Any time I've had to lead a team in the past few years, I've always done two things first (bottom-up): * Get to know the people in the team, learn the overall

Any time I've had to lead a team in the past few years, I've always done two things first (bottom-up): * Get to know the people in the team, learn the overall vibe of the group, and how happy everyone is. * Get the know the people above the team, their motivations for hiring you, and the tangible outcome of your hiring. You say "quality", but what does that mean? Is quality currently low? Do they feel that they could be doing more in certain areas? From there, I would typically work to integrate myself into the team before introducing any changes. If the average person has been there for 2-3 years they've got a lot of business knowledge that I won't have. In my experience, most teams have a strong opinion of what they want to do to improve processes, but there is a business reason as to why they've not implemented those improvements. The last time I led a team, I wanted total transparency, so we came up with an internal list of improvements and we focused on incremental and manual improvements to processes. Most of the time I wasn't even the person making the changes - I was picking up the slack so someone else could do the work, or do something they've wanted to do for months. Our processes improved over time, and as a result delivery improved dramatically. This introduced its own problems, but in the grand scheme of things the problems were nothing compared to before. All I expect from a manager is honesty and consistency in feedback, so when I've been in those shoes I've tried to be as honest as possible, and to be as transparent as possible when my message isn't consistent with what I've said before.