Tag Archives: team

Who Do You Hang With?

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“Why are you here?” I asked.

Ethan paused, sensing his response could not be casual. He knew I would only ask a more probing question. “I have to provide for my family,” he finally replied.

“But, you could do that with most any job,” I predictably prodded. “Why are you here? At this place? At this time?”

“I don’t know, it just sort of happened. A friend told me I could get a job here and things worked out. I started on the floor seven years ago, was promoted to supervisor, and here I am now, just promoted to manager.”

“Why don’t you leave?” I wanted to know.

Ethan took another pause. “Over time, I got used to working with these people. They’re my best friends. Sometimes, I think I spend more time with them than I do my family. Heck, they are like my family. I have an investment in the other people I work with.”

“You are getting closer,” I suggested. “How does that understanding serve you, as a manager?”

Bright Ideas, Insufficient

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“I thought my promotion to manager was to become better at directing people to get work done,” Roberta said. “You make it seem like there should be more focus on the team than on me. I thought I had to have the answers, the solutions?”

“You might have answers and your answers may be the most coherent. You might have solutions and your solutions may be the ones that save the day,” I replied. “But, it is not your answers, your solutions, your planning, your bright ideas that make the difference. It’s execution. I am also certain that you have high performance standards, and you would meet those performance standards if you could self-perform each step in the process. Yet, you have come to realize that successful initiatives are seldom accomplished by a single person, it takes a team. It’s not the idea harbored by a single individual, it’s the coordinated execution that transforms a dispirited group into a cohesive team.”

Earning Followers

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“Well, I’m here,” Roberta replied to the unspoken question. “I’m the manager, now.”

“Yes, you are,” I said. “Tell me how you got here?”

“It’s pretty simple. My manager was out on family leave and decided not to come back. We waited for his return for ten weeks without a manager, limping along. At first, it was okay, we just did what we did the day before. As time went by, the wheels got a little wobbly.”

“And, so they picked you to be the new manager?” I smiled.

“I guess so,” Roberta answered. “So, now it’s my team. I have seven direct reports.”

“Oh, really?” I turned my head a bit to the side. “Why do you think they picked you?”

“That’s easy,” she said, with some awareness of the circumstance. “I have been here the longest.”

“So, it’s not the 10,000 books you read on leadership, or your demonstrated skills at supporting the team through a tough problem? It’s only because you have been here the longest?”

Roberta scrunched her face. “Yes, I guess that’s about it.”

“Don’t feel so bad,” I nodded. “Most managers are appointed to the role in exactly the same way. It’s not your leadership prowess. You were standing in the middle of the scene and there was no one else around with your experience, working here the longest, so you got the job. But, please understand, the team is not yours. You may have been appointed to the role, given the authority, whatever that means, but yours is not an earned position, it was appointed. It is the team that must be earned.”

Working Together

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From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question:
You have talked about managers and systems. And you’ve described the most important system for a manager as the People System. What’s inside that system?

Response:
There are three primary accountabilities for any Manager.

  • First, is that the Manager is responsible for the output of the team. I don’t listen to excuses that some team member failed to perform, or some other team member fell short. I hold the Manager accountable for the output of the team.
  • The element that supports that output is the ability of the Manager to assemble the team together. This has a great deal to do with identifying and selecting talent.
  • Once assembled, the Manager must lead the team to work together, competently and with commitment in pursuit of the goal.

Failure in any part of this system falls to the Manager.

Supernatural Powers

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“Who is responsible for the team?” I asked again. “Who is responsible for the performance of the team, and all the things that affect performance?”

Melanie started looking around her office, as if someone was going to appear. One of her team just quit.

I continued. “If it’s not you, as the department manager, if it’s not your accountability, then who?”

Melanie’s eyes stopped skirting the room. There was no hero that appeared. One last time, she floated her excuse, “But how am I responsible for one of my supervisors quitting?”

“That’s a very good question. How are you, as the manager, responsible for one of your supervisors quitting?”

“What, am I supposed to be clairvoyant?” Melanie snapped.

“That would be helpful,” I nodded. “But let’s say you don’t have supernatural powers. How could you, as the manager, know enough about your supervisors, to have predicted this departure?”

Too Busy

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“But I am busy,” protested Byron. “How am I going to find time to read resumes?”

