The People Change. The Team Remains.
A reflection on what survives when the people who built a team are no longer the ones leading it.
Early in my career, I thought teams were built from people. I still believe people matter a great deal, but over time I’ve come to think that’s only part of the story.
If you stay with an organization long enough, you start noticing something interesting. The people change. Leaders move on. New members arrive. Founders step away. Roles evolve. And yet some teams somehow still feel like the same team, even when many of the people who originally built them are no longer there.
I have found myself thinking about that a lot lately.
It reminds me of an old Greek philosophical thought experiment called the Ship of Theseus. The idea is simple: imagine a ship where every wooden plank gets replaced over time. Eventually, none of the original planks remains. Well, is it still the same ship? Well, there is no universal acceptable answer for this.
But it does make me wonder whether every team is its own version of the Ship of Theseus.
People join. People leave. Careers grow. Life happens. Over enough years, every single member of a team can change.
So what is it that survives?
It can’t be the people because they are the very thing that is constantly changing. Maybe it’s something less visible. The way difficult conversations are handled. The standards people hold themselves to when nobody is watching. The behaviors that get encouraged, rewarded, challenged, or quietly corrected. The stories that get told. The things that are considered “just how we do things around here.”
Culture is often described as what happens when leaders aren’t in the room. I have come to think it’s also what survives after many of the original people are no longer in the room. That realization has changed how I think about leading teams.
There was a time when every departure felt like losing a part of what made a team “the team”. I will be lying if I didn’t say that in some ways, it still does.
But I have now come to believe that leadership isn’t about holding on to every plank. It’s about taking care of the pattern. Making the implicit explicit. Talking about values often enough that they can be understood, challenged, strengthened, and carried forward. Helping build something that lasts beyond any one individual. Because every person who joins adds something to the story. And every person who leaves takes a piece of that story with them.
The goal isn’t to build a team that never changes. That’s impossible! The goal is to build something enduring enough that people can still recognize its character years later, even after most of the faces have changed.
Maybe that’s what good leadership looks like. Not being the keeper of the planks. But taking care of the ship’s soul while the planks keep changing.
And making sure the ship can keep sailing long after we are gone.
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