Building High-Performing Teams in New Organizations

You are appointed leader of a recently created department resulting from a company reorg – how do you build your team?

Introduction

New departments and teams are perennially created across organizations. Sometimes, these are a result of restructuring to bring administrative efficiencies in the organization. On other occasions, these are created to work on strategic initiatives for a company. Regardless of the reason, the one thing they all have in common is that, while they have a certain mandate and set of objectives, tactical details are often left open for the team to figure out. These include processes to follow, systems to be used, team members to be hired, KPIs to be targeted and initiatives to be prioritized. One of the most important decisions is staffing the team. Team members set the tone for the team culture driving its effectiveness and efficiency. If you are the Director of such a team, it is critical to ensure that people with the right skillset, competencies, and attitudes are in the right roles. Over the course of my career, I’ve had a chance to build teams in supply chain and R&D organizations across industries. Based on those experiences, I will discuss a bottom-up approach in this post on building high-performing teams in new organizations.

Where do you start?

Established positions in any company have detailed and stable job descriptions that typically don’t change much over time. So, the question is what do you do for newly created roles? It is possible to leverage the description of similar roles elsewhere in the company. This is based on the assumption that the goals of the other teams with comparable roles are also similar, which may not necessarily be the case. However, we can look into the underlying hard and soft skills embedded within these job descriptions and extract those that align with the new team’s mandate. Let’s look at hard skills first. There needs to be an understanding of the business whether you are in a supply chain planning or R&D role. Any role would require some functional knowledge as well. A demand planner, for example, will need to understand how supply chains work and where their role fits in. Finally, there will be an expectation of developing a minimum level of competency in the processes and systems used by the team. Then there are soft skills. For instance, communication is quite important, whether you are a scientist or a financial analyst. Others such as initiative taking and relationship-building are especially important for members of recently formed teams.

The hiring process

Once we have identified skills required for the roles, the question is what an ideal distribution of the competencies across the team is. Do we want all team members to be equally proficient in all the skills or do we want team members to have a minimum baseline competency across all skills and bring their individual strengths in certain areas to their roles?

From my experience, having every team member meet just the minimum baseline across all skills can lead to a stable but lower performing team. On the other hand, while having team members score high across all required attributes would be remarkable, it will likely be challenging to find people to fill the roles. A middle-of-the-road solution with some team members being more proficient in select attributes than others is not just practical but facilitates healthy discussions within the team and brings increased diversity of perspective into the team. This is taking a leaf out of the book of a team sport such as Soccer, where someone excels in a center-forward role, while someone else as a goalkeeper.

To illustrate with an example, let’s create a table with team members and required skills for their roles. The rows include the hard and soft skills, while the columns represent the employees. Let’s assume that this team has four members: Jamie, Jane, Jas, Jerry who are planners in a recently created S&OP team that does demand forecasting, supply planning and inventory management. They support different business lines within the same company. The scores (ranging from 1 to 4) highlight the varying levels of competency across each skill for each team member. We require team members to have a minimum score of 2 across all attributes either at the time of hiring or ramp up to this minimum score by the end of the first three months in the role.

Team members will gravitate naturally towards certain attributes over time. While the team in this example is performing with a score above the average score of 2.5 across all attributes, there exist opportunities for further enhancement. For instance, we may want to look at ways to increase the business knowledge score for the overall team. We may also want to customize a training plan for each team member to enhance their scores per their interests, as long as they meet the minimum threshold score of 2 across all attributes. A competency matrix such as the one above can be refreshed periodically (potentially once per quarter) to identify focus areas if the team scores collectively or for any individual start to trend in the wrong direction.

So, you’ve built a team … what’s next?

Once the team is in place and stabilized for 3-to 6-months, how do we maximize productivity of the team utilizing each individual’s strength. There are a few options that can be employed by the team’s leadership:

· Buddy system

· Dedicated initiatives

· Best practice sharing

Let’s delve deeper into these mechanisms. In a Buddy system, each team member is paired with another member such that they can complement each other’s skills and learn from one another. For instance, from our example earlier, Jane may learn more about analytics from Jerry, while helping expand Jerry’s business knowledge in a more informal setting. A second approach may be to distribute initiatives that increase the value proposition of the team to the organization, to team members who excel in a particular area. For instance, Jerry would leverage his analytical skills and lead an initiative to build dashboards to analyze historical demand trends at a customer and product level in a bid to increase forecasting accuracy. Similarly, Jamie would draw upon her expertise to develop an advanced process that facilitates quicker and latest inputs from sales and marketing into the plans. Another popular mechanism is best practice sharing, where team members working with similar objectives share anecdotes and data on what’s worked well for them while supporting different businesses. In this case, we may have a rotating system, where the members share their experiences in team meetings on a weekly basis. Over time, these best practices can be documented in an SOP or playbook that would be a reference document for the entire team, and can also be used for onboarding team members.

To summarize…

It can be exciting to be part of a new team, where we have the flexibility to shape its functioning by establishing processes, systems, KPIs among others. At the same time, there are challenges associated with not having a well-defined roadmap on how best to carry out the team’s mandate and on growing the team. To increase the value for the broader company, we need high performing teams. In this post, we talked about how to build effective teams by first identifying the skill sets needed in the team, followed by staffing the team with individuals with varying levels of expertise across attributes, and then providing a mechanism for the team members to raise competency levels through knowledge transfers. Over time, the team’s scope may expand to supporting more businesses or increasing its functional activities. We would use the same mental model to grow the size of the team to support this increase in scope.

Thanks for reading. Hope you found it useful. Feel free to send me your comments at [email protected]. Let’s connect on LinkedIn