Recruiting a leader for an existing team is akin to open-heart surgery. You know this well. You cannot afford to make mistakes. Neither can the others—especially the existing team members! They are watching you closely. Often, and sometimes unknowingly, they perceive the changes you are implementing as an implicit critique of their previous practices (“we’re being asked to change, which means our work isn’t appreciated”). Naturally, they are watching you closely.

Not expand, but enrich

A true turning point… When you recruit a new leader, it’s not merely to expand the existing team but to enrich it with different skills and behaviors. Expanding a team means doing more of the same. It’s like hiring salespeople similar to the previous ones to strengthen the workforce. Expanding a team would mean, in your case, integrating a leader who is a carbon copy of the previous one—just to replace them. That’s not your intention. You expect your recruitment to enrich the team. Your goal isn’t just to replace the current leader; it’s to change them—to alter the company’s trajectory, to shake things up, to write a new story, the one aligned with your investment thesis. Hence, the challenge arises—a double challenge! It’s not enough to recruit someone with indisputable intrinsic qualities; you need someone whose strengths specifically align with your project. This is the first, classic challenge: commonly, we don’t recruit the best, but the best for a specific position. More uniquely, the second aspect of your concerns: you recruit for a position, that’s understood, but also for a team… This is the second, more thorny challenge. Enriching a team is risky. Every organism produces antibodies. Every graft is delicate.

This Is the Critical Moment. You Are About to Recruit a New Leader… for a Company You May Not Fully Know.

It’s up to you to assess the risks and mitigate them by providing your own answers to generic questions.
To what extent is it necessary to enrich the team? On which points? What transformations are essential? Useful? Secondary? What must absolutely change in the management style? What should evolve? What should be preserved?
Through these questions and answers, you develop a multidimensional approach to the desired profile. Often, it’s the human qualities that make the difference—managerial qualities…

Heart Transplant

Integrating a leader into an existing team is like attempting a heart transplant. With one exception: the leader themselves will perform the transplant. They will be both the surgeon and the heart. Upon entering the operating room, they will have to operate without truly knowing the patient (the company), nor the members of their surgical team, nor the anesthesiologist who has already begun their work, nor the nurse who has already positioned the patient…

What a challenge!

And not just technical. It will require the leader’s adaptability, emotional intelligence, ability to gain the team’s trust, and exert influence… But listing such generalities is insufficient. Just as one must understand a position to recruit the right person for it, it’s better to deeply understand a team to recruit its manager wisely—not just the strengths and weaknesses of the group but also its personality, its pride, its motivation systems… and the level of legitimacy of the outgoing leader, the attachment they have or don’t have… The intervention of experts with dedicated tools can be decisive. They will map the team’s inner mechanisms. They will help define the optimal managerial profile. Better yet: for the new leader, upon arrival, the analysis provided will serve as a kind of user manual for the team, a detailed map of the operational territory—where some landmines are well buried! An accident can happen so quickly! For you, a disaster! Preventable! With the intervention of demining experts.

Recruiting a new leader for an existing team determines future financial results, and yet it is often treated as a simple administrative operation. Misjudgments at this stage can compromise the entire investment. Proper preparation, rigorous assessment, and anticipation of the team’s dynamics are essential to turn this critical moment into a success rather than a risk.