5

Build the Team

JULIE DAVIS had risen rapidly through her agency’s ranks as a procurement specialist, earning a reputation for self-direction and reliable handling of complex assignments with minimum supervision along the way. Then she was promoted to lead a new procurement organization—one that had been formed from the consolidation of two former sections and was a result of budget reductions and a recent reorganization. The sections were staffed by a mixture of clerical and administrative employees, as well as contract-administration specialists who directly oversaw the performance of the agency’s various contractors and were empowered to authorize payment when work was completed. Julie’s responsibilities included complex IT and construction procurements for her agency, tasks she was well familiar with, but added to those was the direct supervision of ten newly assigned employees. It was Julie’s first supervisory assignment, and she approached it eagerly.

Julie had thrived in an environment of hands-off supervision and had become wary of the kind of micromanagement she had heard a number of peers complain about. She therefore decided that a light-handed management style would be the approach she would take with her new staff. She would spell out work priorities, set objectives, and allocate resources, but beyond that she believed individual staff members would be better motivated if left considerable discretion about how to carry out their assigned tasks.

After six months, Julie was surprised to learn via a 360-degree performance evaluation that, though her supervisors and her peers praised her performance, some contractors and key internal customers were reporting problematic service and many on her new staff criticized her for being indifferent to their work problems. While a few staff members enjoyed the autonomy they were given, the lack of supervision caused the majority to become risk averse. The result? Important contract-administration problems often were not addressed because staff members were uncertain of the direction they should take and felt uncomfortable about seeking guidance from their new supervisor. Furthermore, when Julie endeavored to trace the sources of customer complaints, she found that her hands-off approach left her unable to evaluate employees adequately. As a result, she could not tell whether the complaints were due to poor employee performance or to inadequate employee training and direction.

After hearing all this, Julie astutely decided to make a midcourse correction in the way she was leading. Her well-intended avoidance of micromanagement was not being seen as a benefit by most staff members and, she feared, could be contributing to customer dissatisfaction. So she began looking at her team-building responsibilities in a new light. As a first move, she met with each staff member to discuss the feedback she had received, assuring him or her that she understood and accepted it, and to ask about some ideas for improvement.

She then scheduled a one-day off-site meeting to review the organization’s performance over the past six months, to identify successes and problem areas, to set performance objectives for the next six months, and to develop an agreed-upon approach to achieving those objectives. This session not only resulted in clarified group and individual performance objectives, but it also enabled Julie to witness firsthand the group’s dynamics and better evaluate the individuals involved.

Once back at work, Julie began a series of development-planning sessions with each staff member to discuss his or her training requirements in the context of the new six-month plan and the employee’s longer-term career aspirations. Julie considered revising who did what work, but she wisely decided to give the staff more time to develop under her new approach before making dramatic changes to the structure.

At the end of the next six months, Julie’s 360-degree evaluation had changed. No contractors or customers had complained. In fact, several of them complimented the improvements in responsiveness they had experienced over the past six months. Moreover, Julie’s staff support was solid.

Fortunately, Julie was astute enough to see that her initial leadership approach was having an effect opposite to the one she sought, and she took quick action to turn the situation from a problem to a success story. Less capable leaders, however, might have become defensive and, by blaming the staff for not responding in the “right” way, made the situation worse. When Julie chose instead to make a midcourse correction to her leadership style, one that focused more attention on her staff, she not only demonstrated her acumen as a leader, but she also brought about rapid improvements in her group’s performance and in her standing as a credible and trustworthy leader.

Repairing the Airplane in Midflight

In most government situations, even if they are start-ups, there are constraints on a new leader’s ability to staff the organization as he or she might prefer at the start. These constraints come in the form of a predetermined budget and personnel allocations, transfers and hires who have high job security and were assigned before a new leader took over, and maybe even labor-management agreements that affect staffing patterns and work processes. Therefore, most new public managers like Julie make do, at least for a while, with the set of people they inherit. Nevertheless, they must not overlook, as Julie did at first, the critical importance of team building.

