New manager inherited a high-revenue department with no real systems, low morale, and constant political blowback. How do I stabilize this without burning out?
I recently stepped into a department manager role at a legacy hospitality/event-production organization. I came in expecting a mature operation with established systems, strong institutional standards, and a culture built around professionalism, loyalty, and delivering excellent results.
What I actually inherited is much more complicated.
The previous manager was in the role for decades and was very successful in certain ways, especially with sales and client relationships. But almost everything was built around him personally. There are very few scalable systems, very little documentation, and everything is hinged on institutional knowledge.
Operationally, the department is still heavily paper-based. We receive a very high volume of daily work orders and revisions that have to be manually reviewed, entered, updated, and translated into our internal calendar and weekly schedule. The calendar and schedule are separate spreadsheets. There is no true dispatch system, no centralized workflow, and no real end-to-end process for intake, quoting, staffing, execution, inventory management, and follow-up.
The department has 30+ employees, but the office/admin side has only two people, with a third being added soon. Morale is extremely low. We have frequent callouts, a lot of frustration from the field team, and a long-standing reputation problem with other departments.
I have been in the role for about a month. I have started building SOPs, streamlining workflows, clarifying responsibilities, and trying to move us toward a more modern operating model. The challenge is that the team says they want change, but then pushes back hard when changes are introduced. At the same time, other departments and senior leaders are quick to escalate mistakes or gaps publicly, even when the issue is rooted in old processes, unclear handoffs, or incorrect information passed to us.
The department is still performing well financially and from a client-service standpoint. Revenue is strong, margins are strong, and client ratings are high. But internally, everything feels fragile. The team is exhausted and distrustful. Other departments seem to view us as a problem department. IT and leadership support are limited or slow-moving. Meanwhile, I am being judged on issues that were years in the making, while only having been in the chair for a few weeks.
I genuinely want to lead this team to a better future. I think the staff’s lives would get easier if we had clear workflows, better tools, cleaner communication, and less dependency on memory and manual work. But right now I feel like I am trying to rebuild the plane while flying it, while everyone is angry that the plane is shaking.
For managers who have inherited broken or personality-driven departments:
How do you stabilize the operation without trying to fix everything at once?
How do you build trust with a disgruntled team that wants change but resists change?
How do you manage up when leadership sees every operational miss as evidence that the department is failing, rather than as a symptom of the inherited system?
And how do you protect yourself from burnout while still moving the department forward?
I am not looking to blame the previous manager or the staff. I am trying to figure out how to create structure, credibility, and momentum in a department that has been running on informal systems for a very long time.