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A Winning Team in the First 90 Days
“The most important decisions you make in your first 90
days will probably be about the people on your team. If you succeed
in creating a high-performance team, you can exert tremendous leverage
in value creation. If not, you will face severe difficulties, for
no leader can hope to achieve much alone”.
— Michael Watkins, The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies
for New Leaders at All Levels, Harvard Business School Press, 2003.
Assessing a team—deciding who should stay and who should
go—is one of the most critical tasks an executive faces when
transitioning into a new position. It
can create or destroy leverage—and
leadership is ultimately about leverage.
Each year, about 25 percent of managers in typical Fortune 500
companies change jobs. Most spend an average of four years in a
given position. High-potential leaders in mid-senior ranks move
more frequently: every 2.5 to 3 years. These statistics demonstrate
why leaders must build strong teams, composed of the right people
in the right jobs, as quickly as possible.
The first weeks are crucial for learning and evaluating. Leaders
must maintain the right balance of confidence and humility, while
asking probing questions and actively listening. During this time,
leaders are most vulnerable. Without a firm support network in
place, they must learn everything they can about the organization,
its strategies, customers and team members in the shortest possible
timeframe.
Leaders must dedicate a large percentage
of learning time to getting to know existing team members. If
you are promoted to a new position from within the organization,
you are likely acquainted with some of its key people. Transition
from the outside, and you face the task of identifying and placing
the right people into the right positions—a much greater
challenge. Either way, you must choose wisely, without disrupting
short-term performance.
How do you assess your existing team
as quickly as possible? How do
you reduce your learning curve and jumpstart your team’s
performance in the first 90 days? What are the most common mistakes
leaders in a new position make?
How to Assess an Existing Team
When performing your evaluation, you’ll find some excellent,
some average and some unsatisfactory people in place. You
will inherit a group with its own dynamics and habitual ways of
working. You cannot afford to make one of the most common errors:
gathering them in a room, telling them that you’re in charge now, and
that you’ll be making some changes. Instead, you will need
to sort out who’s who, the functions people perform and how
the group has worked in the past.
Go in and shake the tree, and you’re
guaranteed to lose some of the best leaves along with the rotting
ones. Always evaluate thoroughly before acting. Hasty action
compromises trust and credibility. You may inadvertently lose
valuable team members.
If you are like most leaders, you will
form an impression each time you meet someone. Hold
onto those thoughts, but don’t
hold them as truths. Remember: They are merely first impressions.
Allow them to register, don’t suppress them, and then allow
other factors to influence your ultimate appraisal.
You also must decide which criteria to use when evaluating your
people. Michael Watkins, an associate professor of business administration
at Harvard and author of The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies
for New Leaders at All Levels suggests using the following:
| • |
Competence – Does
this person have the technical skills and experience to do
the job well? |
| • |
Judgment – Does
this person exercise good judgment under pressure or when faced
with sacrifice for the greater good? |
| • |
Energy – Does
this team member bring the right kind of energy to the job,
or is he/she disengaged, burned out or unfulfilled? |
| • |
Focus – Does
this person stick to priorities, or is he/she easily distracted
and scattered? |
| • |
Relationships – Does
this person get along well with other team members, supporting
team decisions? |
| • |
Trust – Can
you trust this person to be honest, consistent and reliable? |
Probing Questions
Prepare to meet formally with each person by reviewing available
personnel history, performance data and other appraisals. During
your meeting, ask probing questions. Watkins suggests the following
for a comprehensive evaluation:
1. What do you think of our existing strategy?
2. What are the biggest challenges we face in the short term? In
the long term?
3. What are the biggest opportunities we face?
4. What resources could we leverage more effectively?
5. How could we improve the way the team works together?
6. If you were in my position, to what would you want to pay attention?
Be on the alert for nonverbal cues. While
a person’s actual
words have merit, much is revealed by body language, as well as
what a person omits and the way in which he communicates:
• What
doesn’t he/she say?
• Does he/she volunteer information or wait until he/she’s
asked?
• Does the person reveal areas of weakness or only strengths?
• Does the team member blame others or take responsibility for specific
things?
• Does the person make excuses?
• How consistent is his/her body language with his/her words?
• Which topics evoke a lot of energy?
• What is this person like outside of meetings, when he/she interacts
on an informal level with others?
• Does he/she tend to be cordial, polite, tense, competitive, judgmental
or reserved?
Testing for Judgment
It can be difficult to assess an individual’s ability to
make decisions and judgments. This
is quite different from evaluating technical skills and knowledge.
You must observe the person’s
ability to make sound predictions and develop good strategies for
avoiding problems.
