Take People With You Before You Fix Anything
A new leader's toolbox is worthless until the team agrees a problem exists — build the why first.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 91%
Shani's biggest career learning: hired to drive change at TomTom, she arrived seeing every gap and immediately started fixing. The team did not move with her, because she had not built shared understanding of why the change was needed. The insight is asymmetric perception — a newcomer sees the cracks precisely because they are new, and the incumbents cannot see them because they have adapted to living with them. Being hired to drive change does not mean the team accepts change.
Origin
Inbal Shani's own failure, told in the 'failure corner' segment, from leading the location-based services team at TomTom — her first role in an international company.
Core principles
- 01You see the cracks BECAUSE you are new; they don't see them because they've adapted to them
- 02Being hired to drive change does not mean the team has accepted the change
- 03Not everyone shares your go-go-go mindset — pace is a property of the team, not of you
- 04Your character does not automatically translate across cultures
- 05A product/leadership role is influence, not authorship — you influence engineering to build it and revenue to sell it
How to run it
- 1
Write down every gap you see in your first weeks — and do nothing about it yet
Capture the cracks while your outsider vision is still sharp; it will fade as you acclimate. But treat the list as observations, not as a work queue.
Pro tip Your first-90-days list is a depreciating asset in perception and an appreciating liability in politics. Record it fast, deploy it slowly.
- 2
Take a step back and assess what is actually happening
Before driving anything, understand why the current state exists. The team has been living with these gaps for a reason — surface the reason before you overwrite it.
Watch out The go-go-go instinct ('let's take the toolbox out and fix everything') is exactly what fails here.
- 3
Build the why before the what
Establish shared understanding of why a change is needed and why this is a problem worth fixing. Without that, the fix reads as an outsider's imposition and people do not come with you.
Pro tip The feedback Shani received — 'you're moving too fast, slow down, explain the why' — is the checklist. If your team hasn't heard the why, you haven't said it.
- 4
Find the bridge between what you see and what they think is fine
Explicitly reconcile the two views: name the crack, hear their 'it's been working, don't fix it', and negotiate a shared reading of the problem. That reconciliation is the change program.
- 5
Adapt your communication style to the culture you landed in
In an international or unfamiliar org, your natural register may not land. Adjust how you communicate to drive clarity in THIS environment rather than assuming your default style is universal.
In the wild
Shani was hired specifically to drive change on the LBS team — her first role in an international company. High energy, she saw the issues and started fixing immediately, without first building understanding of why change was needed. The team did not follow, and the unsupportive feedback she received was, in her own assessment, right.
→ The learning became foundational: she now treats change management and 'taking people with you' as a core leadership skill, and Lenny notes it is a recurring theme in his failure-corner segment — new leaders changing too much too fast.
Shani built her leadership toolbox by looking up at leaders she worked for, across at peers, and down into the people she managed — cataloguing skills she lacked, and equally cataloguing behaviors that made people unhappy so she could deliberately NOT adopt them.
→ An explicit yes-list and no-list of leadership behaviors, drawn from observation rather than from coaching alone.
Common mistakes
Confusing your mandate with the team's consent
Leadership hired you to drive change; the team did not. Treating the mandate as consent means you skip the persuasion work entirely and stall.
Fixing before understanding
Opening the toolbox on day one signals that the team's history and reasoning do not matter. You lose the people whose cooperation the fix depends on.
Assuming your style travels
A high-energy, direct character that worked in one company or culture may actively repel another. Failing to adjust turns a communication mismatch into a perceived character problem.
Is it for you?
Best for
Newly-hired leaders or PMs brought in explicitly to 'drive change' who can already see everything that is broken
Not ideal for
Genuine turnaround or crisis situations where the mandate is explicit, the clock is short, and slow consensus-building is itself the risk
From the transcript
“I've seing that when I started doing that without building that understanding of why we need to do a change or why this is a…”
“you're moving too fast slow down explain the why why are we doing that how should we move forward”
“if you're working in the same space for a long time in the same team you often don't see these gaps anymore because you got…”
From the episode
The future of AI in software development
Inbal Shani (CPO of GitHub)