Is he or she ready to take over a bigger and more powerful team? Perhaps you have already passed that first test and are in the midst of a new one. The testing will never cease, not even if you become your company's president. All leaders--whether they head a three-person task group, a department, a division, or an entire company--must continually prove to themselves and to all those watching that they possess the ability to lead a group of people smoothly, efficiently, harmoniously, and contentedly toward a goal. Must prove, in other words, that they possess the quality we call leadership.
It often seems like an elusive and mysterious quality. There are some who find it so mysterious that they believe it can't even be defined. "It's something inside--who knows what it is?" says a Hemingway character. Others believe it is a quality you are born with or without. They think you can no more easily change your inborn leadership capacity than the color of your eyes.
I am perfectly sure none of this is true. The ability to lead a group well is, at its root, a simple and straightforward skill that can be learned by any intelligent man or woman. The finer points of this skill, like any skill, may take many years to master, but the fundamentals can be grasped and applied quickly.
The fundamentals are the same no matter where in the company hierarchy you may stand. You must learn them if you look forward to continued security and success in the business world. With few exceptions, any upward step in business means taking over leadership of a bigger or more important team. Whatever team you now lead, whatever team you hope or expect to be promoted into, it is essential that you get those people together and form them into a group that works.
If they perform their jobs poorly, it won't be their fault. In the eyes of management people above you, it will be yours.
Look, Listen, Ask
The crucial first step in getting a team together is to study it and its environment with the greatest care. Astonishing numbers of business group leaders fail to do this, including some top executives I've known.
This first, exploratory step--or, more accurately, series of steps--is something you should undertake as soon as you are assigned to lead any group. If you are already in a supervisory position but didn't conduct a careful exploration when you began the job, now is the time to do it.
These are the key parts of the exploration:
THE MISSION Find out precisely what this group of people is supposed to accomplish. What is meant to be the end product of your group, and just how does it contribute to fulfillment of the company's all-encompassing goal?
Try to boil it down to a concise statement: "This company's goal is to make money for its stockholders by manufacturing and selling children's clothing profitably. My group is part of the accounts--receivable department, whose mission is to bill customers and monitor payments. The specific mission of my group is to get in touch with delinquent customers, find out what the problem is in each case, and take whatever action seems appropriate, always remembering that our main purpose is to get the money fast."
In seeking such a description of your group's goals, go to many sources, not just one. If there is a written function description in a manual or some other directive, start with that. If possible, talk to the person who headed your group before you; to executives above you who depend on what your group does; to people from other groups that interface with yours; and to your group members.
You are likely to find that various people differ widely--even wildly--in their conceptions of what your group is supposed to do. This is why it is a bad idea to depend on just one source for your mission description.
Your group's previous leader, for example, may have been a man or woman who was afraid of taking responsibility for decisions, and who therefore went to considerable lengths to avoid making any decisions at all. This person's description of the group mission might well have a gaping hole in it:
THE MISSION-- Yes, well, we're supposed to get in touch with delinquent accounts, find out what the problem is ..
Accurate so far, but the hole starts to appear:
.. And then we route the case to whoever has authority to handle it. Like, if it's less than $100 we get the Billing people to send out a reminder. And if it's delinquent more than sixty days, we turn it over to Joe Williams in Collections. And if..."
In other words, your predecessor saw this group as nothing more than a traffic-switching operation. The whole purpose of the group, as your predecessor saw it, was to sort cases into categories and then unload them on other people--thus neatly evading all decision-making responsibility.
But if you talk to people above you, you may find that this is precisely what they don't want. "Your group's main job is to handle as many of these cases as you can by yourselves," a senior executive may well tell you. "Use your head. Use your imagination. Do what needs to be done. Don't pass the buck up here or over there unless you really have to. We're all busy. We don't have time for a lot of these cases. That's what you get paid for..."
THE JOB--Your group will accomplish its mission, or will fall short, in direct correlation with the members' performance in their separate jobs. If they perform poorly, it could be mostly their fault--but, as I remarked before, they won't get the bulk of the blame. You will.
Your initial task, then, is to study their separate jobs--what they are supposed to do, what they think they are supposed to do, and what, in fact, gets done.
If there is any shortfall in the team's effectiveness in accomplishing its mission, you are likely to find the problem can be traced to either or both of two roots:
1. Your people are blocked or hindered in some way in the performance of their jobs. Or, more commonly
2. Your people's perceptions of their jobs are off-target. The jobs they are actually doing, in other words, are not the jobs that need to be done in order to fulfill the group's mission.
