JANUARY
2001
How
Good Is the Team You Have in Place?
CHANCES
ARE you’ve built or inherited a team that most
days seems to work pretty well. Perhaps you yourself are a
part of a higher team. Perhaps your team members have their
own teams in place. Looked at from this perspective, the entire
organization is a collection of overlapping teams –
from the board of directors to the smallest sales office and
production unit.
The organization
thus functions like a complex molecule, with the various teams
as its atoms and each leader as a nucleus. And as long as
any given team does not show obvious signs of radioactive
decay, the comfortable assumption is that it’s stable
and performing as intended.
Naturally,
team members have their foibles. Tom, for example, tends to
become passive-aggressive when assigned tasks he doesn’t
enjoy. Amanda is too inclined to criticize other members of
the team. And Ed shoots first, asking questions later. How
many – if any – of such foibles should be accepted
as normal human behavior? And how are they affecting overall
team performance? Could the team be doing better than it does?
The
Overlooked Importance of Teams
From
its over 41 years of search and selection experience, Sanford
Rose Associates has learned that few organizations have clearly
articulated performance standards for small groups of people
– whether a headquarters staff, CRM unit, raw materials
purchasing section, production planning department or accounts
payable section.
Where
incentive plans exist, they tend to be based on a combination
of individual performance goals and large-group financial
yardsticks (such as the sales or earnings performance of an
entire division, or perhaps the total company).
In between,
however, is the collective performance of those smaller groups
of people who work together toward a common objective –
managing a plant, bringing a new product from laboratory to
market, creating advertising and direct-marketing programs,
etc. Yet how often are such team leaders disciplined or penalized
for having an incompetent as one of their direct reports?
Instead, members of the team instinctively learn how to work
around the individual, who continues onward, blissfully unaware
of his or her incompetence.
If not
held to strict standards of accountability, teams are likely
to gravitate toward their lowest common denominator, becoming
less and less effective over time.
Assessing
Current Team Performance
If in
doubt about the effectiveness of your immediate team (along
with any others for which you have responsibility), here is
a helpful series of questions to ask:
1. Does
the team have well-defined, measurable goals that are understood
by all members? If not, now would be an ideal time to establish
them for 2001. Involve the team in the goal-setting exercise,
not only in order to create individual ownership but also
to surface ideas and issues that you may have overlooked.
2. Do
individual job descriptions and performance goals mesh with
those of the team? People’s real-life responsibilities
often evolve over time, but their job descriptions may not.
Don’t evaluate Priscilla’s ability to do X if
you are actually expecting her to do Y.
3. What
are the strengths and weaknesses of each team member? In many
cases, a weakness may be in reality a “need for improvement”
that timely counseling can address. Ed’s tendency to
act on the basis of insufficient information should be a correctable
trait, as should Amanda’s criticism of others. Tom’s
passive-aggressive behavior, on the other hand, may be a personality
problem that is too deeply ingrained to be solved by a performance
review. At the same time, though, be sure to examine the positive
contributions that each member makes to the team. One aggravating
eccentricity may be offset by a valuable – and not easily
replaceable – skill.
4. Ask
the $64,000 question: “If I were starting over today,
would I hire the same group of people?” If, for instance,
you have six direct reports and would only hire four of them
today, start thinking about what steps to take with the other
two.
Fine-Tuning
the Team
The larger
an organization is, the greater are the ways to deal with
an under-performer. He or she might be reassigned to a comparable
position that would be a better “fit,” demoted
to a lesser position, counseled about what the future does
or doesn’t hold, encouraged to find other employment,
offered early retirement or outright fired (the last, of course,
with adequate documentation of past performance deficiencies
and opportunities extended to improve). Human resources professionals
are an important source of guidance.
In smaller
organizations, the opportunities may be more limited –
with the basic choice limited to keeping or terminating the
individual. Leaders of smaller organizations tend to be more
entrepreneurial and “hands on,” and it is often
difficult for them to fire people. There is little or no redundancy
in personnel that might soften the loss, there is no corporate
bureaucracy to involve in the decision and, in all probability,
the leader will need to devote personal time to the search
for a replacement while juggling other duties.
Executive
search consultants, through their knowledge of the personnel
market, often can play a helpful role in evaluating the pros
and cons of making a major management change. Following a
careful (and independent) assessment of the individual in
question, his or her competitors in the marketplace and the
compensation package that the position is able to pay, the
search consultant might recommend to leave well enough alone.
On the other hand, the consultant might advise that there
are anywhere from a few to a significant number of candidates
who are better qualified to perform the job and would find
both your company and the compensation attractive.
In addition
to providing a third-party point of view, along with expert
knowledge of the available talent pool, the professional search
consultant can help the team leader plan for an orderly transition
process – if such is required – and can help formulate
the kind of position description that will locate truly qualified
replacements. Sanford Rose Associates, for example, uses a
process called Dimensional SearchÒ to match candidates
to position openings from three separate points of view.
Succession
Planning and Upward Mobility
Successful
team building, of course, not only strengthens present performance
– but also pays important dividends down the road. By
taking prompt steps to make sure the strongest possible team
is in place, today’s leaders help ensure that their
organizations have the wealth of human capital required to
lead them in the future.
Who will
succeed you? Who will succeed other leaders in the company?
Ideally, some or all of the contenders will come from your
own direct reports – or perhaps, in large organizations,
from similarly placed individuals on other teams. By the time
Jack Welch finalized his plans to retire from General Electric,
there were at least three highly qualified internal candidates
to succeed him. (Within two weeks of when the winner was recently
announced, the runners-up accepted CEO positions at other
major companies. While their departures were anticipated,
the speed with which they happened dazzled most observers.)
Weak
teams generally only get weaker, while strong teams build
the foundation for even more success in the future. Wait no
longer to ensure that your team has the players it needs to
be on the winning side.
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