Avoiding the Traps
Don’t try to do too much in a single off-site meeting. You can’t realistically accomplish more than two of the goals outlined earlier in a day or two. Target a few, and stay focused.
Don’t put the cart before the horse. You can’t try to define the vision and create a strategy without first establishing the right foundation: a shared understanding of the business environment (diagnostic focus) and workplace relationships (relationship focus).
Leading Your Team
As you make progress in assessing, evolving, and aligning the team, think, too, about how you want to work with the team on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis. What processes will you use to shape how the team gets its collective job done? Teams vary strikingly in how they handle meetings, make decisions, resolve conflicts, and divide responsibilities and tasks. You will probably want to introduce new ways of doing things, but take care not to plunge into this task precipitously. First, familiarize yourself thoroughly with how your team worked before your arrival and how effective its processes were. In that way, you can preserve what worked well and change what did not.
Assess Your Team’s Existing Processes
How can you quickly get a handle on your team’s existing processes? Talk to team members, peers, and your boss about how the team worked. Read meeting minutes and team reports. Probe for answers to the following questions:
Participants’ roles. Who exerted the most influence on key issues? Did anyone play devil’s advocate? Was there an innovator? Someone who avoided uncertainty? To whom did everyone else listen most attentively? Who was the peacemaker? The rabble-rouser?
Team meetings. How often did your team meet? Who participated? Who set the agendas for meetings?
Decision making. Who made what kinds of decisions? Who was consulted on decisions? Who was told after decisions were made?
Leadership style. What leadership style did your predecessor prefer? That is, how did he prefer to learn, communicate, motivate, and handle decisions? How does your predecessor’s leadership style compare with yours? If your styles differ markedly, how will you address the likely impact of those differences on your team?
Target Team Processes for Change
Once you grasp how your team functioned in the past—and what did and did not work well—use what you learn to establish the new processes you judge necessary. Many leaders decide, for example, that their team’s meeting and decision-making processes would benefit from revision. If this is true of you, begin spelling out in specific terms what changes you envision. How often will the team meet? Who will attend which meetings? How will agendas be established and circulated? Setting up clear and effective processes will help your team coalesce and secure some early wins as a group.
Alter the Participants
One common team dysfunction—and a great opportunity to send a message that change is coming—concerns who participates in core team meetings. In some organizations, key meetings are too inclusive, with too many people participating in discussions and decision making. If this is the case, then reduce the size of the core group and streamline the meetings, sending the message that you value efficiency and focus. In other organizations, key meetings are too exclusive, with people who have potentially important opinions and information being systematically excluded. If this is the case, then judiciously broaden participation, sending the message that you will not play favorites or listen to only a few points of view.
Lead Decision Making
Decision making is another fertile area for potential improvement. Few leaders do a great job of leading team decision making. In part, this is because different types of decisions call for different decision-making processes, but most team leaders stick with one approach. They do this because they have a style with which they are comfortable and because they believe they need to be consistent or risk confusing their direct reports.
Research suggests that this view is wrongheaded.3 The key is to have a framework for understanding and communicating why different decisions will be approached in different ways.
Think of the different ways teams can make decisions. Possible approaches can be arrayed on a spectrum ranging from unilateral decision making at one end to unanimous consent at the other. In unilateral decision making, the leader simply makes the call, either without consultation or with limited consultation with personal advisers. The risks associated with this approach are obvious: you may miss critical information and insights and get only lukewarm support for implementation.
At the other extreme, processes that require unanimous consent from more than a few people tend to suffer from decision diffusion. They go on and on, never reaching closure. Or, if a decision does get made, it is often a lowest-common-denominator compromise. In either case, critical opportunities and threats are not addressed effectively.
Between these two extremes are the decision-making processes that most leaders use: consult-and-decide and build consensus. When a leader solicits information and advice from direct reports—individually, as a group, or both—but reserves the right to make the final call, she is using a consult-and-decide approach. In effect she separates the “information gathering and analysis” process from the “evaluating and reaching closure” process, harnessing the group for one but not the other.
In the build-consensus process, the leader both seeks information and analysis and seeks buy-in from the group for any decision. The goal is not full consensus but sufficient consensus. This means that a critical mass of the group believes the decision to be the right one and, critically, that the rest agree they can live with and support implementation of the decision.
When should you choose one process over the other? The answer is emphatically not “If I am under time pressure, I will use consult-and-decide.” Why? Because even though you may reach a decision more quickly by the consult-and-decide route, you won’t necessarily reach the desired outcome faster. In fact, you may end up consuming a lot of time trying to sell the decision after the fact, or finding out that people are not energetically implementing it and having to pressure them. Those who suffer from the action imperative are most at risk of this; they want to reach closure by making the call but may jeopardize their end goals in the process.
