Leading the Team You Actually Have

Why Silicon Valley management playbooks typically fail most organizations.

When you’ve been around as long as I have, you are afforded many opportunities to observe others stepping into new roles. I’ve seen the weight they sometimes carry. Many of them feel the clock ticking from day one, driven by the need for quick wins. The stress is real: the longer the change takes, the more their capacity for leadership feels suspect. Most new leaders feel the immediate need to show visible results.

But I also see the weight carried by the people already in the building. The team that has kept the lights on, absorbed the ambiguity of transition, and quietly wondered whether the new leader would take the time to understand what they have actually built. A leadership change is disorienting for everyone, not just the person walking in.

I have been in that position three times in my career. In all three environments, change was needed, and I braced myself for difficult work. Yet once I looked past the inevitable friction of any transition, what I found was remarkable. The teams I inherited were exceptional. They did not require upgrades. They needed clarity, transparency, and someone willing to “sweat the details” of hard work with them.

In today’s Dispatch, I want to pull back the curtain on organizational dynamics in the midst of change and explore why the real leadership is not found in trying to hire your way to a new culture, but in the patient work of leading the team you actually have.

The big picture

Higher education leaders are inundated with management literature preaching the gospel of “talent density,” a philosophy popularized by companies like Amazon and SpaceX, which suggests that the only path to high performance is to pay top salaries and continuously cull the bottom of the organization. For higher education and established enterprises, this model is not just impractical; it is a dangerous distraction that blinds leaders to the talent that their institution actually contains.

Most universities operate with salary bands that cap well below the starting rate at outside firms. When leaders fixate on a labor model designed for venture-backed hyper-growth, they fail to optimize for the conditions they actually face. The result is that capable people, working inside incoherent systems, are mistakenly read as the problem when the structure around them is the real constraint. Good leadership, in this context, is not waiting for a better team to arrive. It is building the structural coherence that allows the people already present to do exceptional work.

What the Team Already Knows

Before any new leader assesses their team, the team has already assessed them. They have watched previous transitions. They know which new arrivals listened and which ones performed. They have seen the reorgs, the rebranding exercises, and the new strategies that went nowhere. Their skepticism, if it exists, is earned and reasonable.

This is worth naming directly. The staff member who seems disengaged may have offered ideas that were ignored for years. The one who pushes back may be protecting something that is really important. The institutional knowledge that looks like resistance often turns out to be the most accurate map of the terrain available. Leading the team you have means starting there, with curiosity rather than a verdict.

The proof of this approach is not abstract, but is found in the continuity it produces. CIOs who invest deliberately in the people already present often find that their own succession comes from within. That outcome is not accidental. It is the direct result of treating the inherited team as an asset to develop rather than a problem to replace.

The “Upgrade” Trap

The danger for incoming leaders is a particular kind of magical thinking: the belief that transformation is primarily a hiring problem. They undervalue the people in the room by comparing them to a theoretical candidate who doesn’t exist, and in doing so, they neglect the development of people who are staying for the long term.

As argued in Star Quarterbacks and Shadow IT, this logic leads leaders to chase the confident, fast-moving builder who promises quick results. That “star” often bypasses collaboration, ignores enterprise architecture, and leaves behind technical debt for others. In a university, a genuinely high-performing technologist is not someone who writes code ten times faster. It is someone who stays ten years longer. Institutional memory and loyalty are force multipliers that individual heroics rarely provide.

The lesson often comes early for leaders who have been on the other side of this dynamic, who were themselves passed over or underestimated before someone took a chance on potential rather than credentials. Most teams contain people like that, individuals who have been overlooked because they did not fit someone’s mental image of the ideal hire. When leaders look for competencies rather than credentials, they often find that the quiet contributor was simply waiting for the right conditions.

Coherence is the Leadership Lever

When leaders accept that they cannot restructure every role and cannot recruit from the top of the technology labor market, the one variable they can actually control is coherence. A group of capable people moving in deliberate alignment will always outperform a group of “star quarterbacks” pulling in their preferred directions.

The mechanism for this is straightforward. The discipline of the weekly team meeting, practiced relentlessly, is one of the most effective coherence tools available. The format is simple: review what was just done, identify what comes next, and ask for feedback. It is not exciting, but it’s relentless. And it works. Steve Williams, a retired Army Colonel who led technology teams with this approach, demonstrated that military-grade meeting discipline translates directly into institutional settings. The consistency of the gathering matters as much as what happens inside it.

The weekly meeting is not micromanagement; it is the calibration mechanism that creates coherence. By gathering regularly to track progress, solve complex problems, and navigate stakeholders together, the team’s capacity rises. When shared standards are enforced and the details are scrutinized together, the gaps in individual capability are filled by the strength of the process. Excellence becomes a shared habit rather than an exception. Indiana’s football success is the newest example of this in action.

The Leader as Shock Absorber

Most teams underperform not because of skill deficits but because of distraction: conflicting priorities, political noise, and the anxiety that accumulates when leaders are vague. As discussed in Resilience in the Fog of Uncertainty, uncertainty creates shadows, and it is the leader’s primary job to turn the lights on and make things clear.

When leaders absorb the institutional ambiguity that would otherwise cascade down to the team, the group’s available capacity increases immediately. When the “VIP queue jumpers” are managed at the leadership level rather than handed off to the team, the people doing operational work can focus. Protecting the team from noise is not a secondary function of leadership. It is often the most consequential one.

Cultures built on individual heroism, on one “star quarterback” keeping fragile systems functional through personal effort, are structurally brittle and will eventually fail. Real operational quality comes from processes designed so that the departure of any single person does not create a crisis. Cross-training and documentation are not administrative overhead. They are the architecture of a strong and resilient team.

Building the Skills You Cannot Buy

When ready-made capabilities cannot be purchased from the open market at scale, leaders must turn to developing them internally. As argued in Why Your IT Hiring Stalls and How to Fix It, the best approach is to hire for competencies like curiosity, initiative, and accountability, then train for the skills that the work requires. This demands real budget commitment; at a minimum, four percent of the personnel budget directed toward training and development annually is a reasonable standard.

Growth happens when people are given responsibility just beyond what they believe they can handle, and when the work itself becomes the development ground. There is a dignity in the long-tenured employee that the technology sector systematically undervalues. These staff members know where complexity lives, how the ERP system actually functions, and how to navigate institutional culture in ways that no document can capture. The goal for leaders is not to bypass that knowledge. It is to unlock it.

A Note on the Exceptions

Every leadership transition includes genuinely difficult cases: the actively resistant employee, the non-performer who operates in the gaps of weak oversight. These situations are real and should be addressed quickly. The process is less about confrontation than about applying consistent organizational standards, clarifying expectations, and raising the bar uniformly. When that structural pressure is applied, the situation usually resolves itself. The person either rises or self-selects out.

But these cases represent a small fraction of any team. The error is allowing them to become the dominant lens for how a new leader reads the entire organization. When all attention goes to the few who are leaving, the many who are staying go unled.

The final word

The belief that a better team is waiting somewhere off the org chart, that transformation is primarily a matter of acquiring different people, is a way of avoiding the harder discipline of actually leading. The team already present is, in most cases, more capable than the circumstances have allowed them to demonstrate.

What they need is a leader willing to do three things consistently: provide clarity about what matters and why, protect them from the organizational noise that fragments attention, and invest in their development over time. When those conditions exist, the performance of an average-tenured, stable workforce can be genuinely surprising. The missing variable is rarely talent. It is coherence. And coherence is something a leader builds, not something they hire.