During the last 60 days, I have witnessed an interesting trend, and listened to people talk about an interesting problem. The trend is that with the Great Resignation taking place across all industries many teams have lost their team leader. So, new team leaders have been hired and placed into these key positions. These new team leaders did not build the team they are leading. Instead, they have inherited a team. And many of these teams have struggled during the last 2 years and more likely will continue to struggle given the economic headwinds within current markets they serve.
The interesting problem I have encountered is that many of these new leaders are completely stumped about how to leader these teams. The question I have been asked over and over is the following: “What do I do with this team? They are so entrenched in their old ways of doing things that I have no idea about where to begin. Got any advice on how to deal with this?”
My response has focused on three specific actions. First, all new team leaders need to read the following article: “Leading the Team You Inherit” by Michael Watkins, Harvard Business Review, June 2016. It is the best resource I know for dealing with this situation.
Second, as outlined in the article, a leader needs to evaluate their “new” team based on the following criteria:
- Competence: do the members of the team have the technical expertise and experience to do the job effectively.
- Trustworthiness: can the members of the team be relied upon to be straight with you and to follow through on commitments.
- Energy: do the members of the team bring the right attitude to the job (isn’t burned-out or disengaged).
- People skills: do the members of the team get along well with others on the team and supports collaboration.
- Focus: do the members of the team set priorities and sticks to them, instead of veering off in all directions.
- Judgement: do the members of the team exercise good sense, especially under pressure or when faced with making sacrifices for the great good.
As Jim Collins wrote years ago, do you have the right people on the right seats on the bus? In the beginning, it is a “who” question before focusing on a “what” solution.
Third, new leaders who are inheriting an old team, need to understand some thing called “coordination neglect” as outlined by Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao in their book, Scaling Up Excellence: Getting To More Without Settling For Less, (Crown Business, 2014). As they explain, “As always, once organizations are divided into roles, teams, levels and departments, locations, and so on, the challenge of coordinating and integrating the work rears its ugly head. Dubbed “coordination neglect” or the “scaling fallacy,” it means decision makers are prone to underestimate the increasing percentage of time, resources, and staff that are required to orchestrate action as a group or organization expands.”
When inheriting an old team during the last 90 days, new team leaders need to understand that their team is not going to be operating at 100% effectiveness. During the last 2 years, all teams have struggled with the impact of a global pandemic. And as such, they have a reduced bandwidth for new or different ways of doing things which is something that many new team leaders introduce and thus fail at over time. This happens because they forget or do not understand that most teams have just been focused on maintaining a degree of operational compliance or just maintaining the ability to be operational, especially with the loss of so many people due to COVID and the Great Resignation.
Therefore, I have encouraged many new team leaders to spend time thinking about and talking with their new-to-them team about the systems and processes the team uses to make sure effective coordination with other teams takes place. This level of operational and strategic dialogue is important because many new leaders start with the idea that the team is broken and needs fixing when in reality, many teams right now are just worn and tired. The best thing a new team leader can do is to start by listening and learning. Often, what they discover is that they have a good team who just needs validation, assistance and some coaching.
Given current events, I suspect we will see more new team leaders inheriting old teams. Now is the time to get prepared for this growing trend, and we need to help these new team leaders to be effective and focused on the right things during their initial 120 days on the job.
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