Building a team in a governmental context is a major transition challenge that can be compared to repairing an airplane in midflight. The plane (i.e., the existing team) is already in flight when you arrive, and you have to be careful that you don’t make too many changes too early. After all, there is work that needs to be done, and team members, even those who are relatively weak, will likely have the critical knowledge necessary to keep the plane in the air. So you have to be careful not to try and change too much too fast, lest you precipitate a crash.

At the same time, it’s easy to conclude that there is nothing much you can do to reshape the team you have inherited. Doing so, however, is a big mistake because people are the most important resource you have to get things done. A weak team inevitably translates into either poor performance or places an intolerable burden on you to pick up the slack and keep things moving. Admittedly, it is difficult to make changes in your team; this is another area where managers in the public sector face more constraints in leading change than their cousins in business. But it’s not impossible to move out really poor performers; it just takes patience and time.

To build your team, begin by assessing it. A thorough evaluation of your existing team provides the necessary foundation for planning how you will restructure it. This evaluation, in turn, will help you assess the potential to make productive changes in goals, measures, and rewards within the boundaries inevitably imposed by existing rules. In parallel with this, you can evaluate and make changes to key team processes—for example, those concerning information sharing and decision making. Of course, good processes can’t turn sow’s ears into silk purses, but they can help you compensate for weaker performers and leverage the strengths of your stronger players. By instituting a stronger system of performance management, for example, Julie was able to significantly improve her staff’s performance.

Assessing Your New Team

Whenever you assume a new leadership position in an organization, you are likely to inherit some good performers, some average ones, and some who need significant improvement. You also will inherit a group with its own internal dynamics and politics—indeed, some members may even have hoped to be selected for the job you now hold. During your first few months, therefore, it is important to sort out who is who, what roles each individual plays, and how the group has worked in the past.

Establishing Your Evaluative Criteria

Inevitably, you will find yourself forming impressions of team members as you meet them. These early impressions are important, but do not let them hold you hostage. A more rigorous evaluation will be needed before final determinations can be made about individual performance and potential.

To assess your team in a thorough and even-handed way, establish the evaluative criteria you will use. On what basis will you evaluate the people on your team? What attributes will be more and less valuable? Few new leaders are consciously aware of the criteria they use. This creates potential vulnerabilities because, as we will discuss later, your criteria should depend on the situation you are facing.

Start by considering these criteria:

• Competence. Does this person have the necessary technical competence and experience to do the job?

• Judgment. Does this person exercise good judgment when faced with time pressures or when information is ambiguous?

• Energy. Does this team member approach his or her tasks enthusiastically or lethargically?

• Focus. Is this person capable of setting or adhering to priorities, or is he or she prone to divergence?

• Relationships. Does this person get along with other team members and support collective decisions, or is he or she difficult to work with?

• Trust. Can you rely on this person to keep his or her word and follow through on commitments?

To get a quick read on the criteria you use, complete table 5-1. Allow yourself 100 points to divide among the six criteria according to the relative weight you place on them when you evaluate direct reports. Record those numbers in the middle column, making sure they add up to 100. Now identify one of these as your threshold criterion. If a person does not meet a basic threshold on that dimension, nothing else matters. Label your threshold issue with an asterisk in the right-hand column.

Now take a step back. Does this accurately represent the values you wish to apply when you evaluate members of your team? If so, does this analysis suggest any potential blind spots in the way you evaluate people? Your selection of your threshold criterion is critical, as we will discuss further later, and should be done with care.

Your assessments are likely to contain certain assumptions about what you can and cannot change about the people who work for you. For instance, if you score relationships low and judgment high, you may think that relationships within your team are something you can influence, whereas you cannot influence someone’s capacity for judgment. Likewise, you may have designated trust as a threshold issue—many leaders do—because you believe that you must be able to trust those who report to you, and because you believe that trustworthiness is a trait that cannot be changed.

