Building a team who share your values, and perform to your high standards, is your number one priority as a leader-manager, says Marianne Page
Taking over a new team can be a daunting prospect. Whether you’ve been promoted from the very team you’re about to manage, you’ve moved from a different department or you’re a new hire yourself, the people you’re managing may pose some pretty tough challenges for you. Perhaps they may see you as an imposter or just be so demotivated that you feel it’s an impossible task to get them to the highly engaged, high performing team you want to be a part of.
Your first task should be to introduce yourself and get to know the team a little. You’ll also need to assess your team informally to ascertain how they are managing and what their potential is.
How do you assess your team with fresh, objective eyes?
The most effective way to assess your new team would be to have informal one to one meetings with each of your team; a ‘getting to know each other conversation.’
These would perform many functions if carried out correctly. Go through each person’s job descriptions and roles and responsibilities. These documents are often out of date.
When going through these you can make the necessary updates and ask your team what they enjoy doing, what they dislike and where they need support. This will make them feel heard and create an understanding of your expectations of them without being forceful.
Ask them too what their dreams are, what are their ambitions within the business? You will then begin to develop knowledge of their position within the team and their aspirations. Do you have a mixture of rising stars and steady stayers? You can plot your new team onto a performance vs potential matrix so that you can see each person and imagine their progression. This document will be for your eyes only of course as a visual representation of your thoughts and as a useful exercise for their ongoing performance.
If you could re-hire all of your team tomorrow, who would make the cut?
Once you’ve completed these meetings, ask yourself the question I get every business owner and manager to ask themselves; ‘If you could re-hire all of your team tomorrow, who would make the cut?’
It’s a powerful question, and one that’s rarely answered with ‘everybody’.
There are often individuals who have never been right for the business still plodding along; who should have been weeded out during their probation. Others who have never been given the training, or more likely, the feedback they needed, to become a valuable member of the team.
You might think it’s too soon to ask this question, but your gut is a powerful tool when it comes to people management. If you have truly approached your role with an open mind then listen to your instincts and bear your answers in mind when we move onto the next stage – performance management.
Planning out your next steps
Once you have a clear picture of who is in your team, pull together a people plan that maps out what each individual needs from you, in order to become a valuable team member – what training, what support, what feedback, what performance management.
Are there skill gaps in your team that you need to fill? Can you fill those gaps by training individuals you already have, or will you need to pull a business case together for hiring someone new. How soon will you need to fill the gap you’ve identified? And what about the team member(s) who need to go? What’s your plan for that? Who do you need to speak to? What steps do you need to take? How will you replace their skills/ experience?
Now that you know your individual team members’ roles and responsibilities, their aspirations within the business, and you have formed your own opinion of those who aren’t a great fit, it’s time to continue this level of engagement with your performance review system. Those who are aspiring to improve will need this boost and continuous feedback, and those who are drifting along or have a negative attitude will either see this as an opportunity for improvement and to prove themselves, or give you the opportunity to manage them out based on their performance.
Think about how you’ll structure your performance management system so that it isn’t just the archaic once a year carrot and stick scenario of the past, but a dynamic opportunity for regular check ins and open conversations, with formal quarterly reviews based on more than just quantifiable figures. Make sure you allow merit for team contribution and for going the extra mile, for example.
Once you have a clear picture of who is in your team, pull together a people plan that maps out what each individual needs from you, in order to become a valuable team member – what training, what support, what feedback, what performance management.
Filling skills gaps
Are there skill gaps in your team that you need to fill? Can you fill those gaps by training individuals you already have, or will you need to pull a business case together for hiring someone new. How soon will you need to fill the gap you’ve identified? And what about the team member(s) who need to go? What’s your plan for that? Who do you need to speak to? What steps do you need to take? How will you replace their skills/ experience?
I think you’ll agree with me when I say that we’re not all the same. We all work in different ways; we all have different styles and characteristics. We communicate in different ways, we want to receive communication in different forms, and we get pleasure out of doing different tasks.
The dynamic within a team affects their productivity, the way they operate and ultimately, their success. If a team is out of sync or out of flow, things happen slowly or sometimes, not at all. People are less accurate, demotivated and take more sick days – all signs of a poor culture.
Personality profiling
Your team are all different, so how can you give each of them what they need in the way they need it? How can you get really clear about who they are and how they operate?
The fastest way I know is through profiling, which helps you to understand the personalities and natural energies of the people you manage. While many profiling tools put individuals in boxes, make sure you find a tool that’s all about concentrating on, and then making best use of, individual and team strengths, passion and natural talent. It helps each person in a team to understand the quickest and easiest way for them to get into and stay in flow.
The profile would assesses personality, strengths, productivity, values and behaviour which will give both your team and you as manager the opportunity to focus on strengths and to support each other in areas that you aren’t naturally drawn to.
Having this information helps you to alter the way you communicate, teach, lead and motivate your team, to get the best possible contribution from each of them. Get this right and you will have engaged team members who love what they do.
Imagine a team that worked well together; a team that could anticipate each other’s needs and could back each other up; a team fully ‘in flow’. How big an impact could that team have? What could you achieve together?
Building a team who share your values, and perform to your high standards, is your number one priority as a leader-manager. It’s challenging, and it can be tough, but whether you are building your team from scratch, or taking over a team from someone else, don’t settle for someone who isn’t right for your team, because you get who you settle for.
Marianne Page is an award-winning leader and developer of high performing teams. She inspires successful small business owners to build the simple systems and high performing team that will free them from the day to day of their operation, giving them back the time to enjoy a fulfilling life, confident that their business is running as it should.
Marianne developed a number of high performing teams of her own during her 27-year career as a senior manager with McDonald’s, and developed over 14,000 managers and franchisees over an eight-year period as the company’s Training Manager.
For the past ten years, Marianne has worked closely with successful business owners who have over-complicated their life and their business, helping them to develop the systems and the structure that will make their operation consistent, and free them to work on their business rather than in it.
Marianne is the best-selling author of Simple Logical Repeatable, The McFreedom Report, and Process to Profit – a book hailed as ‘better than The E Myth’.