The first kind of problem, a blockage or hindrance, is often comparatively simple both to analyze and to fix. In one company I'm familiar with, for example, there was a small team of people whose function required them to spend a lot of time making and receiving long-distance phone calls. The company's phone system was antiquated. There were long waits to place outgoing calls; incoming calls often got misrouted and lost; connections were likely to be broken at any time.
In this case it was the group leader's responsibility to be aware of the problem, to understand how it reduced the group's effectiveness, and to do something about it. For years, the group had had a leader who simply tried to shrug it off; the team's performance seemed adequate to him, and he lacked the energy to try to improve it. Then he was forced into early retirement, and a woman took over. She made it her business to bring the group's problem to the attention of top management. She fought for her people. When a better phone system was finally installed, the group's productivity soared.
And she got the credit, of course. There are two sides to every coin. The leader gets most of the blame when a group fails--but gets the big prize when it succeeds. That woman has enjoyed steady raises and promotions ever since.
The second kind of problem--people's faulty perceptions of their jobs--is more common. It is particularly common among old-timers in a team--not necessarily older people, but those who have been on the team for a long time.
For one thing, you are likely to find veteran employees still operating under instructions they received years ago. In the interim many things may have changed: the company's markets, its procedures, its philosophy. But not all employees are aware of these changes or have figured out or been told how to adjust their job functions. This is why anachronisms are so common in the business world. You will see veteran employees laboriously entering figures in handwritten account books, though computerized records make all that work unnecessary.
For another thing, veteran employees tend to exaggerate the importance and sanctity of their own jobs. They become angry and defensive if you suggest that certain ritualized functions are unnecessary or can be pared down or done faster.
I recall being called in by a large company to evaluate a troubled department. Everyone in the department complained bitterly of being overworked, and casual observation did indeed produce an impression of frantic toil. People sat frowning over sheaves of paper, rushed from desk to desk, shouted into phones. Nobody could be accused of loafing. Yet the department was chronically late with its assigned tasks and at times failed to do them at all. What was wrong?
It turned out that the department consisted mainly of old-time people who, over the years, had gradually got themselves bogged down in details. They had lost sight of the department's fundamental goals and purposes. Instead, they had become concerned with trivia. Should such-and-such a report be typed on blue paper or pink?
Whose initials should appear on it, and in what order? At one time there may have been a sound reason for each of the minor procedural rules that entrapped these people, but in most cases the reasons were lost in the mists of time.
As an outsider coming fresh to the scene, I could see the problem plainly, but I knew it would not easily be made plain to the department's employees. People like to think of themselves and their jobs as important, and it is a mistake ever to make light of anyone's work, no matter how silly and trivial it may seem to you. If somebody has been laboriously sorting out blue and pink reports for years, you are surely going to meet resistance-and perhaps make an enemy-if you come around and say the work is valueless and ridiculous.
Instead of doing that, I approached the problem carefully--as you should do if and when you encounter it. Without in any way belittling what these loyal people had been doing, I managed to convey the idea that exciting new worlds were opening up for the company, and a lot of office procedures were to be streamlined to meet developing challenges. There was some grumbling, as there almost always is when any change is made in old routines, but nobody got seriously upset. In time, as the department's work speeded up and words of praise began to come down from the management levels above, the team's morale soared.
Just because most people do consider their jobs important, you always stand to make friends when you show a team how to get the mission accomplished better. People like the feeling of doing valued work and doing it well. As a team leader, you do neither yourself nor your subordinates a favor by simply relaxing, smiling at everybody, and letting the work plod along in well-worn ruts. Instead, study the group's mission, then talk to each of the members and find out whether the work actually being done directly serves that mission. If it doesn't, find out what work is blocked or hindered and what is off-target. Gently fix what needs to be fixed. You should feel the strengthening of the team almost immediately.
THE PEOPLE--While interviewing your subordinates about the way they perceive their jobs, you will also want to find out about them as people. Don't pry; just show interest.
Call each person into your office one by one if you have an office, or go to their desks if it seems more natural, or take them to the company cafeteria for a cup of coffee. Whatever you do, don't leave this initial acquaintance-making to chance. If you have been the leader of a team for some time and haven't yet had such orientation sessions with your people, do it as soon as you can.
You will want to find out, of course, how they perceive and perform their jobs. Also find out who the leaders of this peer group are. Every team, even the smallest, has an unwritten, unofficial organization--a pecking order. Sometimes it is the most senior employee who stands at the top of this order; sometimes it is the oldest; sometimes it is the smartest, sometimes just the loudest. Quite often it is a secretary who has been with the company for a good many years, knows all the gossip, knows or can guess who is marked for promotion and who for the discard pile.