TABLE 5-1

Ranking evaluative criteria

Evaluative criteria	Relative weights (Divide 100 points among the six issues)	Threshold issue (Designate one issue with an asterisk)
Competence
Judgment
Energy
Focus
Relationships
Trust
	Total = 100 points

How would this exercise have helped Julie avoid that early warning about the weaknesses in her chosen leadership strategy? She could have gotten a quick reading on whether her new staff members were positioned to perform well independently, as her handsoff approach assumed, or whether they required more structure and direction during the first phase of the transition to the new organization and a new leader. Furthermore, she would have got early insight into who among her staff were likely to be problem performers and compensated for it by reallocating the workload, assigning the more critical work to the employees who seemed most likely to perform well under her system of leadership. In this way, contractor and customer dissatisfaction could have been avoided during the transition phase.

Factoring In the Situation

To what extent should your evaluation criteria vary depending on the nature of the ST_ARS situation you are facing? Potentially, a lot. In a sustaining-success situation, for example, you may have time to develop one or two high-potential members of your team. In a turnaround, by contrast, you will need people who can perform at a high level right away. Likewise, in a start-up you may be willing to trade off some trust for a higher level of energy and focus. In a realignment you will need people who recognize that changes need to be made, just not necessarily at the speed demanded in a turnaround. It is worthwhile to spend some time thinking about the criteria you will use to evaluate your new team. Having done so, you will be better prepared to make a rigorous and systematic evaluation.

Julie Davis missed an early opportunity to understand that she was facing a mixture of realignment and sustaining-success situations. If she had taken the time to do some assessments of her new staff before deciding on a leadership strategy, she would have been in a better position to understand the staff’s requirements and invested more time communicating her vision for change while still maintaining a high level of customer service.

Making Individual Assessments

After arming yourself with deeper insight into the criteria you will use, you should make individual assessments of your direct reports. The first test is whether an employee fails to meet your threshold requirement. This is why your identification of the threshold criterion counts for so much in your evaluation process. For example, if you rated technical competence as your threshold requirement, you should carefully review such measures as error rates and consult with your customers as to which, if any, team member’s work often must be returned or amended because of technical omissions or mistakes. If relationships are your threshold requirement, carefully observe who in your group meetings is supportive of others and who may be unduly competitive or self-serving.

For people who meet your threshold requirement, you need to take the next step and assess relative strengths and weaknesses. If you are managing a team whose members have diverse functional expertise—such as a collection of administrative support functions, or a group responsible for research as well as engineering work—you will need to get a handle on their competence in their respective areas. This can be difficult, especially for first-time managers. If you came to your position from the inside, 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 template for each of the functions. A good template consists of guidelines and warning signs for evaluating people in functions such as finance, HR, procurement, and security. To develop each template, talk to experienced managers about what they look for in these functions.

How do you go about making these assessments? Start by meeting one-on-one with each member of your new team. These meetings may take the form of informal discussions, formal performance reviews, or a combination of both, but your own preparation and focus should be consistent, following these four steps:

1. Prepare for each meeting. Familiarize yourself with each person’s technical or professional skills so you can assess how he or she functions on the team. Review available personnel history, performance data, and past appraisals. Where appropriate, consult with customers and others who have had firsthand experience with the individual’s work.

2. Foster dialogue. Too many performance interviews turn out to be monologues from the supervisor. These interviews should be planned around standardized questions, such as:

• What do you think of our group’s current level of performance?

• What are the biggest challenges and opportunities facing us in the near term? In the long term?

• What resources could help us do our work better?

• How could we improve the way the team works together?

• If you were in my position, what would you pay attention to most?

3. Watch for verbal and nonverbal clues. Note word choices, body language, and sensitive topics:

• 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 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 be 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?

4. Test their judgment. Keep in mind that some very bright people have poor judgment, and some people of satisfactory competence have extraordinary judgment. It is essential to be clear about the mix of knowledge and judgment you need from key people. The best way to assess judgment is to work with a person for a while and observe whether he or she is able to make sound predictions and develop good strategies for avoiding problems. Both those 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, which are what judgment is all about.

