The First 90 Days (48 page)

Restructuring Your Team

By now, your evaluation of individual team members’ capabilities should have equipped you to figure out how best to deal with each person. Using the insights you have gained, assign each team member to one of the following categories:

Keep in place.
The person is performing well in his or her current job.

Keep and develop.
The individual needs development, when time allows.

Move to another position.
The person is a strong performer but is not in a position that makes the most of his or her skills or personal qualities.

Observe for a while.
The individual requires watching and needs a personal development plan.

Replace (low priority).
The person should be replaced, but the situation is not urgent.

Replace (high priority).
The person should be replaced as soon as possible.

Consider Alternatives to Outright Termination

You may be tempted to begin right away letting go the people you have decided to replace. But take a moment first to consider alternatives. Letting an employee go can be difficult and time-consuming. Even if poor performance is well documented, the termination process can take months or longer. If there is no paper trail regarding poor performance, it will take time to document.

Fortunately, you do have some alternatives. Often, a poor performer will decide to move on of his or her own accord in response to a clear message from you. Alternatively, you can work with human resources to shift the person to a more suitable position:

Move them laterally.
Shift the person to a position on the team that better suits his or her skills. This is unlikely to be a permanent solution for a problem performer, but it can help you work through the shortterm problem of keeping the organization running while you look for the right person to fill the slot.

Move the person elsewhere in the organization.
Work with human resources to help the person find a suitable position in the larger organization. Sometimes, if handled well, this move can benefit you, the individual, and the organization overall. But don’t pursue this solution unless you are genuinely convinced the person can perform well in the new situation. Simply shifting a problem performer onto someone else’s shoulders will damage your reputation.

Develop Backups

To keep your team functioning while you build the best possible long-term configuration, you may need to keep an under-performer on the job while searching for a replacement. As soon as you are reasonably sure that someone is not going to make it, begin looking discreetly for a successor. Evaluate other people on your team and elsewhere in the organization for the potential to move up. Use skip-level meetings and regular reporting sessions to evaluate the talent pool. Ask human resources to launch a search.

Treat People Respectfully

During every phase of the team-restructuring process, take pains to treat
everyone
with respect. Even if people in your unit agree that a particular person should be replaced, your reputation will suffer if they view your actions as unfair. Do what you can to show people the care with which you are assessing team members’ capabilities and the fit between jobs and individuals. Your direct reports will form lasting impressions of you based on how you manage this part of your job.

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Aligning Goals, Incentives, and Measures

Having the right people on the team is essential, but it’s not enough. To achieve your A-item priorities and secure early wins, you will need to define how each team member can best support those key goals. This process calls for breaking down large goals into their component pieces and working with your team to assign responsibility for each element to a particular team member. Then it calls for making each individual accountable for managing his or her goals. How do you encourage accountability? The short answer is: through effective incentives and clear criteria for measuring performance.

Designing Incentive Systems

A blend of push and pull tools works best to motivate a team and shape behavior (see figure 7-2
).
Push tools,
such as compensation plans, performance measurement systems, annual budgets, and the like, motivate people through authority, loyalty, fear, and expectation of reward for productive work.
Pull tools,
such as a compelling vision, inspire people by invoking a positive and exciting image of the future.

Figure 7-2:
Using Push and Pull Tools to Motivate People

The particular mix of tools you use will depend on your assessment of how people on your team prefer to be motivated. Your high-energy go-getters will probably respond most enthusiastically to pull incentives. With more methodical and risk-averse folks, push tools may prove more effective.

How do you go about combining these two types of incentives? You have several options. A baseline question to ask yourself is how you will want to reward team members for achieving goals. What mix of
monetary
and
nonmonetary
rewards will you employ?

It is equally important to decide whether to base rewards on
individual
or
collective
performance. Do you need a high-performing
team,
or is a high-performing
group
enough? The distinction is an important one. If your direct reports work essentially independently, and the group’s success hinges chiefly on individual achievement, you don’t need to promote teamwork and should consider an individual incentive system. If success depends largely on cooperation among your direct reports and integration of their expertise, true teamwork is essential and you should use group goals and incentives to gain alignment.

Usually, you will want to create incentives for both individual excellence (when your direct reports undertake independent tasks) and for team excellence (when they undertake interdependent tasks). The correct mix of individual and group rewards depends on the relative importance of independent and interdependent activity for the overall success of your unit. (See “
The Incentive Equation
.”) Designing incentive systems is a challenge, but the dangers of incentive misalignment are great. You need your direct reports to act as agents for you, whether they are undertaking individual responsibilities or collective ones. You don’t want to give them incentives to pursue individual goals when true teamwork is necessary, or vice versa.