The First 90 Days (41 page)

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Modifying Strategy

Suppose you discover serious flaws in the strategy you have inherited. Can you radically change the strategy or the way it is implemented? That depends on two factors: the STARS situation you are entering, and your ability to persuade others and build support for your ideas.

Proposing significant changes to strategy is most difficult in realignments. You have to convince people who believe that their unit or team is already performing well using existing approaches. If you believe that the strategy has put the group on the wrong path, your main job will be to raise questions to persuade your boss and others to reexamine the strategy. You can ask questions such as the following:

If we were to achieve this plan, what might some of the
unintended
results be?

I see this plan as aimed at serving a broader market. Is that what we want?

This plan is aggressive. What other goals will we need to put on hold to achieve it?

If you conclude that the existing strategy will move the group forward, but neither fast enough nor far enough, the wisest course may be to tweak it early on and plan for bigger changes later. For example, you might raise the targeted revenue goals modestly, or recommend investing in a needed technology sooner than the strategy calls for. More fundamental changes should wait until you’ve learned more and built support among key constituencies.

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Shaping Your Group’s Structure

Once you have clarified what changes your group’s strategy needs, you can address structural changes to support the desired strategy.

What is structure exactly? Most simply, your group’s structure is the way it organizes people and technology to support

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its strategy.

Structure consists of the following elements:

Units:
How your direct reports are grouped, such as by function, product, or geographical area.

Decision rights:
Who is empowered to make what kinds of decisions and how.

Performance measurement and reward systems:
What performance-evaluation metrics and reward systems are in place.

Reporting relationships and information-sharing mechanisms:
How people observe and control the way work gets done, and how they share information and make high-level decisions.

Assessing Structure

Before you begin to generate ideas for reshaping your group’s structure, look into how the four structural elements interact. Are the pieces out of tune or in harmony? Ask yourself:

Does the way team members are grouped help us achieve our strategic goals? Are the right people in the right places to work toward our core objectives?

Is our decision-making structure letting us make the best decisions efficiently?

Are we measuring and rewarding the kinds of achievements that matter most to our strategic aims?

Do our reporting relationships promote sharing the right information at the right time and monitoring work in a way that supports our strategy?

If you are in a start-up situation—and therefore forming a new group—you will not have existing structures to evaluate.

Instead, think about how you
want
the structural pieces to work in your group.

Grappling with the Trade-offs

There is no perfect organization; every one embodies tradeoffs. Thus, your challenge is to find the right balance for
your
situation. As you consider changes in your group’s structure, keep in mind some all-too-common problems that can arise:

The team’s knowledge base is too narrow or broad.
When you group people with
similar
experience and capabilities, they can accumulate deep wells of expertise. But if their knowledge base becomes too narrow and specialized, isolation and compartmentalization can result. Groups with a
broad mix
of skills may be able to integrate their knowledge more successfully, though at the cost of developing deeper expertise.

Employees’ decision-making scope is too narrow or broad.
A good general rule is that decisions should be made by the people who have the most relevant knowledge, so long as their incentives encourage them to do what is best for the organization. If your group’s decision-making process is centralized, you (and perhaps several other individuals) can decide quickly. But you may be forgoing the benefit of the wisdom of others who are better equipped to make certain of those decisions. This structure can lead to ill-informed decisions and can tax those who make all the decisions. If, on the other hand, people are given decision-making scope but do not understand the larger implications of their choices, they may make unwise calls.