As you make these assessments, discipline yourself to take notes and record impressions after your meetings. Eventually you should be able to fill out table 5-2 for each of your direct reports.

Assessing 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 available. If your organization conducts regular climate or morale surveys of individual units, examine them as well.

• Systematically ask questions. Assess individual responses to the common set of questions you asked when you met with individual team members. Are their answers overly uniform? If so, this may suggest an agreed-upon party line, but it could also mean that everyone shares the same impression of what is going on. Do the responses show little consistency? If so, the team may lack coherence. It is up to you to evaluate what you observe.

• Probe group dynamics. Observe how the group interacts in your early meetings. Do you detect any alliances? Particular attitudes? Leadership roles? Who tends to defer to whom on certain topics? When a particular person is speaking, do others indicate attention, disagreement, or frustration? Pay attention to these signs to test your early insights and to detect coalitions and conflicts.

TABLE 5-2

Individual evaluations

Name:
Evaluative criteria	Importance of criteria	Strengths	Weaknesses	Confidence in assessment
Energy: Is this person a source of the right kind of energy?
Expertise: Is this person a superior representative of his or her function?
Match to situation: Will this person be effective in the business situation(s) that you are confronting?
Teamwork: Will this person be an effective member of the team as a whole?
	Total = 100

Additional comments:

Though this approach might not have been much help to Julie at the start because her team was newly formed, she correctly undertook the task at the six-month point by scheduling the offsite planning session. The intensity of such meetings and the contentiousness of some of the issues discussed among team members can provide an excellent opportunity for a new leader to discern political and cultural indicators and to integrate those indicators into a strategy for performance improvements.

Restructuring Your Team

Once your evaluations of each individual are completed, you will be equipped to make decisions about what changes you will seek to make in your team. This will, as discussed previously, depend also on the situation you are facing.

Your goal is to assign people to one of the following categories:

• Keep in place. The person is performing well in his or her current job.

• Keep and develop. The individual needs more training and development.

• Reassign. The person is a strong performer but is not in a position that makes the most of his or her skills or personal qualities.

• Observe for a period. The person requires further evaluation and needs a personal development plan.

• Replace—high priority. As soon as the opportunity arises, the person should be replaced.

• Replace—low priority. This person should be replaced, but you can afford to wait.

Use table 5-3 to summarize your conclusions about your direct reports.

After completing your summary of evaluations, you should have a clear sense of who within your group has the potential to move up. It may be tempting to move swiftly on these insights, but take care to move deliberately. Your initial impressions are likely to evolve, and those whom you deem high performers today might stumble upon further testing and experience. Similarly, those whom you assessed as having lower potential may pleasantly surprise you as you undertake to implement new policies or approaches to the work at hand. Also, promotions that result from these evaluations must always be handled deftly; moving from being a peer to holding a more senior position is one of the hardest transitions of all, regardless of level. The key is for you to take performance evaluations seriously, which means giving your first impressions a chance to prove out in actual performance before making personnel moves that, especially in government, are most difficult to reverse if they don’t work out.

TABLE 5-3

Summary of evaluations

Team member	Keep in place (high performing)	Keep in place (high potential)	Keep but move	Replace (high priority)	Replace (low priority)

You also may be tempted to try to replace low-performing people right away. But take the time to consider alternatives, as Julie wisely did. Replacing people probably is not an immediate option in many government organizations in any case, and, even if it is, if not done right it can demoralize the new team and damage your credibility.

Instead, due to the terms of various civil service regulations and labor-management agreements, it will more than likely be necessary to undertake formal remedial training efforts designed to bring the individual’s performance up to satisfactory levels. This will be a time-consuming effort, but, when successful, it will improve the performance of your entire team and build your credibility as an engaged and trustworthy leader.

Even if you do not face these constraints, removing an employee can be a difficult and time-consuming process that can take many months (see “Managing Poor Performers Out of the Organization”). If there is an inadequate paper trail documenting the person’s poor performance, it may take even longer. Fortunately, there are alternatives to outright termination, such as:

• Lateral reassignments within the team. Shift the person to another position that better suits his or her skills. While there often are regulatory conditions to lateral reassignments within a team, they can help you work through the short-term problem of having a poor performer in a key position.

