The First 90 Days (46 page)

This may mean hiring people into temporary positions so they learn the ropes, or exploring whether people further down in the organization can meet the challenge.

Not working organizational alignment and team restructuring issues in parallel.
A ship’s captain cannot make the right choices about his crew without knowing the destination, the route, and the ship.

Likewise, you can’t build your team before reaching clarity about changes in strategy, structure, systems, and skills. Otherwise, you could end up with the right people in the wrong jobs. As
figure 7-1

illustrates, your efforts to assess the organization and achieve alignment should go on in parallel with assessment of the team and necessary personnel changes.

Figure 7-1:
Synchronizing Architectural Alignment and Team Restructuring
Not holding onto the good people.
One experienced manager shared some hard-won lessons about the dangers of losing good people. “When you shake the tree,” she said, “good people can fall out too.” Her point is that uncertainty about who will and will not be on the team can lead your best people

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to make moves elsewhere. Although there are real constraints on what you can say about who will stay and who will go, you should look for ways to signal to the top performers that you recognize their capabilities. A little reassurance goes a long way.

Undertaking team building before the core team is in place.
It is tempting to launch team-building activities, such as joint problem solving, brainstorming, and visioning, right away. New leaders with a consensus-building style often are eager to tap the insights of their direct reports. But this approach poses a danger: It strengthens bonds in a group, some of whose members may be leaving. So avoid explicit teambuilding activities until the team you want is in place. This does not mean, of course, that you should avoid meeting as a group.

Making implementation-dependent decisions too early.
When successful implementation requires buy-in from your team, you should judiciously defer making decisions until its core members are in place. There will be decisions you cannot afford to delay. But it can be especially difficult to implement decisions that commit new people to courses of action they had no part in defining. So carefully weigh the benefits of moving quickly on major initiatives against the lost opportunity of gaining buy-in from the people you will bring on board later.

Trying to do it all yourself.
Finally, keep in mind that the process of restructuring a team is fraught with emotional, legal, and company policy complications. Do
not
try to undertake this on your own. Find out who can best advise you and help you chart a strategy. The support of a good HR person is indispensable to any effort to restructure a team.

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.

Assessing Your Existing Team

You are likely to inherit some good performers, some average ones, and some who are simply not up to the job. You will also inherit a group with its own internal dynamics and politics— some members may even have hoped for your job. During your first 30 to 60 days, you need to sort out who’s who, what roles each individual plays, and how the group has worked in the past.

Establish Your Criteria

You will inevitably find yourself forming impressions of team members as you meet them. Don’t suppress these early reactions, but step back from them and undertake a more rigorous evaluation.

The starting point is to be self-conscious about the
criteria
you will explicitly or implicitly use to evaluate people who report to you. Consider these six criteria:

Competence.
Does this person have the technical competence and experience to do the job effectively?

Judgment.
Does this person exercise good judgment, especially under pressure or when faced with making sacrifices for the greater good?

Energy.
Does this team member bring the right kind of energy to the job, or is he or she burned out or disengaged?

Focus.
Is this person capable of setting priorities and sticking to them, or prone to “riding off in all directions”?

Relationships.
Does this individual get along with others on the team and support collective decision making, or is he or she difficult to work with?

Trust.
Can you trust this person to keep his or her word and follow through on commitments?

To get a quick read on the criteria you use, fill out
table 7-1
. Allow yourself 100 points to divide among the six criteria according to the
relative weight
you place on them when you evaluate direct reports. Record those numbers in the middle column, making sure that they add up to 100. Now identify one of these criteria as your “threshold issue,”

meaning that if a person does not meet a basic threshold on that dimension, nothing else matters. Label your threshold issue with an asterisk in the right-hand column.

Table 7-1: Assessment of Evaluative Criteria

Evaluative Criteria

Relative Weights (Divide 100 points

Threshold Issue (Designate with

among the six issues)

an asterisk)

Competence

Judgment

Energy

Focus

Relationships

Trust

Now step back. Does this accurately represent the values you apply when you evaluate direct reports? If so, does this analysis suggest any potential blind spots in the way you evaluate people?

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.

Your assessments are likely to reflect certain assumptions about what you can and can’t change in the people who work for you. If you score relationships low and judgment high, for example, you may think that relationships within your team are something you can influence, whereas you cannot influence judgment. Likewise, you may have designated trust as a threshold issue—many leaders do—because you believe that you must be able to trust those who work for you and because you think trustworthiness is a trait that cannot be changed.

Factor in the Situation

To what extent should your evaluative criteria vary depending on the situation you are facing? Potentially a lot.

Suppose, for example, that you are taking a new job as vice president of sales, managing a geographically scattered group of regional sales managers. How would your criteria for evaluating people differ from those you would apply if you had been named to lead a new-product development project?

These jobs differ sharply in the extent to which your direct reports (1) operate independently and (2) are dispersed geographically. If your direct reports operate more or less independently, their capacity to work together will be far less important than if you were managing an interdependent product development team. On the other hand, the fact that your people are geographically dispersed may restrict your ability to develop them. If so, you will want them to have threshold levels of competence and judgment.

The criteria you apply may also depend on whether you are in a start-up, turnaround, realignment, or sustaining-success situation. In a sustaining-success situation, for example, you may have the time to develop one or two high-potential members of your team. In a turnaround, by contrast, you need people who can perform at a high level right away. Likewise, in a start-up you may be willing to trade off some trust for a higher level of energy and focus, whereas this would not be the case in a sustaining success situation.

It is worthwhile to spend some time thinking about the criteria you will use to evaluate your new team. Having done so, you will be better prepared to make a rigorous and systematic evaluation.

Assess Your People

When you begin to assess each team member using the criteria you have developed, the first test is whether any of them fail to meet your threshold requirements. If so, begin planning to replace them. But merely surviving the basic hurdle does not mean they are keepers. Go on to the next step: Evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, factoring in the relative value you assign to each criterion. Now who makes the grade and who does not?