As leaders, we must communicate our expectations in clear, understandable terms, whether we are managing a wholly new team, an inherited staff, or a work group composed of colleagues drafted from other business units around the organization. Selecting and applying competent individuals with the necessary skill sets to tackle the right job is the most basic requirement to keep things going right. Molding individuals into an invested, collaborative team that we can trust to proactively evaluate threats and work together to correct the damage when it matures into a problem is a great deal more difficult. So, how do we look beyond work histories, titles, and job descriptions when we select our team members and search for character traits that are not often evident on a resume?
JP Morgan Chase alumna and veteran talent development expert Nancy Gill views the process of building a collaborative team as a two-sided coin, and the responsibility for both sides is entirely on us. Our first task is to assess how prospective teammates will work cooperatively with their colleagues under pressure, and cope with the stress that will inevitably be generated when things do not go as planned. Clearly, there is no way to be completely assured that a candidate will contribute positively, collaboratively, and confidently when problems arise simply by looking at a resume.
Recognizing that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, Gill recommends paying careful attention to a prospective teammate’s responses to strategic screening questions that probe for desired “behavioral competencies”:
• “Give me an example of a situation where you understood ahead of others what was called for.”
• “Tell me about a time when you had to make a quick decision in a difficult situation and your judgment turned out to be right.”
• “Give me an example of where your self-confidence permitted you to take an action you would have otherwise avoided.”
• “Tell me about a time when you brought up or said something that others were avoiding.”
Answers to these open-ended questions, and others you may add that are specific to your industry or project, can reveal a great deal not only about how the candidate team members have approached problems, but also some key behavioral indicators. Aside from demonstrating good problem-solving skills:
• Do the answers indicate a tendency toward collaboration and a shared responsibility for the outcome, or a fondness for recognition, credit, and self-promotion?
• Do the responses show initiative and leadership, or instead assign blame or focus on the shortcomings of others?
• Are the answers delivered with confidence and candor, or is the prospect nervous and uncomfortable sharing information?
Look for responses that indicate a behavioral competency for a calmness under pressure and an ability to think quickly. But also take note of how the candidate team members tell their story, and whether they portray themselves as a single character, or one in an all-star cast of problem solvers.
After interviews have narrowed the field to those being seriously considered, Nancy Gill is also a strong advocate for the use of assessment tools, which are available through many talent development and coaching companies. These tools objectively gauge responses to carefully crafted questions designed to tease out attitudes, inclinations, and tendencies as indicators of likely behaviors in the workplace. Gill made certain to have a test like this administered to me when she was the senior vice president of human resources for the National Football League. The more essential the position and the more likelihood that the individual being evaluated will be responsible for leading the response to a crisis, the more essential an assessment tool may be to a successful response and recovery when things do go wrong.
For all companies, especially those that have neither the time nor the resources to avail themselves of a third-party assessment tool, Gill recommends benefiting from the richness of intelligence that can be amassed through a hiring panel, a series of interviews hosted by other teammates and project stakeholders, rather than only by a single individual. “A greater diversity of subjects, perspectives, and questions from different points of view make it harder for the candidate to prepare for the different areas that they will be probed on. It is also more interesting and engaging for the candidates,” she adds. The more engaged the candidate feels, the more information and intelligence will naturally emerge from the interview.
In some cases, we will not be hiring an entirely new set of teammates to undertake a project. We may, instead, be drafting colleagues from other areas of the company who possess experience and expertise that will contribute to the success of our project. Often, we may have no voice in the matter and will not be drafting them at all. Rather, we may be working on a project with colleagues who are assigned to the effort by their respective leaders, and hopefully have the expertise that is required. In this frequently encountered circumstance, there is no way to ensure our colleagues possess the behavioral competencies that will embrace the cohesive, team-oriented environment so critical to the outcome whether things go right, or horribly wrong.
“In my humble opinion,” says Nancy, “the single most important contributing factor to a team’s ability to succeed in the face of a big problem is the leadership that built the team and the collaborative culture they inspire.” That’s the other side of the coin, whether we are leading a team of colleagues, an entirely new one, or a hybrid of the two. Expectation, collaboration, and trust have to go both ways, not just from the bottom up, but also from the top down. The culture we as leaders establish and maintain is as important to our success when responding to challenges as the expertise and attitudes of the team with whom we have surrounded ourselves.
LEADING AND LETTING YOUR TEAM DO THEIR JOBS
Leading is indeed a big job, but it is not the same as doing everyone else’s job. Leaders set the vision, expectations, and culture for a business or project. They guide, motivate, and coach their teams, hopefully to a successful outcome. Leaders, when all appears to be going well, let their teammates do the jobs they were hired to do to contribute to that success. Leaders share credit when things go right and take responsibility when they don’t. When things go wrong, leaders manage the response and provide decisive and timely direction, while also inspiring confidence from and in their team.