• Lateral reassignments elsewhere in the organization. Work with your human resource office to help the person find a more suitable position in the larger organization. Sometimes, when done right, this kind of reassignment can benefit all concerned. However, do not pursue this alternative unless you believe the person can perform well in the new assignment. Simply shifting a problem performer onto someone else will damage your credibility as well as your ability to work with your peers on future problems.

Keep in mind that you need to keep the team performing well while at the same time you work to get the team you need to achieve your performance goals. You may therefore need to keep a disgruntled employee, a destructively competitive employee, an underperformer, or other problematic team member on the job while engineering a way to find and bring on board a replacement. (One leader we interviewed made it a point to hold off on shifting out of an organization people whose knowledge she could leverage during her transition.) Discreetly look for a successor by evaluating other team members or people from elsewhere in the organization and seeing who has the potential to move up. Be sure to work closely with your HR department, however; reassignments can be considered disciplinary actions or might have ramifications from your equal employment office if not handled properly. You do not want to enter this minefield without expert guidance.

During every phase of the team-restructuring process, take pains to treat everyone with respect. Even if people in your unit agree that a particular person should be replaced, your reputation will suffer if your actions are viewed as unfair. Do whatever you can to communicate the seriousness and care you are giving to the process of assessing each individual’s capabilities and evaluating training and development needs. The people who work for you will form lasting impressions of your leadership abilities based on how you manage this part of your job.

Aligning Goals, Measures, and Rewards

Having the right people in the right jobs is essential, but it is not enough. To achieve your highest priorities and secure some early wins, you will need to define how each team member can best support your key goals. This process calls for breaking down the larger mission, goals, and strategy into their component pieces, working to assign team members responsibility for particular elements, and making each individual accountable for managing his or her goals. How do you encourage accountability? Through clear and effective design of performance metrics and incentives.

After Julie Davis received early warning signs that her lighthanded style was not getting the results she was seeking, she took some strategic steps—quickly meeting with employees to assure them that their feedback was heard, scheduling an off-site planning meeting to discuss the group’s performance problems and to establish goals, and then following up with individual meetings to set personal development plans. These moves corrected the misalignment of goals and measurements that were set up early on.

Defining Performance Metrics

In government agencies at all levels, macro performance criteria may be defined by statute, regulation, or centralized administrative authorities. Public-sector managers often are responsible for meeting those criteria, without having the necessary authority to marshal the resources and other tools needed to accomplish them.

While this scenario is especially true at the senior-most levels of governmental organizations, it is also a condition found in middlemanagement ranks. It does little good, for example, for a new manager of a procurement activity, such as Julie Davis, to insist on reducing the time it takes to award a contract when governmentwide regulations specify mandatory time requirements and bidder appeal rights that slow the process. Likewise, the director of a social service agency can do very little to improve efficiency and quality in handling an increasing caseload when the legislature reduces budgets across the board without regard for how workloads will be affected. Similar examples abound throughout the public sector and often make creating specific performance criteria at the agency level a difficult task.

Still, setting exacting performance measurements of individual effort is not impossible. Though macro level goals may be predefined, agency managers at all levels still have micro level influence over individual and small-group performance. In our research we encountered many examples of leaders at the local, state, and federal levels who, though constrained by governmentwide policies, devised methods for translating general mandates into specific, measurable goals for their subordinate managers to use in developing internal performance metrics. As a rule, this was done by allotting the time to consult with people throughout the organization and gaining an understanding of organizational strengths and weaknesses before setting performance goals.

The existence of overlying constraints on resources and flexibility makes designing meaningful performance metrics a challenge, but it’s one that can be met with the approaches discussed in previous chapters. Establishing and sticking to clear and explicit individual performance metrics is the best way to encourage accountability. That is, whenever possible, a manager should follow Julie Davis’s example and set performance measures that will let him or her know unambiguously whether a team member has achieved the assigned goals. In doing so, avoid generally defined goals, such as “improve productivity” or “reduce expenditures.” Instead, set specific targets for improvements measured in percentages or actual dollars.

