Integrating a New Leader Into Your Leadership Team
Bear with me. I’m going to tell you a story about a family on a Finnish island. It seems like an odd place to start a piece about leadership teams, but I promise it’ll make sense.
In Tove Jansson’s novel The Summer Book, a family (child, father and grandmother) lives on a very small island in the gulf of Finland. One day, a friend of the child comes to visit. The child and grandmother decide they don’t like her name, so they secretly give her a new one which they use behind her back. Awkward and unsure within a self-contained family unit, the visitor irks the family. They have private conversations about how terrible she is, and even though they invited her, how they wish she would leave or at least behave differently — more like them.
Over time, the grandmother sympathizes with the visitor’s fate.
“If she were a little bigger,” grandmother thought. “Preferably a good deal bigger, so I could tell her that I understand how awful it is. Here you come, headlong, into a tight group of people who have always lived together, who have a habit of moving around each other now on land they own and understand, and every threat to what they’re used to only makes them still more compact and self assured. An island can be dreadful for someone from the outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure, and self-sufficient place. Within the shores, everything functions according to rituals that are as hard as rock from repetition, and at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as the world ended at the horizon.”
This sympathy turns into kindness as the grandmother forges a friendly relationship with the visitor. This displeases the little girl. Later, the grandmother praises the visitor for creating a well-drawn picture. When she talks to her granddaughter about it, she tells her that it’s probably a one-hit wonder, that she’s not actually a good artist — shutting the visitor out once again in favor of the already contained unit.
The grandmother saw it clearly - the island was “dreadful for someone from the outside.” Everything complete, everyone in their self-sufficient place, rituals hard as rock. No room for new people, routines or perspectives.
Some leadership teams function exactly like this island. Not because they’re trying to be unwelcoming, but because they are — like the family in the story — a tight, established unit. We are self-contained, with well-established norms and patterns of relating to each other. Of course, we’re not outright unwelcoming. Still, watch what happens when the new person simply shows up as themselves: the new CPO runs meetings differently than the last one did. The new CFO has a different communication style. They have different rhythms, different questions, different ways of thinking out loud. And suddenly the team feels… off balance. We’re not trying to freeze them out. We’re just trying to get back to equilibrium. Back to what felt comfortable.
Entrances on teams are tricky points in organizational life
While we may long for or need a person to fill a vacant seat, it can also produce anxiety. We might be filled with uncertainty about how they will behave, what their entrance will mean for us. Leadership teams are living entities made up of humans, not interchangeable cogs. The introduction of a new human means the entity changes. Patterns shift, group norms are altered, power might be redistributed. This is all normal. This is the way an org evolves.
Think about it. Let’s say you hire a new chief product officer because you need someone in that seat. But their presence alone shifts things - maybe they’re more reserved where the last CPO was gregarious, or they ask questions in a way that feels challenging even when they’re just trying to understand. The team doesn’t know quite how to work with them yet. So they either get absorbed into existing patterns — learning to communicate the way everyone else does, matching the team’s rhythms — or the team evolves to accommodate a new way of being together.
Here’s the thing.
When a new person enters a team, the team changes. Always. It’s how systems work.
A leadership team is a living system, and living systems respond to new elements. The team will either absorb the new person into the old patterns, or it will evolve to include their way of being. You don’t get to choose whether change happens. You only get to choose whether you’re intentional about how the system evolves.
Before you bring in your new leader, spend time thinking about the team as an entity. Ask yourself:
What are our team’s norms?
What’s working about that?
What’s not working about that?
What are they here to do? (i.e., what do you hope they will do? Maintain status quo, usher in change, etc.)
How might their role, perspective, or work style shift the org? And the leadership team?
These aren’t one-time questions. They’re the beginning of an ongoing conversation your team needs to have - before the new person arrives, during their first months, and as the team finds its new rhythm together.
The visitor in Jansson’s story never really had a chance. The island’s patterns were too set, the family too self-contained. But your leadership team doesn’t have to be that island. You can choose to be intentional about integration. You can choose to evolve.
Bringing a new leader onto your team? If you want support thinking through how to set them and your team up for success, I’d love to talk. Book a free strategy session.