“Schedule it. You need to be thinking, each and every day about your team and what would happen if any of them needed to make a change. Your most important function as a manager is personnel and recruiting. In fact, if that is all you ever did, was to build a high performance team, and then walked away, I would describe you as one of our greatest managers. Because you left behind, a high performing team that could carry on.”

“It’s that important?” Byron tested.

“Top priority. In the past 120 days, your labor pool has gone from record low unemployment to record high unemployment. Now is the time to look.”

New Team, New Manager

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It is always tough to become a new manager to an existing peer group or a new team. A new manager always means change. And most people don’t like change, at least the unknown parts of change.

Respect comes, not from the authority of the position, or the experience of the manager. Respect comes from bringing value to the problem solving and decision making of the individuals on the team.

In fact, team members will always seek out the person in the company that brings value to their thinking and their work. If it happens to be their manager, that’s great. All too often, it’s not.

We all work for two bosses. We work for the boss who is assigned to us, and we work for the boss we seek out. The boss we seek out is the one who brings value to our thinking, our work and our lives.

So, if you are the new manager, which boss are you?

The Team You Deserve

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“Ted, your team is functioning exactly as it was designed to function,” I started.

“What do you mean? You make it sound like it’s my fault,” he defended.

“Exactly, as the manager, the team you have is the team you deserve.”

I could tell Ted was getting agitated. It is easy to look at someone else to blame. It is tough when the responsibility is ours.

“The team you have is the team you deserve,” I repeated. “As time goes by, you will find that your team will be no better than you are. The speed of the pack is the speed of the leader.

“If you find that your team is not what you want it to be, if you find that you are not able to bring out the best in that team, to bring them to higher levels of performance, then, as the manager, you are not the leader who deserves better. At least not yet.”

Ted was quiet.

After a minute, I broke the silence. “So, what do you think we need to work on? Where should we start?”

Ted took a breath. “I guess we have to start with me.”

A Manager’s Stomach

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“Every time you, as the manager, take a team problem behind closed doors, you participate in a grand collusion that cripples the team from solving ANY problem,” I said.

“What do you mean collusion?” Miriam asked.

“Faced with a problem the team doesn’t want to deal with, they panic and engage in non-work behaviors, so they don’t have to deal with the problem themselves. Remember your team of independent technical contributors, all very competent on their own, but they butt heads when they are required to work together?”

Miriam nodded.

“You give them a difficult project where they have to work together,” I continued. “What is the first problem they have to solve? And here is a hint. It has nothing to do with the project.”

Miriam was quiet for a moment, then, “You are right. The first problem they have to solve is how to work together. But are you suggesting that, as the manager, I put them in the same room and talk about their inability to work together?”

“Yes. And what is the reaction when you say, ‘Gentlemen, I called this meeting today to discuss how difficult it is for the three of you to work together. We are going to talk about your behaviors that derail projects and what behaviors need to change.’ Then you stop talking. How is your stomach feeling right about now? How are the stomachs of each of your team members?”

“Are you kidding? It makes me feel queasy just to think about saying that to the group,” Miriam admitted.

“Then, you know you are talking about a real issue. When everyone in the room has their stomach upside down, you know the team is dealing with a real issue. High performance teams get comfortable with discomfort. Low performance teams go into non-work and want you, as the manager, to solve the problem for them.” -Tom

Keep Them or Transition Them Out

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From the Ask Tom mailbag –

Question:
In an attempt to retain their highest producers, a call center instituted an incentive plan that highly favored a group of seven. These “Magnificent Seven,” as the partners called them, did produce a high percentage of the revenues. But they were also highly dysfunctional as a group as each one was high maintenance with lots of personal baggage in his/her own right. While the reward system worked to retain these seven, the churn rate for the remaining 23 seats was over 400%. In effect, the incentives to retain seven people came at the expense of morale, work environment, job satisfaction and even the bottom line. The cost of continuously replacing the 23 employees far exceeded the benefit of retaining the seven. Your thoughts?

Response:
So, if I was a direct manager and needed high volume sales for only the next three months, I would go the M-7 every time. But, that is not the way most organizations work. Most organizations need sustained revenue over years and decades. Most organizations need a sustainable system of sales which contemplates sales methodology, recruiting, orientation, portfolio growth, levels of work, promotion and retirement. This goes back to time span.

Three months time span – Magnificent Seven
Ten year time span – Not the Magnificent Seven