Whether you are an experienced CEO or a first-time CEO, you often have to work with a new team. Whenever you join a new company, start a new venture, or simply replace underperforming team members, you undoubtedly will have a new set of people working under you. Since you are the CEO, the effectiveness of these people (they are most likely the company's most senior leaders) can make or break the company.
Furthermore, your effectiveness depends on the performance of these people (i.e., great team members who can realize your vision are one of the most valuable assets for CEOs). The decisions you make in the first few weeks and months on how to manage and build your team have a big impact on whether or not your team gets results in the end.
Therefore, you need to transform these new people you barely know into an effective team that:
Share a common goal (i.e., they know what you, the team leader, want to achieve);
Work well together (i.e., positive dynamics among themselves and with you);
Highly performing (i.e., making significant progress towards the goal realization).
But how do you do so? We all know it's hard to get people to work together – especially when you and they are busy with so many things to be delivered and so little time left to build a team. So, how can you set clear goals, make rules for the group, and create an environment where everyone feels welcome and motivated to take part?
This is where you need a systematic but practical approach to managing and building a new effective team. An approach that outlines clearly what action you need to take for your leadership team to be successful.
This post will guide you.
1. Do Your Homework to Know Your Team
Remember, your team members are like your war generals (or your football players, if you prefer this analogy). You need to know them well in order to be able to deploy them well. For example, you don't want to deploy a top striker as a center-back.
Determine the Ideal Team you need, e.g., what capabilities are needed; what kind of team member mix do you need?
Go to LinkedIn and check their "CV" (alternatively, ask them to send it to you). Familiarize yourself with their experience and note some of their potential strengths.
Go to HR and ask for their latest performance appraisal. Familiarize yourself with their performance and note some of their possible weaknesses.
Create a file for each team member (either digital or physical) containing your notes and observations about them. Going forward, it will be in your interest to update these files regularly.
Set a 1-on-1 informal chat with each of them. Meet individually with team members to discuss the company's challenges, individual development needs, and the details of their workstreams.
Understand team members' personalities and determine the most efficient ways to interact.
Assess the team members' capabilities and make sure they are fit for the job (determine who to keep, change, move, or watch). If they are not fit for the job, you must change the Team within 30 days.
2. Create a Formal Team's Game Plan Upfront and Launch a Formal Team Kick-off ASAP
Don't take too long to do your homework. Know that the first few weeks are crucial. People form opinions quickly, and they tend to stick with them. Therefore, you need to do your homework fast and come up with a formal team's game plan that you can share with the team members.
You might think that making the team's game plan is a load of nonsense. Let me assure you this is actually a good use of time. If you don't take the time upfront to figure out how to get the team running well and create a formal game plan, there will always be problems down the line. So, you either invest time upfront or waste time later. Based on my experience, investing upfront is always cheaper than cleaning up the mess down the line.
In the team's game plan, make sure to include the following elements:
Team Goal, i.e., what goal do you, the CEO, want to achieve (i.e., what does success look like for the company) and the metrics you will track. The team members will be interested to hear how you define success (don't forget to ensure the goal is ambitious but realistic). If you share your vision/goal with your team, you show them that you are committed, you are open, you are in control. This creates a good momentum around yourself in the new role;
Individual Goals, i.e., what does this mean for each team member (i.e., how does this goal translate into each team member's goal(s) and target(s) – on what basis each of them will be measured). It is important to explain how you'll measure the team's success both individually and as a whole. Make sure the team members know how you will grade them and what you expect of them. Don't forget to go over the ways you will measure their progress with them;
Team Norms, i.e., how the team should work together in order to realize these goals. The norms should provide clarity on the ground rules, working preferences, meeting drumbeat, communication preferences, roles and responsibilities, conflict resolution methods, how to ask for help, and the executive decision-making process. Put special emphasis on the ground rules of how the team should work: if you don't make these rules clear to everyone, you might make some people feel left out, hesitant, or like they can't take part;
Issue & Action Statement, i.e., what the key issues of the company are – and the high-level work plan to be pursued. This is so that everyone will know who is doing what and how their actions contribute to the solution.
Team Barometer, i.e., what tool you will use to track the team members' engagement/satisfaction/happiness (e.g., monthly anonymous survey-monkey?). I think it is very important to know if your team is struggling, dissatisfied, or disengaged early.
Once you have the Team's Game Plan, schedule a formal Team Kick-off with all the team members, where you are going to present this plan, and get their feedback/inputs/agreement. This way, all of your team members are on the same starting line.
To ensure the team members open up, make sure you also focus on relationship building during the kick-off (see also Part 3 below):
Start with social ice-breaker/team-building activities. The following post has many ideas for ice-breakers.
Share with them the five stages of team formation: 1) Forming; 2) Storming; 3) Norming; 4) Performing; and 5) Ending. So that the team members have a helpful framework for recognizing a team's behavioral patterns and can use it as a basis for team conversation.
Have the team members talk about their best and worst team experiences. If they can talk about the good and bad dynamics, it will be easier for everyone to agree on the behaviors they want to encourage and the ones they want to stop. These points can then feed into your Team Norm's ground rules.
Incorporate a lot of social/mingling opportunities during the kick-off, such as tea breaks, lunch, dinner, social events, etc.