Between the light of success and the darkness of failure is the looming specter of the threat not yet realized. These are the situations that can put our leadership skills to the ultimate test.
On one hand, we recognize that there is nothing as dispiriting as second-guessing our team and jumping in to “rescue” what they were already in the process of solving. On the other, we would be derelict if we allowed them to fail because we didn’t act or help. Where’s the balance when something starts going wrong? When do we step in? That’s the million-dollar question. It depends on your nerves, your degree of trust and confidence in your team, and the scope and scale of the problem. We trust our team to do the job when things are running perfectly. In many cases, they are still the right people to trust when things start going wrong. (Admittedly, I’m still a work in progress.)
It’s our job as leaders to ensure that the people best suited to manage a particular problem are aware of our concerns when we perceive an emerging threat. Many times, the “best-suited people” may, in fact, be us. More often, our teammates are the right people because of their skill set, their proximity to the problem, or because we have other pressing concurrent priorities. Let them know that you know there’s a problem. Ask them if they are prepared to handle it, and how you can be helpful. Make them responsible to let you know if they need you to step in. Then, let them solve the problem and keep you informed of their progress. When they are forced to manage us, they are diverting some of their focus and attention away from whatever went wrong and often at the worst possible time.
Here’s an example. Removing the Super Bowl halftime show from the field was one of the most stress-filled moments of the day. We only had eight minutes to get hundreds of peopl
e and tons of staging off the field. Every year, the halftime team executed this flawlessly. One year, though, it seemed like that was never going to happen. As the clock ticked down, big pieces of the stage got snagged in the access ramps, blocking anything else from leaving. Our stage manager and his team worked through the solutions and were able to remove the very last bit of the show just as the clock hit zero and the broadcast resumed. If, however, I had diverted their attention from finding ways to accelerate the stage removal to fielding less-informed (and less-valuable) suggestions from me, I would only have wasted more of their time. I won’t tell you it was easy. I desperately wanted to contribute to the solution, but this problem needed their expertise far more than they needed my input. I let them know that I trusted them to do what they needed do and they delivered. Could I have similarly trusted a team that was composed of contractors and vendors? Absolutely. None of the halftime crew worked for the NFL.
When problems strike that rely more on your team’s prowess than your own, let your teammates know what the non-negotiables are (in this case, being late was not acceptable) and let them work out the problem, especially when time is of the essence. If you select your people and partners well, clearly communicate your expectations, and give them the responsibility—and the authority—to get their job done, your crisis will never be one of confidence.
STEP THREE
EXECUTE
12
MANAGING THE INVERTED PYRAMID
A starched white shirt with an anachronistic paper collar, a pair of crisply pressed navy-blue pants with a pencil-thin line of piping, a tight-fitting double-breasted jacket trimmed above the hips, and a pair of thick white cotton gloves. That was our uniform at Radio City Music Hall.
At that time, Radio City Music Hall was the largest theater in the world, just shy of 6,000 seats. It was as much an architectural wonder during the 1970s and ’80s as it was when it opened its polished brass doors in 1932. We ushers had a language all our own, which included hand signals that were visible over long distances, despite the theatrical darkness thanks to our white gloves. With a series of hand gestures, an usher standing in Aisle A on the 50th Street side of the building could communicate with the usher captain, standing way over in Aisle H (a city block away), that there were 150 available seats in Aisle C.
Saturdays and Sundays were the theater’s busiest days by far, and no one ever had those days off. It was mandatory for Radio City Music Hall ushers to go to “Sunday School” about a half-hour before the theater opened for the matinee. The entire crew gathered in a large circle around Bill Davis, the senior theater manager, dwarfed in the magnificence of the 60-foot high Grand Foyer. Mr. Davis imperiously reviewed the schedule for the day, delivered news about upcoming shows, rattled off important announcements on a variety of subjects, and drilled us mercilessly about everything he just said, or had said at previous “Sunday School” sessions. If we were asked a question and didn’t know the answer, there was a reasonably good chance we would be verbally humiliated, and an outstanding possibility of being sent home without pay. The “service staff,” doormen who were a minimum of six feet tall, and the more altitudinally challenged ushers, hailed from a diversity of backgrounds, neighborhoods, and cultures. Notwithstanding what made us different, we had two things in common. We were incredibly proud to be working at “the showplace of the nation” (and we hated the guy).
Occasionally, Mr. Davis sermonized about the significance of working in such a remarkable place. Radio City Music Hall meant something to people, he said, and we meant something to the delivery of an experience in front of the curtain that complemented the quality of the experience presented from the stage. If we had thought about it, we would have recognized that Mr. Davis’s weekly “Sunday School” sermon, his deadly question-and-answer session, and his incessant, uncompromising insistence on excellence in every detail communicated that we were part of the guest experience, part of the show, and as such, essential to the business. If only he had outright said that.