Designing Incentives Systems

Any system for motivating people will consist of a blend of push and pull tools, as illustrated in figure 5-1. Generally, push tools are things like financial compensation and awards plans, performancemeasurement systems, and budget increases for success in attaining a goal that motivate people mainly through the fear of the consequences of failure or the promise of financial reward for success. Pull tools, such as a compelling and widely shared vision, a culture that recognizes success, potential for professional development and advancement, and a motivated and engaged team inspire people by invoking a positive and exciting image of the future.

FIGURE 5-1

Push and pull tools

Push tools align effort through authority, fear, and reward. Pull tools align effort through inspiration. To use pull tools, leaders must have very strong visioning and communication skills.

One of the starkest areas of contrast between the public and private sectors is the nature and motivating power of financial performance incentives. In business this issue tends to be a relatively straightforward matter of sharing in the financial benefits derived from a successful business plan. In government, however, using financial incentives as a way of promoting improved individual or group performance is notably more complicated for a number of reasons.

First, the purpose of a career civil service in a democratic system is to carry out the various functions of government defined by the legislature, courts, and elected administration as being in the public interest. Reliance on financial incentives to accomplish that can be seen by some as being too entrepreneurial and, therefore, in conflict with the concept of a professional corps of public administrators conscientiously executing the policies of an elected administration in a way that best serves the public, not personal financial gain.

Second, partisan and ideological sentiments about the proper role of government in American society—sentiments that often tend to devolve into positions that either promote or discourage professional public service as a career choice—influence attitudes in a particular elected administration about what level of reward is appropriate for exceptionally performing government administrators. Some believe such performance should be incentivized and rewarded above standard salary levels; others maintain that a high level of performance is just part of the administrator’s job and not worthy of additional financial reward.

Finally, on the individual level, motivation to work in government can range from the altruistic desire to work for the public good to the personal predilection to seek relatively secure employment at the cost of potentially higher financial remuneration. As a generalization, people who make their careers in the public sector are not as motivated by money as those who choose the private sector. As a result, though monetary awards are always appreciated and no doubt have varying degrees of motivating value for different individuals, people in the public sector generally tend not to see them as a principal measure of success or an essential condition of continued employment.

There most certainly are monetary incentives available in the public sector, usually in the form of specified amounts tied to individual performance evaluation, group performance, and employeesuggestion systems that result in measurable financial benefits. These financial benefits, however, tend to be fixed and limited in amount because of the prevailing policy and political belief that any financial benefit derived from the efficiency of government operations should accrue largely to taxpayers in the form of reduced government expenditures. Thus, though the use of monetary incentives is not without value in government organizations on an individual or small-group level, it does not have the motivating push-tool power that one would typically expect it to have in the private sector because of the nonentrepreneurial nature of the public sector. So how do you build incentives into public sector organizations?

The limited power of monetary incentives coupled with the strong sense of job security that prevails across the government sector leave public-sector managers heavily reliant on pull tools. That is why the lessons of the previous chapters are essential. Getting off to a good start by understanding your mandate and the type of organizational situation you face, learning what is necessary, and forming constructive working relationships with your team and stakeholders is critical to establishing the sort of leadership strategy that will pull those who work for you and with you toward accomplishing your most important goals.

Designing an incentive system that depends heavily on pull tools is a challenge. The correct mix of individual and group incentives depends on the relative importance of independent and interdependent activity for your unit’s overall success. What you must avoid is inadvertently setting up incentives that encourage the pursuit of personal goals when teamwork is necessary, or vice versa.

Establishing New Team Processes

Once the team and its goals, measures, and incentives are in place, the next step is to think through how you want the team to work. What processes will shape how the team gets its collective work done? Leaders vary strikingly in how they handle meetings, make decisions, resolve conflict, and divide up responsibilities and tasks.