Introduce to them a personality types framework (e.g., MBTI, NEO, Big-5, Strength-Finders). Use whichever tool you prefer. The point is to provide a framework is to help them understand themselves and others. So that the team members have a helpful framework for recognizing a team's behavioral patterns and can use it as a basis for team conversation.
Develop and present their How to Work with Me one-pager document (see Part 3 for more detail).
3. Get to Know Each Other Well and Share 'How to Work with Me' with Each Other
At the end of the day, for a team to work well, the team members must know each other. Therefore, you must resist the urge to talk right away about the work/project/task, and put more emphasis on building relationships.
Make it one of your main goals to: get to know the people on your team; encourage and help them do the same. Practical things you could do include: doing a team retreat; after-hours social events; meet-and-greet; knowledge-sharing session; starting meetings with activities that bring people together; holding virtual happy hours/coffee breaks; or simply asking how everyone is doing at the start of a call/meeting.
One of the most useful tools I learned during my MBA at London Business School is the How to Work With Me document. Essentially, it is a one-page Word document with several bullet points outlining:
Your Most Distinctive Characteristic.
Your Most Important Values.
Your Personality Profile (based on the framework shared during kick-off).
Your Negative Tendencies/Warning Signs.
Your Previous Professional Experience/Expertise.
Your Personal Goals and Development Targets.
Your Communication Preference.
Cross-sharing the document helps the team members to know each other quickly. My suggestion is to ask every team member to develop their one-pager How to Work with Me, and present it to each other during the formal Team Kick-off.
A client of mine, a hardcore ex-Investment Banking CFO, once asked why we need to talk about values. He thought values were mambo jambo, mushy squishy stuffs that waste everyone's time. I told him that he was correct – if the participants write down some meaningless words that sound good but are not really upheld by them; but he was dead wrong if the participants, especially the CEO, write about the things that really matter to them, that become the basis of their decision making, and the standards of their behaviors.
This is why I recommend that you, as the CEO, must share with your team as early as possible (e.g., during the Team Kick-off):
What you believe (your values);
Give examples of how they affect your choices when faced with difficult cases;
Describe what your available options and what your top priorities are;
Explain why you choose the option you take.
Explain why it is important for the Team to know these values, i.e., the implications for the company and the individual team member.
4. Encourage the Team to Regularly Talk about How the Team Works
Since the team is new, some hiccups in team dynamics often happen. Therefore, as their team leader, you need to regularly discuss whether 'we as a team work well' or not.
I know the Team Norms already specify how the team should work. But what was discussed during the kick-off and put on paper may not reflect how the team actually works in reality. Therefore, for the first 12 months, you need to take time to discuss team dynamics and performance regularly – perhaps spend 15 minutes at the end of the weekly team calls or monthly team meetings.
Don't just assume because they are senior leaders in your organization, they will automatically ask for help or this kind of meeting. Dedicated time slots can uncover many things that could potentially ruin your team. As their team leader, it's your role to set the dynamics right and correct issues.
As Jack Welch, the legendary CEO, once said:
Business is a game, and as with all games, the team that puts the best people on the field and gets them playing together wins.
5. Over-Interact with Your Team
As a new CEO, you should know that, in the beginning, it's better to over-interact with your team than under-interact. It's always best to start with more team meetings, one-on-ones, email, or shared progress reports in the beginning.
There are big benefits to doing this.
The intensity of interaction will accelerate team formation – due to many interactions, the team members get to know each other faster.
The frequent interactions will give the team more opportunities to work together to tackle the company's issues. This way, the team is becoming more effective in addressing the issues.
The depth of the interactions will encourage team members to talk to each other. Better communication from early on would help avoid misunderstandings and poor results later.
Therefore, do as many interactions as possible with your team members for the first six months. You can always cut back on the interactions if the team is doing well.
PS:
I found WhatsApp Group as a powerful tool for maintaining interactions with your team members. Depending on the team members' familiarity with technology, I can also recommend Slack, Trello, or Cascade.
I know I recommend over-interact, but don't go crazy and overboard – your team shouldn't spend 100% of the time in meetings if you want them to deliver.
6. Motivate Your Team by Showing Them that You are Someone who Gets Things Done
You need a strong reputation to ensure the team members quickly accept you as the team leader. Some of it comes from your previous experience and success stories. But some of it comes from the real impact you bring in the new role.
To quickly cement your reputation in your new role, you need some 'quick wins.' Therefore, you must find a big problem the company faces that you can easily fix. By fixing it, the big immediate effect right away shows that you are a man/woman of action. Some preliminary ideas for you:
A long-standing problem with a supplier or customer;
An old way of doing something at work;
Significant projects that are not prioritized;
Critical capex project that you can easily pay for;
A vital shift in the corporate focus.
Your "early victory" will not only boost your reputation but also motivate your team. They now know that they have a man/woman of action as their team leader. It gets them going, and their successes will further fuel your reputation. You will become the de facto leader of a high-performing team.
After reading this, I hope you know how to build and manage your new team.
If you can only remember one thing from this article, then please remember this:
Create a Plan How You Want Your Team Work Together
Thanks a lot for reading. And all the best with your new team and new role!
If you are interested to read more about strategy, check out my blog here.
Also, check out my book, the GOSPEL of Strategy, here.
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