Role Requirements

With a picture of ideal structure and roles in hand, you can now determine which roles will have the greatest impact on delivering against your mission, strategies, and goals. The roles responsible for these tasks are the critical ones. The other roles encompass tasks that can be done merely well enough. This is where strategy and people overlap. At this point, determine which roles need to be best in class and invested in and which roles can be maintained or outsourced.

The airline industry has historically lost buckets of money over the long term. Yet, Southwest makes money every year. Part of why it does is that it has figured out which are its critical roles. Southwest overinvests in maintenance roles so it can turn its planes around faster. It overinvests in training its flight attendants so passengers' in-air experience is fun. Conversely, it underinvests in food service and on-the-ground waiting spaces.

Identify what roles will enable you to:

• Win with capabilities that are predominant, superior, or strong compared with others.
• Play not to lose by being above average or good enough.
• Choose to outsource, ally with others, or not do at all.

Right People in the Right Role

Once you have defined the right structure and set of roles and determined the requirements for success in those roles, it is time to see whether you've got the right people in the right roles (current) and who should be placed in new roles. It's unlikely that you'll acquire a team that is perfectly set up to deliver against your Burning Imperative. If you're lucky, with a couple of small tweaks you'll be on your way to a world-class team. However, if there is a significant need for change, you may need to do a major overhaul. If so, be prepared for a lot of work and a lot of disruption. The earlier you make that assessment the better. Don't make the mistake of delaying or avoiding the people changes that need to be made while hoping that some magical transformation will occur. It won't.

For some reason, it is human nature to put off such decisions. Yet the number one regret experienced senior leaders express is not moving fast enough on people. Have a strong bias for figuring the right role sort out as early as possible and making the moves quickly. Getting the right people in the right roles with the right support is a fundamental, essential building block of a high-performing team. Without the right people in the right roles, there is no team.

Getting the right people in the right roles is guided by the team's mission, vision, and values, as well as by individuals' strengths. Strengths are necessary for success. But they are not sufficient. People must want to do well, and they must fit in. It is helpful to think in terms of strengths, motivation, and fit.

Strengths

Match the right people with the right roles. In their book Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham and Don Clifton's core premise is that people do better when they capitalize on their own individual strengths, which comprise talent, knowledge, and skills. According to Gallup, “a strength is the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance in a specific activity. The key to building a strength is to identify your dominant talents, then complement them by acquiring knowledge and skills pertinent to the activity.” Use a tool such as Gallup's Clifton Strengths Assessment to help you better match talent to roles and as a valuable aid in career development for your team.¹

It's useful to add hard-won experience to this base model because people learn from their failures and mistakes—hence “hard-won.” In some rare cases, people take these strengths to craft-level based on their artistic caring and sensibilities. This suggests a more complete view of strengths includes innate talent, learned knowledge, practiced skills, plus hard-won experience and apprenticed craft.

Motivation

If you understand your people's values, your people's goals, and how they see what they are currently doing considering those goals, you have a terrific advantage in helping them find or live up to the right role for themselves and for the organization. Look at recent performance reviews, go back to your due diligence, and reflect on the observations you have made so far.

Fit

Fit is determined by how well an individual's cultural preferences match with the organization's culture. Take a hard look at attitudinal perspective, values, and biases.

Perspective is an attitude born out of how people have been trained to view and solve business problems. It is the accumulation of people's business experience as manifested in their mental models. People with a classic sales perspective may feel that they can sell any product to customers. Conversely, people with a more marketing perspective may feel the organization should modify its products and services to meet customers' needs. It's not that one perspective is better than the other—just that they are different.

It is rare for all of any individual's values to match all of the organization's values. However, it is important for most of the core values to match and for none of them to be in direct conflict with each other.

Different people behave at work in different ways. Some roles may require people with a greater sense of urgency. Some roles require people who think things through thoroughly before jumping in. If someone who tends to get a later start in the day is assigned the role of generating overnight sales reports for the group before everyone else comes in, it would force the person to work in opposition to a natural bias and would most likely be a recipe for failure (and inaccurate reports!).

How Fast Should You Move on the Team?

In a merger or acquisition, think in terms of three time frames: immediate, 100 days, and long-term.

As discussed earlier, no one is going to be able to fully engage with their new reality until you've answered the question, “What about me?” They need to know if they still have a job, what that job is, and what you want them to do.

One organization had done a series of acquisitions without fully integrating them. Finally, they announced a major restructuring, telling its people that they were going to zero base everyone's job and cascade the choices. First the CEO was going to pick his direct reports. Then those people would have 6 weeks to pick theirs, then the next level would have 6 weeks, and the next, and so on. They said the entire process was going to take a year given the number of layers and that people should keep doing their existing jobs along the way.

There were some predictable responses. Everyone started creating other options. The organization lost some of its best people along the way and suffered through tremendous stress and confusion.

What they had not predicted was the complete failure of the rollout process.

They made a choice to move from separate, geographically focused organizations to a single triple matrix cut by product line, function, and geography. But they failed to account for the massive increase in travel costs in having their product line leaders and functional leaders fly all over the world to collaborate with their geographic partners.

Six months into the process they had theoretically realigned the first four layers of the organization and decided to eliminate the product line leg of the matrix, pretty much starting their organizational thinking again. Six months after being told their jobs were in jeopardy, only 8 (8—not 8,000) of the 40,000 people in the organization felt secure in their jobs.