The following rules of thumb can help you figure out which decision-making process to use:
If the decision is likely to be highly divisive—creating winners and losers—then you usually are better off using consult-and-decide and taking the heat. A build-consensus process will fail to reach a good outcome and will get everyone mad at one another in the process. Put another way, decisions about sharing losses or pain among a group of people are best made by the leader.
If the decision requires energetic support for implementation from people whose performance you cannot adequately observe and control, then you usually are better off using a build-consensus process. You may get to a decision more quickly using consult-and-decide, but you may not get the desired outcome.
If your team members are inexperienced, then you usually are better off relying more on consult-and-decide until you’ve taken the measure of the team and developed their capabilities. If you try to adopt a build-consensus approach with an inexperienced team, you risk getting frustrated and imposing a decision anyway, and that undercuts teamwork.
If you’re put in charge of a group with whom you need to establish your authority (such as supervising former peers), then you’re better off relying on consult-and-decide to make some key early decisions. You can relax and rely more on building consensus once people see that you have the steadiness and insight to make tough calls.
Your approach to decision making will also vary depending on which of the STARS situations you’re in. In start-ups and turnarounds, consult-and-decide often works well. The problems tend to be technical (markets, products, technologies) rather than cultural and political. Also, people may be hungry for “strong” leadership, which often is associated with a consult-and-decide
style. To be effective in realignment and sustaining-success situations, in contrast, leaders often need to deal with strong, intact teams and confront cultural and political issues. These sorts of issues are typically best addressed with the build-consensus approach.
To alter your approach to decision making depending on the nature of the decision to be made, you will sometimes have to restrain your natural inclinations. You are likely to have a preference for either consult-and-decide or build-consensus decision making. But preferences are not destiny. If you are a consult-and-decide person, you should consider experimenting with building (sufficient) consensus in suitable situations. If you are a build-consensus person, you should feel free to adopt a consult-and-decide approach when it is appropriate to do so.
To avoid confusion, consider explaining to your direct reports what process you’re using and why. More importantly, strive to run a fair process.4 Even if people do not agree with the final decision, they often will support it if they feel (1) that their views and interests have been heard and taken seriously and (2) that you have given them a plausible rationale for why you made the call you did. The corollary? Don’t engage in a charade of consensus building—an effort to build support for a decision already made. This rarely fools anyone, and it creates cynicism and undercuts implementation. You are better off to simply use consult-and-decide.
Finally, you often can shift between build-consensus and consult-and-decide modes as you gain deeper insight into peoples’ interests and positions. It may make sense, for example, to begin in a consensus-building mode but reserve the right to shift to consult-and-decide if the process is becoming too divisive. It also may make sense to begin with consult-and-decide and shift to build-consensus if it emerges that energetic implementation is critical and consensus is possible.
Adjust for Virtual Teams
Finally, how should you modify your approach to building your team if some or all of the members are working remotely? It’s a big challenge to gain and sustain cohesion in virtual teams. It also makes it more difficult to evaluate team members, especially if the situation precludes early face-to-face meetings. Although most of the principles of effective teamwork apply to virtual teams, there are a few additional things to consider:
Bring the team together early if at all possible. The technology to support virtual interactions is improving. However, if true teamwork is required, there still is no substitute for getting people together to establish a shared foundation of knowledge, relationships, alignment, and mutual commitment.
Establish clear norms about communication. This includes which communication channels will be used and how they will be employed. It also means having explicit agreements concerning responsiveness—for example, that urgent messages will be responded to within a specified time. Often it’s essential as well to have clear norms about how people will interact during virtual meetings—for example, interrupting less than usual when meeting face-to-face, but also being more efficient in putting points across.
Clearly define team support roles. Virtual teams need to be more disciplined about capturing and sharing information as well as following up on commitments. It often helps to assign people specific team support roles (perhaps on a rotating basis), such as note-taker and agenda-creator.
Create a rhythm for team interaction. Co-located teams naturally establish patterns and routines for interaction; these can be as simple as arriving at roughly the same time or talking over coffee. Virtual teams, especially those working in multiple time zones, lack natural opportunities to create these reassuring routines. Therefore, it’s essential to provide a lot of structure for virtual team interaction—for example, setting meeting times and following specified agendas.
Don’t forget to celebrate success. It’s easy for members of a virtual team to feel disconnected, especially if most of the team is co-located and only a few are working remotely. Although it’s always important to pause occasionally to recognize and celebrate accomplishments, it’s essential in virtual teams.
