You’re in Charge and You Start Today: How to Lead a Team, When You’re the Newest Person in the Office

A new leader must effectively assess the team they have and motivate them to perform. When I ask executives transitioning to new companies if they will be leading an existing team, and if they even want a team in the first place, most say yes. But executives may not have a clear definition of what a high-performing team means to them.

From personally conducting more than 220 custom engagements with C-Suite executives in the last five years, Deloitte’s CFO Program has developed a simple and practical framework to help you diagnose and assess your team and improve effectiveness as a leader in those critical first few weeks.  To do so, you may want to consider asking your colleagues, stakeholders and team members themselves the following simple, yet revealing questions:

What is your brand? Every team has its own brand, and the team’s brand will eventually become your brand.  Your team’s brand is the single most critical attribute, as it is a window to how your team interacts with its external environment.

Ask your team’s clients and stakeholders to rate your team on several chosen attributes. One approach is to adapt the basic question underlying the Net Promoter Score.¹ For example, if you are a CFO, you might ask your clients to score your team from 1 (absolutely not) to 7 (absolutely yes) on the question, “How likely is it that you will recommend finance to your colleagues in our company?” Depending on the score, you can delve deeper to understand where your organization meets client expectations or falls short. If the latter, the issues discussed next—goals, roles and responsibilities, processes, and interpersonal relationships—may be the underlying reasons.

What’s the goal?  Every team needs to have a set of shared goals. Just these two questions, posed to your leadership team, will help you test the extent of goal alignment. The greater the variation in responses, the less likely it is that the team has clear shared goals.

• What is the shared purpose or goal of this team?
• Do you believe the team is aligned to these goals?

For the next four attributes, each member would mark a response to the suggested statements/questions on a scale that ranges from “strongly agree (SA)” to “strongly disagree (SD).”

 

Are roles and responsibilities well defined? In high-performing teams, each team member has a clear grasp of his or her roles and responsibilities in achieving the shared purpose.

• I clearly know my role and responsibilities in helping my organization accomplish its goals
• My peers on the team know their roles and responsibilities in accomplishing our collective goals

Clear and effective team processes. Processes include rules for communication, problem solving, conflict resolution, and decision making among team members.

• Our team has clear processes for solving routine problems and issues
• Our team is effective in creating new processes to handle ambiguous problems

How are interpersonal relationships?  Do your team members trust and respect one another, are they mutually supportive and can they resolve conflict?

• There is a high level of trust across the leadership team
• I perceive that team members generally have a strong foundation of mutual respect
• I am not aware of interpersonal conflicts in my group

Communication—energy, engagement, and exploration: Research has shown that communication, both within and outside of a team, is one of the most notable predictors of team performance.² The three critical dimensions of communication are energy, engagement and exploration.

• I observe a high frequency of communications within the team across formal, informal, and back-channel meetings and exchanges
• I observe a broad group of team members actively interacting and communicating with each other
• I observe my team members actively communicate with non-team members to seek out solutions or inform others about team progress, challenges, and solutions

As an incoming executive, you inherit a leadership group that are not yet functioning as your team, even if they function well together.  Taking a moment to explore your teams’ key attributes can provide you with the necessary insights for creating the strongest possible team.

 

For more on these topics, I invite you to explore our Deloitte University Executive transitions page.

Dr. Kambil will be a speaker this May 22-24 at FEI's 2016 Financial Leadership Summit at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, CO.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Ajit Kambil, is a global adviser, executive, innovator, and educator committed to enriching and expanding the potential of individuals and organizations. Currently, Ajit serves as the Global CFO Program Research Director at Deloitte LLP.

¹Frederick F. Reicheld, “The one number you need to grow,” Harvard Business Review, December 2003.Back to article

²Alex (Sandy) Pentland: “The new science of building teams,” Harvard Business Review, April 2012.Back to article