Post-assessment- Time to Reshape the Team

After completing your assessment of your new team it’s time to reshape the team within the constraints of the organization’s culture, leadership mandate and the available talent. Ultimately as the new leader you will want your people to exhibit high-performance behaviors such as sharing. Information freely, identifying and dealing with conflict swiftly, solving problems creatively, supporting one another, and presenting a unified face to the outside world once decisions are made.  Leaders can promote these behaviors by focusing on four factors:  the team’s composition, it's alignment to a shared vision, its operating model, and it's integration of new rules and expectations.

Composition

Let’s get the right people in place as a first step.  The obvious method may be to terminate under-performers and those who capabilities are not a great fit for the new team.  Sometimes this option is not open for cultural or political reasons so new leaders need to work with the team they inherit.  However, termination is still an option. For employees in critical roles who cannot do the work or who are so toxic that they undermine the course set by the new person in charge.

Fortunately, you can reshape the composition of your team using other methods.

For instance, you may elect to wait for normal turnover to create a space for the type of person you want.  That usually takes time but you can speed this process up by signaling your expectations for higher performance – thus encouraging marginal employees to seek other options. 

Another option is to groom high potentials to take on new responsibilities, provided you have enough resources and time.  If not, you may instead choose to alter individuals’ roles to better match their capabilities.  This powerful, often under appreciated way of reshaping a team may involve adjusting the scope of existing roles, having people swap roles, or create new positions by carving the work up differently.  Any of these tactics can revitalize people who have become stale in their jobs, but few leaders think of trying alternative ways of allocating work.

Alignment

You will need to ensure that everyone has a clear sense of purpose and direction.  Sometimes a team’s direction needs to be changed.  In other cases, it’s pretty much right, but people are not pulling together.

To ensure alignment, the team needs to agree on answers to four basic questions:

What will we accomplish?   You spell this out with your mission, goals and key metrics.

Why should we do it?  Here’s where your vision and incentives come into play.

How will we do it?  This includes defining the team’s strategy in relation to the organization’s, as well as sorting out the plans and activities needed for execution.

Who will do what?  People’s roles and responsibilities need to support all of the above.

Most do well with alignment but the one element that trips up new leader most frequently is the “why.’  If the team lacks a clear and concise vision and proper incentives, they may not move energetically in the right direction.  Compensation. and benefits may not on their own be adequate motivators.  You may have to offer a full set of rewards, including interesting work, status, and advancement paths. 

Operating Model

Reshaping a team also involves rethinking how and when people come together to do the work.   This may include increasing or, decreasing the number of “core” members, creating sub teams, adjusting the types ad frequency of meetings, running meetings differently, and designing new protocols for follow-up.

These changes can be powerful levers for improving the team’s performance.  Unfortunately, too many new leaders continue to operate in the status quo or make minor adjustments only that have limited impact on the team’s output.

To think more creatively about your team’s operating model, identify your real constraints on how the work gets done – such as established business planning and budgeting processes for the entire enterprise – and then ask yourself how your team could work within them more productively and efficiently. 

When rethinking meeting frequency and agendas it’s important to understand the three types of meetings that leadership usually conduct – strategic, operating, and learning.  It's important that the right amount of times are allocated to each type.

Strategic meetings deal with the biggest issues, like business model, strategy, vision, and organization configurations, and so no.  Though they tend to be in-frequent they do require time for in depth preparation and discussion.  Operational meetings involve reviewing forecasts and KPI’s of short-term results, and adjusting activities and plans in light of those results.  These are usually shorter and more frequent than strategic meetings.  Learning meetings are scheduled on an as-needed basis, often in response to crises, emerging issues, or product releases.  They can also focus on team building.

When leaders try to jam all these activities into one recurring meeting, operational urgencies tend to crowd out strategic and learning content.  By thinking through the right mix of meeting types and scheduling each kind on its own regular cycle, you can prevent the problem.

Integration

The final element in reshaping is integration.  This involves setting ground rules and processes to feed and sustain desired behaviors and serving as role model for your team members.  This is the opportunity to lay out the process to reshape group dynamics. 

First, everyone would agree on certain behavioral principals: They would share information, treat one another with respect, and act as “one team” after decisions were made.  Then they would approach decision making with greater transparency.

Once you have laid out the reality it’s critical that you start living these principals and processes. It’s time to reinforce behaviors so when you see any unproductive behaviors you must intervene immediately – either in a team meeting setting or privately as needed.

Accelerate
Building on the assessment and reshaping work it’s important that you build on early successes. Recognizing these early wins will energize the team and reinforce the importance of the new  rules and processes.  Once the team has successes in place you keep building on them creating a cycle of confidence and achievement.