Of course, organizations have to evolve as things change. But you can do that in three steps:

1. Immediate. Do an initial role sort, announcing and making all the job moves you can before, on, or shortly after the day the deal closes. This includes eliminating redundant jobs. Shame on you if you don't do the work to get this right for 80–90 percent of the new organization.
2. 100 days. Fill open positions in the first 100 days. This will include bringing in new people with new-to-the-organization strengths to fill newly created roles and making the remaining choices in your initial role sort.
3. Long-term. Implement future capability plans and continue to evolve the organization over time.

Future Culture, Capabilities, and Perspectives Required by Those Priorities

Lay out the human, financial, physical, technical, and operational organization and culture and different capabilities and perspectives required to implement those priorities. This most likely involves either a specialized, hierarchical matrix or decentralized organization:

• Specialized organizations enable winning invention or design. They provide freeing support to enable specialized artistic leaders to do what they do best.
• Hierarchical organizations enable winning production. They provide disciplined command and control so scientific leaders can focus their efforts.
• Matrix organizations are essential to winning distribution. They drive interdependence across the various groups involved in distributing and delivering products and services.
• Decentralized organizations enable winning customer service and experience. They provide flexible guidance to interpersonal leaders rallying their teams.

Existing Capabilities

Insert an assessment of your current human, financial, physical, technical and operational culture, capabilities, and perspectives based on objectively factual data and truths versus subjective, personal, cultural or political truths, opinions, assumptions, or conclusions.

Gaps

Highlight the differences between future culture, capabilities, and perspectives required and existing capabilities, culture, and perspectives.

Current people to develop/plan to develop them

Insert the output from the latest talent management reviews along with any updates since then and your due diligence, along with the current plans to develop these people to be able to fill future human capability gaps.

Sort redundancies

Where you have people in overlapping roles, choose who will stay in that role in the future and who will move to another role within the new organization or to another organization altogether.

Gaps to recruit for early on and develop/plan to develop new people

Lay out which gaps to fill first from the outside and your plan to develop those new people.

Gaps to recruit later

Identify which gaps to fill later and when and how you will fill them.

Plans to fill other gaps

Lay out plans to fill financial, physical, technical, and operational gaps.

Succession Planning

Succession planning gives you a picture of the people who can take the place of current leaders when they move on—their successors:

1. Identify most important leadership positions.
2. Identify successors to the leaders in those positions in line with future capability plans.
3. Put in place development plans for those successors.

Contingency Planning

Contingency planning gives you a picture of how you're going to fill the gap when a leader needs to be replaced unexpectedly. For the same positions identified in succession planning, lay out plans to back-fill those leaders if there's a sudden, unexpected need by (in no particular order):

• Having the person currently supervising those leaders step in on an interim basis
• Having a peer assume supervisory responsibilities on an interim basis
• Bringing someone in from the outside to supervise on an interim basis
• Having a direct report into that position assume supervisory responsibilities—either permanently or on an interim basis

Talent Management

Talent management helps you optimize the potential of your existing people, developing them in place or moving them across, down, or out as appropriate:

1. Begin with an assessment:
   1. Results versus objectives and cultural ratings (doing the right job, the right way)
   2. Learnings and accomplishments: What worked? What needs to improve? What learned about self?
   3. Strengths: Innate talent + learned knowledge + practiced skills + hard-won experience + apprenticed craft
   4. Gaps
   5. Career interests
2. Based on assessment, map people on role appropriateness versus performance grid:
   1. If in right role and underperforming, invest to improve their performance.
   2. If in right role and effective, support in current role.
   3. If in right role and outstanding, cherish in current role.
   4. If in wrong role and underperforming, move to a better role in or out of the organization.
   5. If in wrong role and effective, move laterally to a better role for them in the organization.
   6. If in wrong role and outstanding, promote them to better role.

      Many organizations find it helpful to do some sort of calibration meeting where people managers can share their assessments of the people that work for them. This allows those managers to get input from others to refine their thinking and calibrate assessments of performance and potential across the organization.

3. Make moves as appropriate. Once you decide people have to go, move.
4. Put in place development plans, which are all about helping people develop. The trap is that some managers focus development plans exclusively on filling gaps/fixing problems. It's better to help people further develop their strengths (as well as filling gaps). Do this for each element:
   1. Strength to develop:
   2. Gaps to fill:
   3. Developmental objectives for the period—build on innate talent with learned knowledge, practiced skill, relevant experience:
   4. Developmental approach and plan
      1. Learn knowledge (reading, courses, training):
      2. Practice skills (On-the-job or other emphasis):
      3. Gain relevant experience (activities, projects, programs, assignments, roles):
      4. Nurture craft-level artistic caring and sensibilities
   5. Resources to be deployed – managers, coaches, trainers (internal or external):
   6. Responsibilities of person being developed:
   7. Responsibilities of manager/coach:
   8. Milestones/timing:
5. Implement and repeat.

Underperforming in Right Role: Invest

Do what it takes to define their roles, fix their management, give them the training or resources they need, and they will perform.

Effective in Right Role: Support

Invest appropriately to support in current roles, helping them continue to grow, perform, and be happy.

Outstanding in Right Role: Cherish

Overinvest to help them grow, perform, and be happy in their current roles.

Underperforming in Wrong Role: Move Out

Treat with respect and compassion and move them out with a minimum of discretionary investment.

Effective in Wrong Role: Move Over

Find them and move them to the right role before they burn out or quit.

Outstanding in Wrong Role: Move Up

Promote them before somebody hires them away. Move them up sooner than you're comfortable and with more support to succeed in their new roles.

Or the classic nine-box (Table 20.4).

Think through the people you have in place and how you can apply them best to immediate priorities and how you're going to build the organization you need to deliver ongoing, accelerated value creation.