Match your team development strategy to the situation
Of course, the specific deadline you select (and more generally how you will approach leading your new business) will depend on the severity of the challenges you are facing. This brings us to the second imperative – match your team development strategy to the situation. The more severe the problems, the faster and deeper you have to make your changes.
How should you think about this? Start with a clear view of the type of business situation you are entering. In “The First 90 Days”, I developed a framework called the STARS model for assessing the impact of different types of business situations on how executives entering new roles should manage their transitions. STARS stands for startup, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, and sustaining success. The fundamental idea is that leaders should approach their transition differently depending on the situation they are entering.
In startups and turnarounds, the level of urgency for making team changes is typically higher, and the time frame for making key decisions is correspondingly shorter. In such situations, newly appointed leaders should strongly consider working with a 60-day decision-making window. In realignments and sustaining success situations, the problems are less severe, and the capability of the inherited team is often greater. So a 90-day or perhaps even 120-day window should be employed.
Establish your assessment criteria
Having set the decision deadline, the next imperative is to think hard about your criteria for evaluating your inherited team (see box for the questions you should ask yourself).
The issue of role complementarity often is missed, but it’s a crucial dimension of assessment. The ultimate goal is to create a team of natural complements that collectively can drive the business to achieve great things. Some aspects of senior team complementarity are obvious – you need someone to head up marketing and someone strong in finance. But other dimensions are more subtle. Who will focus on rigorously evaluating, developing, and implementing the vision if you are the visionary? If you plan to be the good cop, who will be the disciplinarian? Who will mind the store if you intend to focus a lot of time externally dealing with key stakeholders?
Be efficient in your assessment
Having established a time frame and having thought through evaluation criteria, the third imperative is to be as efficient as possible in assessing the team you inherited. If you are an insider, you may already have a lot of information about the team at your disposal. However, even (indeed especially) if you think you know people and their capabilities, it is worth doing a systematic and thorough assessment. If nothing else, it will help immunize you against potential criticism that you are “just settling scores” if you decide to let someone go.
In assessing your team, there are obvious things that you will do, including:
- 1. Reviewing all the available data and focusing on key function-specific metrics to get a sense of overall performance, drilling down as necessary into the details.
- 2. Talking to the Board about their assessments of the capabilities of key people on the senior team and the match of their abilities to the demands of the situation.
- 3. Consulting with respected outsiders who are experts in key functions such as finance or marketing.
- 4. Making judicious use of consultants to do performance, strategy, industry, and benchmarking reviews and plumbing them for their insights about key people.
Beyond this, however, there is no substitute for doing “up close and personal” assessments both in 1-to-1 and team settings. Helpful approaches include:
- 1. Developing a standard template of questions that you ask all team members about the business as a whole (in addition to function-specific questions), perhaps patterned on a standard SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis.
- 2. Setting up structured business review meetings in which team members present to the team as a whole.
- 3. Putting a challenging business problem on the agenda and observing how the team deals with it.
- 4. Doing some “vertical slices” of information gathering by talking to the reports of your new reports and perhaps even delving deeper into the organization to explore capability and alignment.
- 5. Practicing the art of “two-level observation” in individual and team meetings, which means looking not just at what is said but how it is said (is information volunteered or does it have to be extracted, is responsibility embraced, or are fingers subtly pointed elsewhere?) and how others react to what is said (do they engage or disengage, do they respond positively or roll their eyes?).
Help rivals exit gracefully
One major challenge that new CEOs face is dealing with people on their teams who were competing for the position and didn’t get it. If they are highly-capable candidates, they will have a range of other opportunities. Some will leave immediately of their own accord or have been asked to leave as part of the process leading to your appointment.
As a general rule, you should facilitate their departures for greener pastures as expeditiously as possible. At the most, if they have critical capabilities and you are confident that they won’t be disruptive influences, you may negotiate transitional arrangements. Many such temporary bargains are struck in the wake of CEO successions.
There are, however, rare but notable cases where a disappointed competitor for the CEO role is a natural complement for the new CEO. It can be that the business is large, diverse, and successful enough to demand the attention of two highly capable people, and there must, of course, be enough maturity on the part of both people to make it work. The executive must be willing and able truly to “reenlist”.
Balance stability and change
Inheriting and reshaping a team is like repairing a plane in mid-flight. This means establishing priorities for making changes in your team to strike the right balance between short-run stability and long-run potential. It also means recognizing that making changes on your team can be time-consuming.
The key is to focus first on making the highest priority personnel changes. Doing this well means distinguishing between critical and non-critical roles before assessing people. Those in critical roles will be assessed with greater urgency and to higher standards. Ensuring you have A-players in these roles is imperative. You may be able to work with B-players in less critical roles, anticipating making these less important changes later.
It’s up to you
Success in adopting these six imperatives is, of course, no guarantee that you will make the right choices in assessing and restructuring your team. But failing to adhere to any one of them – by letting the process go on for too long, by failing to establish the right criteria, or by not being sufficiently rigorous in making assessments – is a sure recipe for trouble. In the end, you are just one person. If you can’t leverage yourself, your vision, and your energy effectively through the top team, you are on the way to derailment.