The implication is that you should be careful not to plunge into introducing new ways of doing things too precipitously. If you are taking over an existing unit, for example, spend some time familiarizing yourself with how your team worked before your arrival and how well its processes worked. In doing this you can decide which processes you want to retain and which you want to change.

Assessing Existing Team Processes

How do you go about learning about your team’s existing processes? As discussed earlier in chapter 3, talk with team members and support staff, and, where possible, meet or talk with your predecessor. Ask team members to brief you on their functions and to explain key processes. Probe for answers to these questions:

• Participants’ roles. Who influenced your predecessor most? Who liked to play devil’s advocate? Who avoided uncertainty? Whose opinions seemed to be most respected? Who was the peacemaker? The dissident?

• Team meetings. How often did your team meet? Who participated and who set the agendas?

• Decision making. Who made what kinds of decisions? Who was consulted on decisions? Who was informed once decisions were made?

• Leadership style. What leadership style did your predecessor prefer—how did he or she prefer to communicate, motivate, and make decisions? How does your predecessor’s leadership style compare with yours? If there are marked differences between those styles, how will change likely affect the way the team is used to working?

Targeting Processes for Change

Once you are confident that you understand what has and has not worked well for your team in the past, it is time to apply that knowledge and establish the new processes you see as needed. For example, in our research we interviewed the head of a large federal agency who was brought in because the agency had had an embarrassing performance failure and was in need of a turnaround. One of the things the new agency head found shortly after his arrival was a twenty-page document spelling out in excruciating detail how decisions were made. Its effect was simply to diffuse accountability and paralyze the agency’s ability to respond to problems.

The new executive responded by discarding that document and instituting a more direct system of group decision making. Many new leaders decide that their team’s meeting and decision-making processes would benefit from revision, and, if that is the case for you, the sooner you begin spelling out the changes you envision, the better.

Altering Who Participates

One common team process problem—and a great opportunity to send a message that change is on the way—concerns who participates in key meetings. In some organizations, such as the agency we just mentioned, meetings tend to be too inclusive, with too many people involved in discussions. The result is inefficient decision making. In others meetings can be too restrictive, thereby sending a message of managerial unilateralism, excluding potentially valuable insights and perspectives on the matters at hand, and limiting broad accountability and buy-in for the decisions themselves. Balancing the need for efficiency with the motivational benefits of wide participation requires careful consideration of your unit’s operating needs. A good approach is to structure meetings narrowly or widely, depending on the issues to be decided. As with most things in management, flexibility is key.

In Julie Davis’s case, she wisely adopted an inclusive approach that invited equal participation by staff members at all levels. She was able to do so in part because her staff was small; when larger groups are involved, including representative “slices” of the organization might be the better approach.

Managing Decision Making

Many new leaders have difficulty establishing the best decisionmaking processes at the start. This happens because they have a style with which they are comfortable and they believe they must be consistent or risk confusing their team members. But there are several ways to make good decisions; the key to knowing which is best in a given situation and to communicating why to team members, is establishing a decision-making framework based on the nature of the decision itself. The possible approaches can be arrayed on a spectrum ranging from unilateral to unanimous consent, as illustrated in figure 5-2.

Sometimes decisions must be made either unilaterally or in consultation with just a few individuals. When that happens, of course, the risk is that you may miss critical information and insights and wind up with lukewarm support because others have the impression that only a favored few have influence. At the other extreme, processes that require unanimous consent tend to suffer from decision diffusion, going on and on and either never really reaching a conclusion or, if one is reached, settling for the least-common-denominator compromise. In either case, critical opportunities and threats are not effectively addressed. Between those extremes are the decisionmaking processes most leaders use:

• Consult-and-decide. When a leader solicits information and advice from a group or from a series of individuals but reserves the right to make the final call, he or she is using the consult-and-decide approach. In effect, the leader separates the process of information gathering and analyzing from the process of evaluating and reaching a conclusion, relying on the group for one but not the other.

