You don't know their job. Lead them anyway.
Five tactics for leading a team whose core function is not your core competency
Since I have been on a General Manager/cross-functional leadership article spree, many of you have reached out with one specific, anxiety-laden question: “What are the specific tactics I can use to manage a team of individual contributors or leaders whose job I have never done in my career?” There are five things you should do to not just win the respect of the team, but make it perform better than it ever has.
Before I dig into the concrete things you can learn and do, I want to say that it is okay to feel anxious. We have all felt like imposters in roles we were actually extremely qualified to perform. After twenty-plus years in this industry, I still sometimes feel like I have no idea what I am doing. It is completely okay to feel a heightened sense of insecurity when you have to lead a team whose core function is not your core competency. However, keep this in mind. You are an experienced leader, and ninety percent of patterns repeat across departments and functions. Think of leading a different department not as learning a new language, but as learning a new dialect.
That is the good news. The reality check is this: to lead another department or team of individual contributors whose job you have never done, you do need real management experience behind you. Put it another way, the answer to “Have you delivered value through others?” should be yes. You cannot go from being a software engineer to managing a team of product managers without first having managed people. I would say you need at least five years of successfully leading a team before you attempt to lead one whose job you cannot do yourself. Learning a new dialect requires that you already speak the language. With that, let’s get into it.
1. Learn
The most reliable way to build fluency in an unfamiliar domain is through books. Specifically, books written by practitioners who have actually done the job and not the pundits and gurus.
I read fifty-plus books a year across fiction, non-fiction, and everything in between. I would not be overstating it to say that habit has given me a meaningful advantage when it comes to promotions and new opportunities. If you have not read seriously in a while, start now. If non-fiction feels dry, start with fiction and cross over. The medium matters less than the habit.
Once you have the theory, observe. Watch how the functional leaders in your current company run their departments, set goals, and make decisions. If you have a good relationship with a leader whose domain you want to understand, ask to shadow them. Sit in on their meetings. Most good leaders will say yes if you just ask. Come with no agenda other than to understand how they think.
Building this level of fluency, if you do the work seriously, takes a seasoned leader roughly five years. By the end of it, you should be able to answer three questions about the team at a high level: What does the day-to-day of an individual contributor on this team actually look like? What goals do they track at a departmental level? How do the leaders decide what those goals should be?
One thing I want to call out explicitly before moving on. You will only get what you put in. If you half-ass the learning, everything that follows will fall apart and may cause lasting reputation damage. Putting in the work is the easiest thing to get right, and yet most people fail at it. The more work you put in, the higher your chances of success. It is that simple.
2. Trust
One of my favorite sci-fi shows, after Battlestar Galactica, is Stargate Atlantis. For those who have not seen it, the show follows a cross-disciplinary team of scientists and soldiers exploring a new galaxy. The leader of the expedition is a scientist, Dr. Weir, and the show captures exactly the tension you will experience when you take over a team whose job you cannot do. She is technically the leader of the entire crew, but in the early episodes, the soldiers actively disregard her directions. Over time, Dr. Weir earns their respect and eventually convinces the military contingent to see her as their commander. The tactics she uses are very similar to what I have used in my own career.
The first thing she does is trust the people to do their jobs. She includes the military leaders in her decision-making and does not undermine their calls. That does not mean she blindly accepts their recommendations. She respectfully pushes back when their point of view conflicts with the core objectives of the mission. She is clear about her goals and makes the appropriate decisions while taking everyone’s input into account.
Obviously, Dr. Weir is fictional, but her approach to building trust with a team that does not fully trust her yet is extremely applicable to tech leadership. When you take over a new team, trust is the first job. Spend time with them. This is so simple and so consistently underdone that it still surprises me. Trust the people on your team to do the job and manage toward outcomes, not implementation details. Actively remove blockers from their path. And disagree with them when their point of view pushes you further from your goals. There is potentially an entire book waiting to be written about this topic, but the bottom line is this: know your goals, understand how they tie into the company’s future, trust your team to do the work, and help them become successful.