When the patrons arrived, the first representative they met was not a highly-paid C-level executive from the suite of offices hidden above the arched ceiling of the auditorium. It was the doorman managing the queue. The patrons purchased their tickets not on the stage from the producer of the show, but at one of the tiny box office windows from another barely compensated employee. They presented their tickets at the door not to the lead singer, but to an usher. And, none of the people they would interact with between the lobby and their seats were members of the Rockettes. The people were ushers and concessions workers. The fact is, in most businesses in today’s experience economy, the people you count on the most to deliver your company’s brand message are often the least paid and/or least appreciated—the customer service representatives, online chat agents, salespeople, clerks, cashiers, security guards, and, yes, even ushers. They may actually be the ONLY people your customers will ever meet in person, online, or over the phone.
Frequently, the only training customer-facing staff members receive is procedural in nature. They are instructed how to clock-in and clock-out when they report to work, log into their computer, operate the cash register, write up an order, fill out an expense report, allow only properly credentialed people past a certain point, or direct a ticket holder to the correct seat. Ensuring that the staff can do their core jobs accurately is essential to a high-functioning organization, but it is only half the job. We have all encountered people working for a wide range of companies and government agencies who may be efficiently and precisely accurate but deliver a memorably miserable experience.
Enlightened leaders understand the importance of developing an environment where every representative of the brand—whether they are the lowest paid or are more competitively paid employees, contracted staff, or vendors—care as much about each other and the customer as do their better compensated, behind-the-scenes colleagues. It is paramount to engage the customer-facing staff to represent themselves as an essential delivery system for your brand’s experience. We have to transform them from a roster of employees into a team, and from a collection of colleagues into teammates. Our teammates must fully grasp the importance of their role, and how dependent the company, brand, and/or project are on them. To realize this, it is incumbent upon managers and leaders to reinforce that message directly with words, actions, and behaviors.
TURNING THE PYRAMID UPSIDE DOWN
The ancient Egyptians built the earliest pyramids more than 4,600 years ago, and they remained stable and durable by planting the biggest flat surface firmly on the ground. Although the ancients have long departed, the pyramids stand in silent testimony to the Egyptians’ ingenious feats of engineering and construction. No one has had to make any sort of adjustments to keep the pyramids right where they are, in the very same location and oriented in the very same position.
Most organization charts organize and manage workforces in the shape of a pyramid. The large base at the bottom is typically composed of positions considered the least essential, empowered, and compensated. These individuals are directed by a series of managers in levels of diminishing size and increasing responsibility as one ascends through the structure, finally reaching the senior leadership—the smallest number of individuals in the positions of ultimate authority—at the very apex of the pyramid.
I believe organizational pyramids should be precariously poised on the tip of an inverted pyramid. (See Figure 12.1.) Because so much is riding on direct or indirect human interactions with the customer, I put the most populous group at the top to symbolize their importance, rather than at the bottom. I call this front-line staff the service team because that’s what they are there to provide—outstanding service—whether in the form of a simple greeting; assistance; conflict resolution; a sale; or a safe, clean, and smoothly operating environment. If any of these touchpoints go wrong, more problems can follow.
FIGURE 12.1. The Inverted Pyramid
The next most important group is the p
roduct team. This is the group critical to delivering on the customer’s expectations of the brand. Sometimes they are very visible and synonymous with the product or service itself (singers, dancers, athletes, designers, physicians, and nurses) and sometimes they are entirely unseen but nonetheless essential to the delivery of a flawless experience (mechanics and engineers, chemists and researchers, assembly line workers, stage hands, project planners, programmers, and technicians). Membership in the service and product teams is not mutually exclusive. It is possible to be simultaneously part of both. We depend upon physicians and nurses for their professional skills, but no matter how stellar they are at delivering medical care, the experience is better when they have good bedside manner. We may have been greeted at the departure gate by the most ebullient attendant and thanked at the end of the flight by the most gracious and skilled pilots, but if the baggage handlers don’t care about where your luggage goes or how it looks when it gets there, the customer’s overall experience and relationship with the brand can be significantly endangered.
The next team in descending order of size is the management team, a group that is almost always invisible to the customer, but upon whom members of the product and service teams rely for guidance and support. This is the level of teammates that may not directly deliver the customer experience, but can significantly impact the effectiveness, efficiency, and attitudes of those who do. It is populated by managers and supervisors across the entire business, and teams of professionals representing marketing, financial services, human resources, and other essential functions, They, too, have a part to play in ensuring that things don’t go wrong within their area of responsibility, from overseeing informed budget planning and accurate forecasting to compliance with government regulations and the development of effective promotional campaigns.
What to Do When Things Go Wrong Page 13
