When I join an organization as a leader, my first instinct is rarely: who needs to go, which roles are missing, and how could I rebuild this team? My preference is almost always:
First understand what is already there.
When teams aren’t functioning well, they aren’t necessarily made up of the wrong people. Often, direction is missing, responsibilities aren’t clear enough, people don’t feel heard, or collaboration has gradually become fragmented. Sometimes processes and structures simply make performing well unnecessarily difficult.
In that situation, a reorganization solves very little. Mostly, you just move the problem.
First understand the core business process
You don’t build a strong team by looking at people first. You start by understanding the value they need to deliver together. For me, that begins with the core business process. Not just strategy, architecture, KPIs, or SLAs, but the people doing the actual work every day.
At KLM Engineering & Maintenance, for example, that meant looking beyond a Windows workstation. You look at an aircraft maintenance technician who needs that workstation to get an aircraft safely back in the air on time. That perspective immediately changes the questions you ask:
- What gets in your way?
- What takes unnecessary time?
- What information do you need, and when?
- And which solution did we once come up with that made technical sense but doesn’t work at all in your day-to-day reality?
I’m sincerely curious about those answers. Not because I want to carry out aircraft maintenance, insurance, manufacturing, or healthcare myself, but because the people doing that work every day often know exactly where systems, processes, and policies support them—and where they get in the way.
I learn quickly from that, straight from the source.
Then you look at the team
Once the value the organization needs to deliver is clear, you can see much more precisely what a team needs to achieve it. Throughout my career, I’ve regularly encountered teams with strong expertise but fragmented ways of working. Different disciplines, interests, and priorities overlapped, and sometimes there was a history in which collaboration couldn’t be taken for granted.
My approach is fairly simple:
- listen,
- provide context,
- set direction,
- remove obstacles,
- establish ownership.
But that also means expecting people to actually take that ownership.
That last point matters. To me, servant leadership doesn’t mean facilitating everything and then letting everyone chart their own course. It means enabling people to perform well, making our direction clear, and taking them seriously enough to expect responsibility from them.
At Alfen, I worked with specialized Cloud and Networking teams in an organization growing incredibly fast. Fragmentation develops easily in that environment: everyone works hard, but not necessarily on the same problem. Working even harder doesn’t help. You need to connect technical teams, other departments, and the business, establish shared priorities, and clarify the result you’re trying to achieve together. Technology is often the easiest part.
A leader doesn’t need to be the smartest specialist at the table
One mistake I regularly see leaders make is unconsciously building teams of people who resemble them.
I’d rather have the opposite.
To me, a strong team consists of people who can do things I can’t, think differently from me, and feel comfortable enough to disagree with me. My job isn’t to be the smartest person in every discipline. My job is to make sure expertise is actually used, people understand one another, and their work supports the organization’s direction.
That requires translation, too. I enjoy breaking complex technology down into plain language. At Veterfina, our COO explicitly appreciated that. Not because technology suddenly becomes simple, but because executives don’t need a technical lecture. They need to understand the decision in front of them, why it matters, the risks involved, and what it delivers for the organization. Conversely, a technical specialist also needs to understand why a technically beautiful solution might make no organizational, financial, or operational sense.
A good leader moves between those worlds.
Develop where possible, change where necessary
My preference for developing existing teams doesn’t mean everyone automatically belongs in their current role. Sometimes an organization changes faster than someone can or wants to keep up. Sometimes skills really are missing. Sometimes behavior doesn’t fit what a team needs. You have to be clear about that.
But replacing people before investigating why they aren’t able to contribute fully strikes me as both poor leadership and poor business management.
Hiring new people takes time and money, knowledge disappears, and trust can suffer. And if you don’t address the underlying cause, new faces can produce exactly the same problem.
That’s why I’d rather develop what’s already there first.
Coach, make expectations explicit, give people room to take responsibility, connect disciplines, remove obstacles, and make shared results visible. Only then do you really know which gaps remain.
And sometimes you do rebuild
Sometimes building from scratch really is the right choice. But even then, I’d rather not start with job descriptions.
I start with one question: what should this organization be able to do better because this team exists?
That determines the capabilities the team needs, the responsibilities required, and ultimately the roles and people that fit.
I believe that principle works in almost any industry. Whether the core process involves maintaining aircraft, insurance, manufacturing, financial services, or patient care. Technology changes, regulations change, and the industry changes. But good leadership still begins with understanding what people are trying to achieve, truly listening, and then creating an environment where professionals can do their jobs well.
For me, that’s ultimately the essence of team building:
You don’t build a strong team by managing people first. You build it by first understanding the value they need to deliver together, and then organizing everything they need to succeed.
Originally published on LinkedIn. View all blog posts.