• Build consensus. When the leader seeks information and analysis as well as buy-in for any decision, that is the buildconsensus approach. The goal is not full consensus but sufficient consensus, meaning that a critical mass of the group believes the decision to be the right one and, importantly, that the rest agree that they can live with and support implementation of the decision.

FIGURE 5-2

The decision-making spectrum

When should you choose one of these processes over the other? The answer is not, “If I am under time pressure, I will use consultand-decide.” Why? Because although it may be the quicker route to a decision, you will not necessarily reach the desired outcome any faster. In fact, you could end up spending more time trying to sell the decision after the fact or pressuring people to implement it. Those leaders who like to take quick action are most at risk of this; they want to reach conclusion by making a call but may end up jeopardizing their goals in the process.

The following rules of thumb can help when you must decide which decision-making process to use:

• If the decision is likely to be divisive—creating winners and losers—then you are usually better off using consult-anddecide and taking the heat. A build-consensus approach will just fail to reach a good outcome and make everyone mad at each other. Decisions about sharing losses or pain among a group of people are best made by the leader.

• If the decision requires energetic support from people whose performance you cannot adequately observe and control, then you are better off using the build-consensus approach. Consult-and-decide might be faster, but it also risks not getting the desired outcome.

• If you are managing a team of people who are relatively inexperienced, then you usually are better off relying on consultand-decide until you assessed your team and developed their capabilities. Trying a build-consensus approach with an inexperienced team risks creating frustration, and you likely will make the decision anyway, thereby undercutting the effort to build teamwork.

• If you are put in a position of supervising people with whom you must establish your new authority (such as supervising former peers), then you are better off relying on consultand-decide to make some early key decisions. You can relax and rely more on building consensus once your authority has been established.

Your approach to decision making also will be heavily influenced by which of the ST_ARS situations you are in. Start-ups and turnarounds are situations in which consult-and-decide works best as the problems tend to be technical rather than cultural or political in nature. Also, the staff might desire strong leadership to help them out; staffs often view consult-and-decide leaders as strong. In realignment or sustaining-success situations, on the other hand, leaders often have to deal with strong in-place teams and confront cultural and political issues. These sorts of challenges are usually best dealt with through the build-consensus approach.

To alter your decision-making approach to the nature of the decision being made, you sometimes will have to restrain your natural inclinations. You are likely to have a preference for either consult-and-decide or build-consensus decision making. But these are only preferences, not hard wiring. If you are a natural consultand-decide person, you should experiment with building consensus in suitable situations. If you are a build-consensus person, you should feel free to adopt a consult-and-decide approach when you believe it is appropriate to do so.

To avoid confusion, consider explaining to your team members what approach you are going to use and why. Most important, whatever process you use must be seen as fair. Even those who may disagree with your decision often will support it if they feel that their views and opinions have been heard and sincerely considered, and if you have given them a plausible rationale for why you made the call you did. The flip side of this is not engaging in building consensus for a decision already made. This charade almost never fools anyone and just winds up damaging your precious credibility and the probability that your decision will be effectively implemented. You are better off just using consult-and-decide.

Finally, you can shift between build-consensus and consult-anddecide modes as you gain deeper understanding of people’s interests and positions. It may make sense, for example, to begin in the build-consensus mode but reserve the right to shift to consult-anddecide if the process becomes too divisive. It also might make sense to begin with consult-and-decide and shift to build consensus if it emerges that energetic implementation is critical and consensus is possible.

Conclusion

Team building is arguably the most important, and is certainly among the most difficult, of the tasks facing new leaders. This is the case in both public- and private-sector organizations. But in government agencies the process is complicated by restrictive rules, imposed goals, and the unavailability of powerful financial incentives. Nevertheless, our research has revealed many cases of extraordinary leaders who, regardless of the constraints, have achieved success in motivating the people in their organizations to achieve new successes. The lesson that Julie Davis learned about the need for clarifying performance goals, for example, proved valuable both in terms of improving the performance of her organization and in demonstrating to her staff and key customers her skill as a leader in adapting to changing circumstances.