90 Days - Part 7: Building Team

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Summary

Team building and marshaling talent needed is required to achieve superior results. The most important decisions made in the first 90 days revolve around the team building. High performance teams have the potential to exert leverage in creating the value associated with your units strategy. Beyond the right people, goals, incentives, performance measures and processes which promote teamwork are all key to achieving goals.

Team Building & Common Traps

Common traps to avoid:

  • Keeping the existing team too long - first 90 decisions on stay/go/move/re-align (based on STaRS model)
  • Speed Balance - not tearing entire model down mid-flight, but developing options to allow business to continue while repairing mid-flight.
  • Not working Org and team restructures in parallel - strategy, structure and systems need to be worked with team skills, and alignment in parallel.
  • Not Holding on to Good people - beware shaking good out with the bad
  • Undertaking team building before core team is in place (save exercises until after team is in place)
  • Making Implementation-Dependent Decisions too early
  • Trying to do it all yourself

Team Assessment

Six criteria used in early evaluations:

  • Competence
  • Judgement
  • Energy
  • Focus
  • relationships
  • Trust

(Offline worksheets in conjunction with any 9-box work)

Individual

Factor the situation (STaRS) when developing criteria for evaluation. Steps standardized:

  1. Prepare for each meeting: available personnel history, performance data, appraisals
  2. Standardized Questions:
    1. What do you think of our existing strategy?
    2. What are the biggest challenges and opportunities facing us in the short term? Long term?
    3. What resources could we leverage more effectively?
    4. How could we improve the way the team works together?
    5. If you were in my position, what would you most want to pay attention to?
  3. Verbal and noverbal clues
  4. What does not get said?
  5. Consistency with words and body language
  6. What topics elicit strong emotional responses?
  7. How team members relate to other members?

Team As a Whole

Techniques for spotting problems in the team's overall dynamics:

  • Study the data (team meetings, reports, climate morale surveys)
  • Systematic questions (compiling individual, overly consistent, or opposite?, party-line vs. coherence)
  • Probe group dynamics: Alliances, attitudes, leadership roles - early signs / insights to detect both coalitions and conflicts.

Restructuring Team

Options:

  • Keep in Place
  • Keep and Develop
  • Move to another position
  • Observe
  • Replace (low)
  • Replace (high)

- or if in the restructure, it is possible the position does not exist, (STaRS- start-up)

High priority to develop backups, succession planning as part of 9-box exercises.

Achieving Goals, Incentives & Measures

Establishing clear and explicit performance metrics is required for both accountability and reward systems. This section will be built out offline, leveraging a balanced scorecard methodology, examining how well we:

  • Deliver Enterprise Value (National Perspective)
  • Optimize Execution (Operating Perspective)
  • Building the Foundation (Internal perspective)

Our Balanced scorecard will be linked to the strategic agenda (Financial performance, customer satisfaction, business excellence, talent readiness, agent satisfaction)

Establishing New Team Processes

Part of initial 90-day plan is to get a clear handle on the team's existing processes:

  • Documentation: Degree to which processes are documented (level 0/1/2/3 decomposition vs. ad-hoc).
  • Process Accountability: RACI, again documented?

Probe for answers in the areas of:

  • Participants' roles
  • Team meetings
  • Decision making
  • Leadership style

- This section continues offline

Managing Decision

Decision making is an area to focus as part of team building. Spectrum for decision making:

  • Unilateral
  • Consult and Decide
  • Build Consensus
  • Unanimous

Beware the trade-offs, benefits, risks based on STaRS model - how rapidly decisions need to be made (ie it is not necessarily good to "consult and decide" if a rapid decision is required if you do not end up with the support behind the decision made. General rules of thumb:

  • If decision is likely to be highly divisive: Consult and decide
  • If decision requires energetic support: Build consensus
  • If team is relatively inexperienced: Consult and decide


Roles, Jobs & Positions

(this section to be built offline)

Governance

(this section to be built offline)

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