One strategy for evaluating judgment involves asking questions
about areas outside of work, such as sports, hobbies or other interests.
Ask people to offer predictions for their favorite athletic teams
and how they have reached their conclusions. Observe whether they
easily commit to predicting an outcome or prefer to play it safe.
Your goal is to gauge whether their rationale makes sense and how
capable they are in exercising expert judgment. Individuals who
have found passion outside of the work world are likely to do so
in their chosen business field, as well.
Assessing the Team
After evaluating individual team members, you need to learn and
understand how the existing team functions. This requires you to
study data and reports from meetings, as well as any climate surveys.
Take the time to determine whether team members share similar impressions
of the situations they face. Major differences point to a lack
of team coherence.
Group dynamics will become evident in first meetings. Observe
how individuals interact in your presence and the roles people
take. Who speaks easily? Who holds back? Are there alliances? Nonverbal
cues inevitably surface each time someone speaks up in a meeting.
Restructuring a Team
Within a short period, you will be able to outline a plan for
restructuring your team:
• Who will you keep in place?
• Who will you keep and develop?
• Who will you move to another position?
• Who will you observe for a while?
• Who will you replace (low priority)?
• Who will you replace (high priority)?
Alternatives to Termination
Even if poor performance is well documented, it can be difficult
and time-consuming to let people go. Consider alternatives, such
as moving them to other positions within the team that are better
suited to their skills. Or, you may want to remove someone from
the team and place him elsewhere in the organization. Do this,
however, only if you are positive that he can perform well there.
Shifting one problem employee to another department will damage
your credibility and reputation.
To keep your team functioning while you build a better one, you
may need to retain an underperformer while searching for his replacement.
Always treat
people with dignity and respect, and allow them to find positions
elsewhere when it becomes clear that their skills no longer suit
the organization’s
needs. Do what you can to help them find a better fit. Remember:
People form lasting impressions of you based on how well you
manage this part of your job.
A checklist to Jump Start Your Team
| 1. |
What criteria
will you use to assess performance of the members of your team? |
| 2. |
What
personnel changes do you need to make? |
| 3. |
What
process will you put in place for high-priority changes? How
will you act respectfully with people? |
| 4. |
What
help will you need with the restructuring? |
| 5. |
What
changes will you need to make with existing incentives and
measures? |
| 6. |
How
do you want the new team to operate? What roles do you wish
people to play? Do you need to shrink the core team or expand
it? |
| 7. |
How
will you manage decision-making? Will you establish a consult-and-decide
or a build-consensus approach? |
Common Mistakes
When it comes to building a winning
team, many leaders in new positions stumble, partly because it
is extremely difficult to let people go. Failure to act decisively
and quickly prolongs the transition period and can derail your
efforts. Here are some of the most common mistakes leaders make,
from Watkins’s book
The First 90 Days:
Keeping the existing team too long. You should decide who will
remain and who will go within your first 90 days. After six months,
you should have communicated your planned personnel changes to
key stakeholders, your boss and HR.
Not repairing the glitches. Develop
options right away, even if you have to hire people in temporary
positions. You can’t
let the engine stop running while you recharge the batteries. You
may be able to find people at lower levels of the organization.
Not working organizational alignment
and team-restructuring issues in parallel. It
isn’t enough
to have the right team in place. Members must be aligned and
clear about the organizational mission, goals and values.
Not holding onto the good people. You need to look for ways to
signal to the top performers that you recognize their capabilities.
Reassurance can do wonders.
Undertaking team-building before the
core team is in place. Don’t
strengthen the bonds of a team whose members will not continue
with you as a cohesive group. Wait until you have the right people
in place.
Making implementation decisions too
early. Wait until core members
of your new team are in place before attempting to secure their
buy-in for changes. You cannot afford to delay some issues, but
it’s difficult to get buy-in from people when they haven’t
been part of the decision-making process.
Trying to do it all yourself. The
process of restructuring a team is full of legal, emotional and
company policy complications. Don’t
undertake this on your own. You have HR people who can advise you
and help you chart a strategy.
Resource:
Watkins, M. (2003). The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies
for New Leaders at All Levels. Boston, MA. Harvard Business School
Press.
Working
Resources is a Leadership Consulting, Training and Executive Coaching
Firm Helping Companies Assess, Select, Coach and Retain Emotionally
Intelligent People; Emotional Intelligence-Based Interviewing and
Selection; Multi-Rater 360-Degree Feedback; Career Coaching; Change
Management; Corporate Culture Surveys and Executive Coaching.
Dr. Maynard Brusman
Consulting Psychologist and Executive Coach
Trusted Advisor to Senior Leadership Teams
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