Start As You Mean To Go On
Updated: 2 days ago
Why the first few weeks of a team quietly decide the next six months
There is a moment most leaders walk straight past.
The first meeting of a new team. Or the first meeting after something shifts: a reorganisation, a new joiner, a wider remit, a bad quarter everyone is politely not mentioning.
It feels like a beginning. Something to get through before the real work starts.
It is the real work.
Week One
What gets decided without anyone deciding it
Teams settle fast. Faster than feels reasonable.
In that first room, a group is working out how things are done here. Not from the values on the wall. From what happens in front of them.
Who spoke. Who did not. What got raised, and what got left. How you reacted when someone disagreed with you.
None of it is written down anywhere. All of it is learned.
Whatever gets normalised in week one tends to get defended in month six.
The Forecast
What people are doing while they watch you
The brain is not sitting back and observing. It is predicting. It uses what has happened before to guess what comes next, and then it lives inside the guess.
So your team is not neutrally taking you in. They are building a forecast.
If nobody interrupted, the forecast is: we do not interrupt here.
If the difficult thing went unnamed, the forecast is: we do not name difficult things here.
Nobody agreed to any of it. It simply became true.
Designed Together
What a team alliance actually is
A team alliance is a deliberate conversation, early on, about how this particular group intends to work together. And what it will do when that breaks down.
Not what we do. How we will be while we do it.
Two questions carry most of the weight.
What do we want it to feel like in this room?
What do we want to do when it does not feel like that?
The second question is the one most teams skip. It is also the one that earns its keep.
One thing worth being honest about. An agreement written once and filed away does almost nothing.
The returning to it is the intervention, not the writing of it.
Going Polite
Where this quietly goes wrong
Team alliances tend to fail in one particular way.
They become polite.
Everyone agrees to respect, transparency and open communication. Nobody defines what those words mean when a deadline slips. Or when someone takes credit in front of the board. Or when a person goes quiet for a month and nobody asks.
The agreement then does the opposite of its job. It hands the team a shared vocabulary for avoiding the very things it was built to surface.
A team alliance is only as useful as the most uncomfortable thing it lets you say.
Five Questions
If you are starting, or restarting, something
Not a system. Just five things worth asking out loud in the first few weeks.
What do we want it to feel like to work here?
What happens when one of us gets it wrong?
How will we know if something is not being said?
What did the last team do that we do not want to repeat?
When will we look at this agreement again?
And one for yourself, quietly: what am I normalising this week without meaning to?
Three Things
If you keep nothing else from this
Teams set their habits early and then defend them. The first meeting is not a warm-up. It is the template.
People are not observing you, they are forecasting you. Your silences teach as much as your words.
An agreement is worth exactly what it lets you say when things are uncomfortable, and only if you go back to it.
Where this goes next
Reading about this is one thing. Doing it with a team that already has history in the room is another. Book a discovery call — 30 minutes, no pitch.
Where this comes from
I have kept the research out of the body of this piece, but it is there, and I would rather show it than ask you to take my word for it.
Connie Gersick followed eight teams from first meeting to deadline in the late 1980s. Each settled into a distinctive way of working almost immediately, and held it for roughly the first half of however long the project ran. Gersick, C. J. G. (1988), Academy of Management Journal, 31(1).
Mathieu and Rapp (2009) tracked 32 MBA teams through a business simulation. Those that invested early in both a charter and a task strategy sustained the strongest performance. A small student sample, so worth holding lightly. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(1).
De Jong, Dirks and Gillespie (2016) pooled 112 studies across nearly 7,800 teams and found trust within a team reliably linked to performance, with an above-average effect. A real effect, not a transformation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 101(8).
The prediction idea comes from Lisa Feldman Barrett. The Designed Team Alliance is a tool from relationship systems coaching.
Further reading
Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization (Wiley, 2019). The clearest work on psychological safety, from the researcher who defined the term.
Michael Watkins, The First 90 Days (Harvard Business Review Press, 2003; updated 2013). The natural companion to starting as you mean to go on.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). For the prediction machine.
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