Be sure to make friends with this unofficial leader. You may encounter hostility at first. He or she may have been fond of a group's previous boss, may have felt secure and coddled under the old leadership, may now feel worried, uncertain, and resentful. These are all perfectly natural reactions to an incoming new leader; don't let them upset you.
Instead, reassure the person that his or her position isn't in jeopardy from the change in bosses. A little subtle flattery may help: "You seem to have a thorough knowledge of what goes on around here. I'm going to rely on you to help me get myself oriented. Don't expect to be accepted instantly. Allow time for these people to watch you, and to speculate and gossip about you among themselves. Just be sure that they also do a lot of talking to you.
Getting Performance
When the initial exploration is over, you should have a basis for making the group into an efficient, performing unit. You now know three essential things:
- What the mission is.
- Where the drive toward that mission is being weakened by blockages or poor targeting.
- What staff you have to work with.
Tell each subordinate just how you perceive the job he or she is to do. Be gentle but firm. Don't ridicule the work your people have been doing or laugh at their misperceptions, but do make it clearly understood that you want things done your way. Give rea sons; show why you think your way is going to produce the best results.
Don't try to describe each person's job down to the last detail. Give these people credit for intelligence, give them the leeway to use it, and be sure they know you are giving it: "If you have problems with this, let me know, but I think it'll be better if I let you figure out the best routine..." You will have to use your human judgment about this. Some people need and want fairly close supervision, while others can take only a bare outline of a job and run with it.
Reward good performance publicly and often. Pay raises and promotions are the big plums of the business world, of course, but there is a limit to the number of such plums that can be handed out to a given employee, particularly in less-than-boom times. In any case, the supervisory jobs you hold early in your career might not give you much influence over salaries and promotions. But another kind of reward costs nothing and can be handed out often: the public commendation. "Before we get down to the business of the meeting, I want to say how good a job you're all doing. Martha, I thought you handled that problem beautifully last week..." Martha will blush and pretend to be uncomfortable. But she will glow for the rest of the day. And she will try to perform even better tomorrow.
Admonish poor performance privately and in steps of increasing severity. Be very gentle the first time: "Sam, you left some blanks in this report. It's got to be filled out completely or Martha won't have enough information to work with. Is there some problem I can help with." Let Sam do all the explaining he wants to do. In all likelihood, all you hear will be the usual excuses people give for careless work: "I was rushed... I had to take care of such-and-such, and so on. Don't argue or call Sam a liar. Just listen. It may be there actually is a problem you didn't know about, in which case, of course, you should do something about it. But if Sam merely mumbles excuses, be patient. With most people, one gentle admonishment is enough to produce more careful work.
If there is a second time, make the admonishment more severe: "Look, Sam, these incomplete reports cause a bottleneck we can't afford to have. This is the second time we've talked about this. You're slowing up Martha's operation, and that makes the whole group look bad."
The third time ...
Firing is, of course, the ultimate punishment of the business world. Be very, very careful with it. Don't make frequent or idle threats about getting people fired. Save this ultimate remedy for the most extreme situations, when all else has failed. Even then, be sure you have firing authority before threatening or attempting to use it.
I recall talking to one fairly high-placed executive who had had a painful experience with a firing. During a period of companywide retrenchment, he fired a fifty-nine-year-old man who had failed to earn his salary for years. "The guy was lazy, insubordinate, and just plain incompetent at his job," the executive said. "I'd given him more chances than he deserved. Finally I let him go. A week later, he lands in a hospital with a heart attack. Oh boy! You wouldn't believe the problem it caused. I felt I had to stand by my decision; the guy was a malingerer and I didn't want him in my department, messing up my other people's work. But in the end, top management ordered me to take him back. They felt the overriding consideration was company morale."
Even the best-handled, most trouble-free firing is painful to both people involved. Avoid it as long as you can. On the other hand, never forget that the team's mission is of primary importance. If a subordinate continues to turn in a poor job performance and shows no interest in improving, and if you genuinely feel you have tried everything there is to try, then you had better talk to a senior executive and find out what kind of firing authority you may have.
Set standards, and publicize them both by directive and by example. Establish rules for promptness, for keeping schedules, for personal neatness. And then exceed those standards yourself. If you want your people at their desks by nine each morning, you had better be at yours by 8:50. If you want them to improve the sloppy personal appearance tolerated by a previous boss, you had better pay meticulous attention to your own grooming. This doesn't mean you should dress more formally than is the custom in that particular level of the company. If everybody else is in casual wear, you might look out of place in a suit. But be sure your casual wear is spanking clean, well pressed, and neat.
