– What resources could we leverage more effectively?
– How could we improve the way the team works together?
– If you were in my position, what would your priorities be?
Look for verbal and nonverbal clues. Note choices of words, body language, and hot buttons.
– Notice what the individual does not say. Does the person volunteer information, or do you have to extract it? Does the person take responsibility for problems in her area? Make excuses? Subtly point fingers at others?
– How consistent are the individual’s facial expressions and body language with his words?
– What topics elicit strong emotional responses? These hot buttons provide clues to what motivates the individual and what kinds of changes she would be energized by.
– Outside these one-on-one meetings, notice how the individual relates to other team members. Do relations appear cordial and productive? Tense and competitive? Judgmental or reserved?
Test Their Judgment
Make sure you are assessing judgment and not only technical competence or basic intelligence. Some very bright people have lousy business judgment, and some people of average competence have extraordinary judgment. It is essential to be clear about the mix of knowledge and judgment you need from key people.
One way to assess judgment is to work with a person for an extended time and observe whether he is able to (1) make sound predictions and (2) develop good strategies for avoiding problems. Both abilities draw on an individual’s mental models, or ways of identifying the essential features and dynamics of emerging situations and translating those insights into effective action. This is what expert judgment is all about. The problem, of course, is that you don’t have much time, and it can take a while to find out whether someone did or did not make good predictions. Fortunately, there are ways you can accelerate this process.
One way is to test people’s judgment in a domain in which feedback on their predictions will emerge quickly. Experiment with the following approach. Ask individuals about a topic they’re passionate about outside work. It could be politics or cooking or baseball; it doesn’t matter. Challenge them to make predictions: “Who do you think is going to do better in the debate?” “What does it take to bake a perfect soufflé?” “Which team will win the game tonight?” Press them to commit themselves; unwillingness to go out on a limb is a warning sign in itself. Then probe why they think their predictions are correct. Does the rationale make sense? If possible, follow up to see what happens.
What you’re testing is a person’s capacity to exercise expert judgment in a particular domain. Someone who has become an expert in a private domain is likely to have done so in her chosen field of business, too, given enough passion about it. However you do it, the key is to find ways, beyond just waiting to see how people perform on the job, to probe for the hallmarks of expertise.
Assess the Team as a Whole
In addition to evaluating individual team members, assess how the entire group works. Use these techniques for spotting problems in the team’s overall dynamics:
Study the data. Read reports and minutes of team meetings. If your organization conducts climate or morale surveys of individual units, examine these as well.
Systematically ask questions. Assess the individual responses to the common set of questions you asked when you met with individual team members. Are their answers overly consistent? If so, this may suggest an agreed-on party line, but it could also mean that everyone genuinely shares the same impressions of what’s going on. It will be up to you to evaluate what you observe. Do the responses show little consistency? If so, the team may lack coherence.
Probe group dynamics. Observe how the team interacts in your early meetings. Do you detect any alliances? Particular attitudes? Leadership roles? Who defers to whom on a given topic? When one person is speaking, do others roll their eyes or otherwise express disagreement or frustration? Pay attention to these signs to test your early insights and detect coalitions and conflicts.
Evolving Your Team
Once you’ve evaluated individual team members’ capabilities, factoring in functional expertise, teamwork requirements, the STARS portfolio, and the criticality of positions, the next step is to figure out how best to deal with each person. By the end of roughly the first 30 days, you should be able to provisionally assign people to one of the following categories:
Keep in place. The person is performing well in her current job.
Keep and develop. The individual needs development, and you have the time and energy to do it.
Move to another position. The person is a strong performer but is not in a position that makes the most of his skills or personal qualities.
Replace (low priority). The person should be replaced, but the situation is not urgent.
Replace (high priority). The person should be replaced as soon as possible.
Observe for a while. This person is still a question mark, and you need to learn more before you can make a definitive judgment about them.
These assessments need not be absolutely irreversible, but you should feel 90-plus percent confident in them. If you remain uncertain about someone, leave her in the “observe” category. As time goes on and you learn more, you can revise and refine your assessments.
Consider Alternatives
You may be tempted to begin right away to act on high-priority replacement decisions. But take a moment first to consider alternatives. Letting an employee go can be difficult and time-consuming. Even if poor performance is well documented, the termination process can take months or longer. If there is no paper trail regarding poor performance, it will take time to document.
In addition, your ability to replace someone at all may depend on a host of factors, including legal protections, cultural norms, and political alliances. Sometimes it simply is not possible to replace someone, even if he is performing miserably. If this is the case, you must figure out how to play the hand you were dealt as well as possible.
