The First 90 Days (47 page)
Authors: Michael Watkins
Tags: #Success in business, #Business & Economics, #Decision-Making & Problem Solving, #Management, #Leadership, #Executive ability, #Structural Adjustment, #Strategic planning
Meet one-on-one with each member of your new team as soon as possible. Depending on your style, these early meetings might take the form of informal discussions, formal reviews, or a combination, but your own preparation and focus should be standardized:
1.
Prepare for each meeting.
Review available personnel history, performance data, and other appraisals. Familiarize yourself with each person’s technical or professional skills so you can assess how he or she functions on the team.
2.
Ask probing questions.
As we saw in
chapter 2
on learning, ask each person the
same
set of questions, for example:
What do you think of our existing strategy?
What are the biggest challenges and opportunities facing us in the short term?
In the long term?
What resources could we leverage more effectively?
How could we improve the way the team works together?
If you were in my position, what would you
most
want to pay attention to?
3.
Look for verbal and nonverbal clues.
Note choices of words, body language, and hot buttons.
Notice what the individual does not say. Does the person volunteer information or do you have to extract it? Does the person take responsibility for problems in This document was created by an unregistered ChmMagic, please go to http://www.bisenter.com to register it. Thanks
.
his or her area? Make excuses? Blame others?
How consistent are the individual’s facial expressions and body language with his or her words?
What topics elicit strong emotional responses? These hot buttons provide clues to what motivates the individual and what kinds of changes he or she would by energized by.
Outside of these one-on-one meetings, notice how the individual relates to other team members. Do relations with other team members appear cordial and productive? Tense and competitive? Judgmental or reserved?
Test Their Judgment
Make sure you are assessing
judgment
and not technical competence or raw intelligence. Some very bright people have lousy judgment, and some people of average competence have extraordinary judgment. It is essential to be clear about the mix of knowledge and judgment you need from key people.
One way to assess judgment is to work with a person for an extended time and observe whether he or she is able to (1) make sound predictions and (2) develop good strategies for avoiding problems. Both abilities draw on an individual’s
mental models,
or ways of identifying the essential features and dynamics of emerging situations and translating those insights into effective action. This is what expert judgment is all about. The problem, of course, is that you don’t have much time, and it can take a while to find out whether someone did or did not make good predictions.
Fortunately, there are ways you can accelerate this process.
One way is to test people’s judgment in a domain in which feedback on their prediction abilities will emerge relatively quickly. Experiment with the following approach. Ask individuals whose judgment you want to evaluate about a topic that they are passionate about outside work. It could be politics or cooking or baseball; it doesn’t matter. Challenge them to make predictions: “Who do you think is going to do better in the debate?” “What does it take to bake a perfect soufflé?” “Which team will win the game tonight?” Press them to commit themselves—unwillingness to go out on a limb is a warning sign in itself. Then probe why they think their predictions are correct. Does the rationale make sense? If possible, follow up to see what happens.
What you are testing is a person’s capacity to
exercise expert judgment
in a particular domain. Someone who has become an expert in a private domain is likely to have done so in his or her chosen field of business too, given enough passion about it. However you do it, the key is to find ways, beyond just waiting to see how people perform on the job, to probe for the hallmarks of expertise.
Evaluate Key Functional People
If you are managing a team whose members have diverse functional expertise—such as marketing, finance, operations, and R&D—you will need to get a handle on their competence in their respective areas. This can be daunting, especially for first-time general managers. If you are an insider, try to solicit the opinions of people you respect and trust in each function who know the individuals on your team.
If you are entering a general-management role, consider developing your own evaluation template for each of the key functions. A good template consists of guidelines and warning signs for evaluating people in functions such as marketing, sales, finance, and operations. To develop each template, talk to experienced managers about what they look for in these functions.
Assess the Team as a Whole
Besides evaluating individual team members, assess how the entire group works. Use these techniques for spotting problems in the team’s overall dynamics:
Study the data.
Read reports and team meeting minutes. If your organization conducts climate or morale surveys of individual units, examine these as well.
Systematically ask questions.
Assess the individual responses to the common set of questions you
asked when you met with individual team members. Are their answers overly consistent? If so, this may suggest an agreed-on party line, but it could also mean that everyone genuinely shares the same impressions of what’s going on. It will be up to you to evaluate what you observe. Do the responses show little consistency? If so, the team may lack coherence.
Probe group dynamics.
Observe how the team interacts in your early meetings. Do you detect any alliances? Particular attitudes? Leadership roles? Who defers to whom on a given topic? When one person is speaking, do others roll their eyes or otherwise express disagreement or frustration? Pay attention to these signs to test your early insights and detect coalitions and conflicts.
