You Inherited a Procurement Team…Now What?

A practical guide for new CPOs and Procurement Directors navigating the complexity of a team that didn't choose you; and a role you didn't inherit empty-handed.

There's a moment, usually somewhere in your first few weeks, when the realisation lands.

You've walked the corridors. You've done the introductions. You've sat in the meetings. And you start to realise, beneath the surface of all the pleasantries and cautious optimism, that this team has a history. And you're now part of it, whether you like it or not.

You didn't just inherit a team. You inherited a system, a culture, unspoken rules, loyalties, disappointments, and a set of expectations that were formed long before you arrived.

This is the reality of stepping into a CPO or Director of Procurement role with a team already in place. And it's one of the most underestimated leadership challenges in the profession.

If you've been here, or you're here right now, this one's for you.

A Framework Worth Revisiting

Before we get into the challenges, it's worth anchoring this in something most of us learned early in our leadership journey but rarely apply to ourselves: Tuckman's model: Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing.

We often apply it to teams. But here's what I want you to sit with: when you arrive as a new leader, you restart the cycle for everyone, including yourself.

The team was somewhere on that spectrum before you walked in. They may have been performing. They may have been storming under the surface. Either way, your arrival resets the clock, and the work of moving back to performing falls, in large part, to you.

In my work with CPOs and their teams, here are three of the main challenges that I help them work through. Let's talk about them honestly.

Challenge 1: You Inherited the Team...And They Inherited a Leader

The forming stage is rarely a blank slate when you're stepping into an existing team. Everyone arrives with a story.

Your predecessor left a legacy; positive, complicated, or somewhere in between. And the way they left matters enormously. Were they promoted? Pushed out? Did they leave the team feeling supported or abandoned? Was there a period of uncertainty before you arrived?

You are entering a system that has already made meaning of your arrival. Some people will be relieved. Some will be cautious. Some will want to test you. And almost all of them will have expectations...of what you'll change, what you'll protect, and who you'll favour.

Here's the thing that's easy to miss: managing expectations goes both ways.

Yes, you need to manage theirs. But your own expectations - of who this team should be, how quickly they should adapt, what good looks like - need checking too.

The invitation here is curiosity.

Before you diagnose, listen. Before you change, understand. Ask questions that aren't about performance; ask about experience. What's worked well here? What's frustrated you? How do you like to be led and managed?

The answers won't just tell you about the team. They'll tell you about the system you've stepped into and where the real leverage points are.

Forming begins with honest discovery, not assumption.

Challenge 2: Understanding Capability & Confidence Gaps And Where You're Trying to Go

Once the initial pleasantries settle and you start to see the team more clearly, a more complex picture emerges.

There will be gaps.

But here's where many leaders stumble: they assess capability through the lens of where the team is, rather than where they need to go. And in Procurement, where the strategic agenda is shifting faster than ever - from cost management to value creation, from transactional to advisory - that distinction needs great attention.

A team that was perfectly capable under the old model may be underprepared for the one you're trying to build. That's not a criticism of them. It's just the reality of a function in transition.

And capability is only half of it. Confidence is the other.

You can have someone with the intellectual capacity for strategic Procurement - category strategy, stakeholder influence, commercial thinking - but whose confidence has been eroded by years of being kept in a tactical lane. They don't believe they belong in the room. So they don't show up like they do.

This is where the storming can be internalised.

People start to sense that the bar is shifting. Some will lean in; energised by the ambition. Others will pull back...threatened by what they might be asked to become. And some will simply wait to see if you're serious before they commit.

Your job in this phase is to map both dimensions - capability and confidence - and understand how each person relates to your strategic direction. Not to weed people out, but to invest in the right places and have honest, developmental conversations early.

Storming, navigated well, creates the conditions for genuine norming - where people start to coalesce around a shared sense of what the team is becoming.

Challenge 3: Building a Common Language and Understanding How People Communicate

This one is more subtle than the others. But in my experience, it's the one that derails more teams than it should.

When you bring together a team with different tenures, different functional backgrounds, and a new leader with their own style and vocabulary; you have a communication patchwork. Everyone is technically speaking the same language. But they're not always meaning the same things.

What does "strategic" mean in this team? What does "good stakeholder management" look like? When someone says they're "across" something, do they mean they've read a report, or that they've built a relationship and shaped a decision?

Language shapes culture. And in procurement, where credibility with the business is everything, the way your team talks about their work (internally and externally) has far more weight than most leaders give credit for.

But it goes deeper than vocabulary. How people communicate; their preferred style, their level of directness, how they process information, how they respond under pressure...these are the invisible dynamics that either create cohesion or generate friction.

Building a common language isn't about enforcing conformity. It's about creating enough shared understanding that the team can operate with confidence; individually and collectively.

This is the work of norming. It's unglamorous. It's iterative. It's the conversations in the corridor as much as the workshops on the calendar. But it's what unlocks performing, when the team stops working around each other and starts working with each other.

A Note on Patience - With the Process and With Yourself

None of this is linear. You'll think you've moved through forming only to hit a patch of storming you didn't anticipate. You'll build momentum on communication and then lose it when a restructure or a difficult stakeholder situation knocks things sideways.

This isn't failure. It's just the nature of leading humans through change.

The leaders I've seen do this well share one quality: they stay curious. About their team, about the system they've inherited, and - crucially - about themselves.

Because when you understand how you show up as a leader under pressure, in ambiguity, in transition...you get to make better choices. More intentional ones. And that's what separates a leader who inherits a team and leaves it roughly as they found it, from one who brilliantly transforms what Procurement can do for the business.

How I Can Help

Building a high-performing Procurement team from an inherited one isn't a solo endeavour. The leaders who navigate it most effectively aren't the ones who have all the answers on day one; they're the ones who have the right thinking partner alongside them as the picture becomes clearer.

I partner with CPOs and Procurement Directors to do precisely this: to make sense of what they've inherited, to develop a clear-eyed view of their team's capability and potential, and to build the conditions where Procurement can genuinely perform at a strategic level.

If you're in the early stages of leading an inherited team - or you've been in it a while and something isn't quite clicking - I'd love to have a conversation.