Fortunately, you have alternatives. Often, a poor performer will decide to move on of her own accord in response to a clear message from you. Alternatively, you can work with human resources to shift the person to a more suitable position:
Shift her role. Move her to a position on the team that better suits her skills. This is unlikely to be a permanent solution for a problem performer, but it can help you work through the short-term problem of keeping the organization running while you look for the right person to fill the slot.
Move her out of the way. If she simply can’t contribute productively or is a disruptive or dispiriting influence, then it is better to have her doing nothing than destroying value. Consider shrinking her responsibilities significantly. This also has the virtue of sending a strong signal to her about your view of her contributions, which may help her see that it would be best to move on.
Move her elsewhere in the organization. Help the person find a suitable position in the larger organization. Sometimes, if handled well, this move can benefit you, the individual, and the organization overall, but don’t pursue this solution unless you are genuinely convinced the person can perform well in the new situation. Simply shifting a problem performer onto someone else’s shoulders will damage your reputation.
Develop Backups
To keep your team functioning while you build the best possible long-term configuration, you may need to keep an underperformer on the job while searching for a replacement. As soon as you are reasonably sure that someone is not going to make it, begin looking discreetly for a successor. Evaluate other people on your team and elsewhere in the organization for the potential to move up. Use skip-level meetings and regular reporting sessions to evaluate the talent pool. Ask human resources to launch a search.
Treat People Respectfully
During every phase of the team-evolution process, take pains to treat everyone with respect. Even if people in your unit agree that a particular person should be replac
ed, your reputation will suffer if they view your actions as unfair. Do what you can to show people the care with which you are assessing team members’ capabilities and the fit between jobs and individuals. Your direct reports will form lasting impressions of you based on how you manage this part of your job.
Aligning Your Team
Having the right people on the team is essential, but it’s not enough. To achieve your agreed-to priorities and secure early wins, you need to define how each team member can best support those key goals. This process calls for breaking down large goals into their components and working with your team to assign responsibility for each element. Then it calls for making each individual accountable for managing his goals. How do you encourage accountability?
As illustrated in figure 7-2, a blend of push and pull tools works best to align and motivate a team. Push tools, such as goals, performance measurement systems, and incentives, motivate people through authority, loyalty, fear, and expectation of reward for productive work. Pull tools, such as a compelling vision, inspire people by invoking a positive and exciting image of the future.
The mix of push and pull you use will depend on your assessment of how people on your team prefer to be motivated. Your high-energy go-getters may respond more enthusiastically to pull incentives. With more methodical and risk-averse folks, push tools may prove more effective.
The right mix also will depend on the STARS situations you’re dealing with. Turnarounds typically provide plenty of push. The problem teaches people that something needs to be done. In realignment situations, however, it may be challenging to create a sense of urgency. When this is the case, focus more attention on the pull side of the equation—for example, by defining a compelling vision for what the organization could become.
FIGURE 7-2
Using push and pull tools to motivate people
Define Goals and Performance Metrics
On the push side, establishing—and sticking to—clear and explicit performance metrics is the best way to encourage accountability. Select performance measures that will let you know as clearly as possible whether a team member has achieved her goals.
Avoid ambiguously defined goals, such as “Improve sales” or “Decrease product development time.” Instead, define goals in terms that can be quantified. Examples include “Increase sales of product X by 15 to 30 percent over the fourth quarter of this year,” or “Decrease development time on product line Y from twelve months to six months within the next two years.”
Align Incentives
A baseline question to ask yourself is how best to incentivize team members to achieve desired goals. What mix of monetary and nonmonetary rewards will you employ?
It is equally important to decide whether to base rewards more on individual or collective performance. This decision is linked to your assessment of whether you need true teamwork. If so, put more emphasis on collective rewards. If it is sufficient to have a high-performing group, then place more emphasis on individual performance.
It’s important to strike the right balance. If your direct reports work essentially independently and if the group’s success hinges chiefly on individual achievement, you don’t need to promote teamwork and should consider an individual incentive system. If success depends largely on cooperation among your direct reports and integration of their expertise, true teamwork is essential, and you should use group goals and incentives to gain alignment.
Usually, you will want to create incentives for both individual excellence (when your direct reports undertake independent tasks) and for team excellence (when they undertake interdependent tasks). The correct mix depends on the relative importance of independent and interdependent activity for the overall success of your unit. (See box, “The Incentive Equation.”)
