Executive Coaching: Articles

Onboarding: How to Pick a Winning Team in the First 90 Days

Assessing a team—deciding who should stay and who should go—is one of the most critical tasks an executive faces when transitioning into a new position.

The first weeks are crucial for learning and evaluating. During this time, leaders are most vulnerable, without a firm support network in place. If you are promoted to a new position from within the organization, you are likely acquainted with some of its key people. Transition from the outside, and you face the task of identifying and placing the right people into the right positions—a much greater challenge.

How to Assess an Existing Team

When performing your evaluation, you’ll find some excellent, some average and some unsatisfactory people in place. You will need to sort out who’s who, the functions people perform and how the group has worked in the past.

o Who will you keep in place and/or develop?
o Who will you move to another position?
o Who will you observe for a while?
o Who will you replace (low and high priority)?

“The most important decisions you make in your first 90 days will probably be about the people on your team. If you succeed in creating a high-performance team, you can exert tremendous leverage in value creation. If not, you will face severe difficulties, for no leader can hope to achieve much alone.” — Michael Watkins, The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, Harvard Business School Press, 2003.

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Office Politics: Survival of the Savvy

There’s one skill everybody at work wishes they were better at, but you won’t find it taught in MBA courses: office politics.

Tales of political sabotage, power plays and turf wars are part of any organization’s history. Nonetheless, political competence is the one skill everyone wishes to have more of — but no one admits to it.

Political competence is the “ability to understand what you can and cannot control, when to take action, who is going to resist your agenda, and whom you need on your side. It’s about knowing how to map the political terrain and get others on your side, as well as lead coalitions,” according to Prof. Samuel B. Bacharach who wrote Getting Them On Your Side, 2005.

Defining Political Savvy

It’s naive to suggest that all office politics are destructive and unethical. If you define politics in such a narrow and negative way, you overlook the value of political awareness and skill. When political astuteness is combined with ethics and integrity, it can produce positive results for you, your team and your organization.

By avoiding or denying its existence, you underestimate how political behavior can destroy careers, a company’s reputation and overall performance. If you define politics in only negative terms, you are naively under-political, which leaves you vulnerable to overly political, self-serving individuals.

Three Phases of Political Competence

Political competence can be developed in an ethically sound way with a three-phase process.

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Once Again, How Do You Motivate People?

You know you have a talented group of people working for you. You may have personally hired some of them or seen their excellent work in other teams. But all of this talent is meaningless if you cannot raise the bar and motivate people to produce their best work ever, for you and your team, right now.

When people feel inspired to live up to their full potential, companies thrive. There’s a positive shift in the work environment, and the resulting culture boosts morale and productivity.

When you inspire motivation, you’ll see the following advances at work:

• People come up with new ideas about how to solve your company’s most pressing problems.

• People get along well and collaborate in teams to create new ways of doing things that can revolutionize the marketplace for your products and services.

• People work with boundless energy, giving their time, enthusiasm and drive to forward the company mission.

• Even during challenging times, your people remain steadfast and loyal.

• People take pride in their work and feel responsible for the company’s future.

If you’re a manager or team leader whose employees exhibit such behaviors, you work under ideal conditions. When such energy is evident, truly great things can happen.

But what if, like the results of the Gallup Organization’s study of engagement at work, some of your people are not fully dedicated to their jobs? What if one-third of your team members are simply going through the motions, showing up but withholding energy?

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This is a brief synopsis of an article available for purchase for your newsletters and other materials with non-exclusive reprint rights from ContentforCoachesandConsultants.com

The full 2000 word article is based on the book Motivating People for Improved Performance, a collection of timely articles from Harvard Management Update and Harvard Management Communication Letter, part of the Results-Driven Manager Series (2005, Harvard Business School Publishing).

Here are the concepts discussed in the full article:

A Paycheck Isn’t Enough
Is Motivation an Inside or Outside Job?
Helping People Find Meaning at Work
8 Career Anchors: What Matters Most
Strengthening Personal Qualities
Fostering Commitment Beyond the Job
Open-Book Management Style
9 Steps to Creating a Great Workplace

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