3. Know what success looks like
Since we are on a sci-fi kick, let’s keep it going. This time, I am going to use an example from my all-time favorite sci-fi show: Battlestar Galactica (BSG). For the uninitiated, BSG is the story of a ragtag group of humans who have to flee their home to survive an attack by an alien civilization. The leader of that group is the recently promoted President Laura Roslin, now responsible for keeping the entire human race alive. The scene that has stayed with me is when President Roslin wheels a whiteboard into her makeshift office and writes a single number on it. Population. The number of living humans. That is her metric. It is her only metric.
BSG is fictional, but having a clear point of view on what success looks like is not just good television writing. It is your job. Understand what success looks like for your team, define the metrics, and align everyone around them. Pressure test those metrics constantly to make sure they are not vanity metrics. That means having a regular process to monitor and discuss them and getting honest feedback from stakeholders. Also, remember that metrics come in two flavors: input metrics, which your team can directly influence, and output metrics, which are company-level results like revenue and churn. Your team should be moving input metrics. The output metrics will follow. There is an entire discipline around this, but the meta point is simple: know what winning looks like, write it on the whiteboard, and make sure everyone can see it.
4. Build the right process
You have built trust with your team, and you know what your goals are. How do you ensure things are moving in the right direction? There are multiple tactical things you can deploy, like business reviews, agile, scrum, and so on, but at its core, the question you should be asking yourself as a leader is:
“Are the right people working on the right projects at the right pace?”
That is it. However, you end up designing your processes, they should help you answer that question.
Right people means you have the talent the team actually needs, not just the talent the team has always had. You may not be able to evaluate the craft directly, but you can observe the signals around it. Are the people on this team trusted by their peers? Are they making decisions that hold up over time? Are the leaders around them leaning on them or working around them? You do not need to know how to do the job to answer those questions. You just need to pay attention.
Right projects means the work your team is doing today is connected to the metrics you defined in the previous section. This is where the “So What?” question earns its place. Before any major initiative gets your sign-off, ask it. Why does this work matter? What happens if we do not do it? How does it move the metrics that actually matter to the business? A lot of teams are busy on work that made sense six months ago and has not been pressure tested since. Your job is to pressure test it.
Right pace means decisions are moving, not stacking up. The highest-leverage thing you can do for a team whose work you cannot evaluate directly is unblock their decision-making. Most new leaders in an unfamiliar domain hold decisions too long because they lack confidence in their domain knowledge. That hesitation costs the team more than a wrong call would. Learn to distinguish one-way doors from two-way doors. Most decisions are two-way. Let the team make them. Reserve your intervention for the ones that are genuinely hard to walk back.
If you can answer yes to all three, the team is healthy. If one of them is off, you now know exactly where to focus.
5. Give it time
None of this happens in the first month. Probably not in the first quarter either.
The leaders who struggle most in this transition are the ones who expect the team to trust them before they have earned it, who expect to understand the work before they have observed it, and who expect to see results before they have built the conditions for results to happen. That impatience is understandable. It is also expensive.
The arc looks something like this. In the first ninety days, you are learning and listening. You are spending time with the team, understanding the work, and building the relationships that will carry everything else. In the next ninety days, you are starting to form a point of view. You know what success looks like. You are pressure testing the metrics and the projects. You are starting to spot what is working and what is not. By the end of the first year, if you have done the work, you are leading.
Twenty-plus years in this industry have taught me one thing about leading people whose job you cannot do: the craft you lack matters far less than the judgment you bring. Trust the team. Know what winning looks like. Build the conditions for them to get there. And give it the time it actually takes.
PS: I have a lot more to say on this topic, so I have been quietly building something for senior leaders who want to make this transition the right way. It is almost ready. Watch this space.
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