The Incentive Equation
The incentive equation defines the mix of incentives that you will use to motivate desired performance. Here are the basic formulas:
The relative sizes of nonmonetary and monetary rewards depend on (1) the availability of nonmonetary rewards such as advancement and recognition and (2) their perceived importance to the people involved.
The relative sizes of fixed and performance-based compensation depend on (1) the extent of observability and measurability of people’s contributions and (2) the time lag between performance and results. The lower the observability or measurability of contributions and the longer the time lag, the more you should rely on fixed compensation.
The relative sizes of individual and group-based performance compensation depend on the extent of interdependence of contributions. If superior performance comes from the sum of independent efforts, then individual performance should be rewarded (for example, in a sales group). If group cooperation and integration are critical, then group-based incentives should get more weight (for example, in a new-product development team). Note that there may be several levels of group-based incentives: team, unit, and company as a whole.
Designing incentive systems is a challenge, but the dangers of incentive misalignment are great. You need your direct reports to act as agents for you, whether they’re undertaking individual responsibilities or collective ones. You don’t want to give them incentives to pursue individual goals when true teamwork is necessary, or vice versa.
Articulate Your Vision
When you’re aligning your team, don’t forget about the organization’s vision. After all, it’s a key reason why you and your team come to work every day.
An inspiring vision has the following attributes:
It taps into sources of inspiration. It is built on a foundation of intrinsic motivators, such as teamwork and contribution to society. One orthopedic medical device company, for example, had “Restoring the joy of motion” as its vision statement, accompanied by stories about injured athletes being able to compete again, and grandparents being able to hold their grandkids.
It makes people part of “the story.” The best statements of vision connect people to a larger narrative that provides meaning—for example, a quest to recapture the organization’s past glories.
It contains evocative language. The vision must describe in graphic terms what the organization will achieve and how people will feel to have achieved it. Launching twelve rockets in ten years is a goal; putting a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth by the end of the decade, as President John F. Kennedy put it, is a vision.
Use the categories in table 7-2 to help craft your shared vision. Keep asking yourself, Why should people feel inspired to expend extra effort to achieve the goals we have defined for the organization?
TABLE 7-2
Inspirations for vision statements
As you work to create and communicate a shared vision, keep the following principles in mind:
Use consultation to gain commitment. Be clear on which elements of your vision are nonnegotiable, but beyond these, be flexible enough to consider the ideas of others and allow them to have input and to influence the shared vision. In that way, they share ownership. Off-site meetings are often a powerful way to create and generate commitment to a shared vision, as long as you take care to ensure they are well designed. (See box, “Off-Site Planning Checklist.”)
Develop stories and metaphors to communicate it. Stories and metaphors are potent ways to communicate the essence of a vision. There is something surprisingly powerful in a parable. The best of these stories crystallize core lessons and provide models for the kind of behavior you want to encourage.
Reinforce it. Research on persuasive communication heavily underlines the power of repetition. Your vision is more likely to take root in people’s minds if it consists of a few core themes that are repeated until they sink in. Even when people have begun to understand the message, you should not stop. Strive constantly to deepen people’s commitment to the vision.
Develop channels for communicating it. You cannot hope to communicate your vision directly to each person in your organization. This means that in ad
dition to working with small groups such as a top team, you must be effective in persuading from a distance. This means developing communication channels that you will use to spread your vision more broadly.
Finally, and above all, take care to live the vision you articulate. A vision that is undercut by inconsistent leadership behaviors—by you or members of your team—is worse than no vision at all. Be sure you are prepared to walk the talk.
Off-Site Planning Checklist
Before you schedule an off-site meeting for your new team, you need to clarify the reasons for doing so. What are you trying to accomplish with this meeting? There are at least six important reasons for having off-site meetings:
To gain a shared understanding of the business (diagnostic focus)
To define the vision and create a strategy (strategy focus)
To change the way the team works together (team-process focus)
To build or alter relationships in the group (relationship focus)
To develop a plan and commit to achieving it (planning focus)
To address conflicts and negotiate agreements (conflict-resolution focus)
Getting Down to Details
If you decide that an off-site meeting would indeed be useful for the group, start to consider the logistics of the meeting based on your answers to the following questions:
When and where should the meeting be held?
Which issues will be dealt with, and in what order?
Who should act as facilitator?
Don’t neglect the facilitation question. If you are a skilled facilitator and if the team respects you—and is not enmeshed in a conflict—it may make sense for you to be both leader and facilitator. If not, you’d be well advised to bring in a skilled outsider—either an expert on the substance of the issues you’re dealing with or a skilled orchestrator of team process.
The First 90 Days, Updated and Expanded_Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter Page 15