Jump-Starting the Team
Your decisions about the team you inherited probably will be the most important decisions you make. Done well, your effort to assess, evolve, align, and lead the team will pay dividends in the focus and energy people bring to achieving goals and securing early wins. You will know you’ve been successful in building your team when you reach the break-even point—when the energy the team creates is greater than the energy you need to put into it. It will take a while before that happens; you must charge the battery before you can start the engine.
BUILD YOUR TEAM—CHECKLIST
What are your criteria for assessing the performance of members of your team? How are relative weightings affected by functions, the extent of required teamwork, the STARS portfolio, and the criticality of the positions?
How will you go about assessing your team?
What personnel changes do you need to make? Which changes are urgent, and which can wait? How will you create backups and options?
How will you make high-priority changes? What can you do to preserve the dignity of the people affected? What help will you need with the team in the restructuring process, and where are you going to find it?
How will you align the team? What mix of push (goals, incentives) and pull (shared vision) will you use?
How do you want your new team to operate? What roles do you want people to play? Do you need to shrink the core team or expand it? How do you plan to manage decision making?
CHAPTER 8
Create Alliances
Four months into her new job at MedDev, Alexia Belenko already was deeply frustrated by the bureaucratic maneuvering going on at corporate headquarters. “Where’s the support for needed change?” she wondered.
An accomplished sales and marketing professional, Alexia had risen through the country-management ranks of MedDev, a global medical devices company, to become the firm’s managing director (also informally known as “country manager”) in her native Russia.
Senior leaders recognized Alexia’s potential and decided she needed broader regional experience. So they appointed her regional vice president of marketing for EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa). In this new role, Alexia was responsible for marketing strategy for MedDev’s country operations in the region. Alexia reported directly to Marjorie Aaron, the senior vice president of corporate marketing, who was based at the company’s U.S. headquarters, and Alexia had a dotted-line reporting relationship with her former boss, Harald Jaeger, the international vice president for EMEA operations, to whom all the managing directors in the region reported.
Alexia dove in with her usual enthusiasm. She conducted a thorough review of current affairs, including one-on-one conversations with managing directors across the EMEA region and with her former boss. She also traveled to the United States expressly to meet with Marjorie and a couple of Marjorie’s direct reports.
Drawing on those discussions, as well as her own experiences in the field, Alexia concluded that the most pressing problems—and opportunities—lay in better managing the tension between centralizing and decentralizing marketing decisions for new-product launches. Alexia put together a business case, outlining her assessment and recommendations for increasing standardization in some areas (for example, decisions concerning overall brand identity and positioning) and giving the managing directors more flexibility in others (such as making important adjustments to advertising promotion plans).
Marjorie and Harald saw merits in Alexia’s approach, but neither was prepared to commit. Both directed her to brief the key stakeholders: MedDev’s corporate marketing executives in the United States, and the EMEA country managers.
Six weeks and many confounding meetings later, Alexia felt as if she was caught in quicksand. She had scheduled a meeting with important members of the corporate marketing team, including David Wallace, the executive reporting to Marjorie Aaron in charge of global branding. She then flew to the United States to present to
a group of more than thirty people. Virtually every one of them had suggestions, all of which would result in more central control, not less.
She was surprised, too, when a conference call with the EMEA country managers—her old colleagues who reported to Harald Jaeger—didn’t go much better. They were more than happy to accept any ideas Alexia had that would give them additional flexibility. But when there was any mention of more limits to their autonomy, members of the group rapidly closed ranks. One respected managing director, Rolf Eiklid, expressed concern that the flexibility they were being offered wouldn’t be enough to compensate for what they would be giving up and that corporate wouldn’t really honor agreements. “We’ve been promised more flexibility in the past, and it hasn’t materialized,” he said.
The usually sure-footed Alexia was thrown off her stride by this turn of events. She was left wondering whether she had the patience and finesse to navigate the politics of her new regional role.
To succeed in your new role, you will need the support of people over whom you have no direct authority. You may have little or no relationship capital at the outset, especially if you’re onboarding into a new organization. So you will need to invest energy in building new networks. Start early. Discipline yourself to invest in building up “relationship bank accounts” with people you anticipate needing to work with later. Think hard about whether there are people you haven’t met who are likely to be critical to your success.
Recognize, too, when a new role presents you with very different influence challenges from those you’ve experienced in the past. Alexia was used to operating with a lot of positional authority and a team that reported directly to her. She didn’t recognize early enough that she needed to influence in very different ways—through persuasion and alliance building—than she had in the past.
The First 90 Days, Updated and Expanded_Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter Page 16