of your team early on. Good luck.

There definitely seems to be an opportunity to improve “line of sight”. The CTO/CEO brought you on for a reason. There exists some goal that those individuals want you to accomplish and you want to make them articulate it.

Once you know that your job gets easier, you now need to figure out how to get the team from the place they were to the place that the executives want them to be, remove blockers etc.

Don’t try so much to quickly enact processes as much as listen to what’s working and not working currently.

Keeping transparency for each and every information would go a long way in helping you achieve their trust.Lookout for tools which can help you to achieve this.

To listen.

Great communication,good work result