You're the New Manager. They've Been Here for Years. Now What?
One of the most common situations I see in my new manager workshops is someone who has been handed a team they didn’t build. Maybe they were promoted from a different department. Maybe they were hired externally. Maybe they were a high-performing individual contributor who woke up one day to find themselves in charge of the very peers they used to work alongside. The team is already there, already functioning, already loyal to each other — and now there’s a new name on the door.
If that’s you, the first thing I want you to know is this: the technical skills that got you the job are not what will make this work. What matters now is something entirely different.
It’s rapport.
The Mistake Most New Managers Make
Since January, I’ve been teaching a class specifically designed for new managers — some of them straight out of college stepping into their first leadership role, others with years of technical expertise who are now leading people for the first time. It’s one of the most rewarding things I do, and it’s also given me a front-row seat to the most common mistakes new managers make in their first weeks on the job.
The biggest one? Trying to establish authority before establishing trust.
I get it. When you’re new, you want to prove you belong. You want to show that you know what you’re talking about, that you have ideas, that you’re not just there to observe. So you come in with energy, with changes you want to make, with a vision for how things should work. And your team watches — arms crossed, expressions neutral — waiting to see who you really are.
Here’s what I tell every manager in that class: your team isn’t judging your ideas yet. They’re judging you. Before they decide whether to get behind your vision, they need to decide whether they trust you as a person. And trust isn’t built through authority. It’s built through relationship.
Why Existing Teams Are Different
If you’ve already read my post on integrating new hires into an existing team, you know how much thought goes into welcoming someone new. But there’s an important flip side to that situation that rarely gets talked about: what happens when you’re the one who’s new?
When a new hire joins your team, you hold all the positional power. You know the culture, the processes, the people. They’re the one learning the ropes.
When you join an existing team as their new manager, that dynamic is reversed. Your team already has relationships, inside jokes, informal leaders, and unspoken norms. They’ve developed ways of doing things that predate you by months or years. They’ve also (and this is the part that matters most) already formed opinions about what a good manager looks like based on whoever came before you.
You’re not walking into neutral territory. You’re walking into a fully formed culture, and you’re the outsider.
That’s not a bad thing. But it means your approach in the first weeks has to be different than you might expect.
What Building Rapport Actually Looks Like
I was a process assistant at Amazon before I ever managed anyone. When I eventually moved into a leadership role, I was fortunate enough to transition onto a team I hadn’t worked with directly, which meant I didn’t carry the awkward weight of suddenly being “the boss” to people who used to be my peers. But I was still the new guy. And I made plenty of mistakes before I figured out what actually worked.
The thing that made the biggest difference wasn’t any framework or system. It was simple: I started asking questions and actually listening to the answers.
Not performative listening. Not “I hear you, now let me tell you what I think” listening. Real listening — the kind where you walk away having learned something you didn’t know before.
Here’s what I started asking:
What’s working well on this team that I should make sure not to break?
What’s one thing you wish the previous manager had done differently?
What does success look like for you in this role?
Those questions changed my relationship to the team. Not because the answers were always surprising, but because asking them communicated something important: I’m not here to overwrite everything. I’m here to understand what you’ve built, and figure out how I can serve this team well.
The Informal Leaders Are the Key
Every team has them: people who aren’t in any formal leadership position but who carry enormous influence. They’re the ones others turn to when something goes wrong, the ones whose opinion shifts the room, the ones who have been around long enough to have seen a manager or two come and go.
If you win these people over, you gain access to the whole team. If you alienate them — or worse, ignore them — they become silent saboteurs of everything you’re trying to build.
I’ve watched new managers walk into a team and immediately try to flatten informal hierarchies, not realizing that these relationships are the connective tissue holding the team together. The informal leader isn’t a threat to your authority. They’re an asset.
Identify who they are early. Have individual conversations. Ask for their perspective and (this part is critical) actually act on what you hear. Nothing builds credibility with an informal leader faster than showing them that talking to you has tangible results.
Consistency Is Your Greatest Tool
In my post on the leadership identity shift, I wrote about how the transition from individual contributor to leader requires a fundamental change in how you think about your role. That shift is especially visible in this context: when you’re new to a team, your team is watching to see whether you are the same person on day one that you are on day thirty.
New managers often put on their best behavior in the beginning and let it slip when the pressure hits. Your team, especially the veterans, have seen this before. They’re not watching who you are when things are easy. They’re waiting to see who you are when things get hard.
That means every small interaction matters. The way you respond when someone brings you a problem. Whether you follow through on what you said you’d do. Whether you take credit for the team’s wins or share it. Whether you protect your people when someone higher up is looking for someone to blame.
Rapport isn’t built in big dramatic gestures. It’s built one consistent interaction at a time.
Give It Time — And Be Patient With the Process
The biggest mistake I see new managers make, beyond the rush to establish authority, is expecting rapport to happen fast.
It doesn’t. And trying to force it often backfires.
I’ve had managers in my class tell me they’re frustrated because it’s been three weeks and their team still feels distant. Three weeks. I remind them that some of the people on their team have been working together for three years. You don’t undo that kind of familiarity and trust through a few good conversations. You earn your way into the group over time, through repeated evidence that you are who you say you are.
Be patient. Show up consistently. Keep your commitments. Be curious about people as people, not just as employees. Learn their names, but also learn what they care about, what motivates them, what they’re proud of.
The rapport you’re building right now is the foundation everything else rests on. As I explored in the self-awareness series, the best leaders understand that how others perceive them is data — and in these early weeks, that perception is forming. You have more influence over how it forms than you might think.
From Theory to Action
1. Schedule one-on-one conversations with every team member in your first two weeks. Not to set expectations or share your vision — to listen. Come with open-ended questions about what’s working, what they’re proud of, and what they wish were different. Take notes. Follow up on what you hear.
2. Identify the informal leaders on your team. Look for who others turn to when there’s a problem, whose opinion carries weight in group settings, who has been there the longest. Prioritize building a relationship with these people early.
3. Make one visible change based on team feedback in your first 30 days. It doesn’t have to be big. What matters is that your team can see the direct line between something they told you and something you did. This builds credibility faster than any policy or initiative you could announce.
4. Create a simple way to track your commitments. Every time you tell someone you’ll do something — follow up on an issue, get back to them with an answer, look into a concern — write it down. Then do it. Your team is tracking whether you’re a person of your word, even when you’re not aware they’re watching.
5. Resist the urge to change things in the first 30 days. Unless something is a safety issue or a clear ethical problem, let things run the way they have been while you’re still learning. Changes can always come later. The trust you’d spend making premature changes takes far longer to rebuild.
6. Learn what your team is proud of. Ask directly: What has this team accomplished that you think deserves more recognition than it got? The answer tells you what people value, and it gives you something genuine to affirm. Acknowledging past wins before you introduce future goals signals that you see the work that came before you.
7. Be the same in private as you are in public. How you treat your team when no one important is watching is the truest test of your character. Your team will learn your real values not from what you say in all-hands meetings, but from how you handle a quiet conversation in the hallway when it’s just the two of you.
8. Revisit your first impressions after 60 days. Go back to the notes from your early one-on-ones. Have things changed? Are there commitments you made that you haven’t followed through on? Are there people you haven’t connected with as much as you intended? This check-in keeps rapport-building from becoming something you did in week one and then forgot about.
The team you’ve inherited didn’t ask for you. They’ll decide — based on everything you do and don’t do in the coming weeks — whether they’re glad you showed up.
Give them reasons to be.