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The Executive Team As Strategist By Ed Yager Teams are teams. Teamwork is teamwork. All the research evidence suggest that teams get more done, are more creative, more synergistic, and more likely to develop more correct answers. That's true - sometimes. In too many cases teams loaded with bright people demonstrate what Chris Argyis called the "collective IQ of a moron". Then there are executive teams. The dynamics at the executive level are very different than at any other level in the organization. There is more competition and more at stake for the individual members. There is no appeal process. The visibility is overwhelming; executive team watching is sport in most organizations. Given a natural bias against and skepticism about senior managers that exists in most organizations, people listen carefully to and continually evaluate what goes on. The personalities are generally more dominant and the potential for conflict is far greater. In the battle for the hearts and minds of the team member's followers the stakes are much greater. On the other hand, as emphasized by Sanjay Joshi in a recent publication of Machine Design (9/98) cross functional teams are important for an organization to succeed, especially when it comes to the successful development and commercialization of products. Why then do so many businesses continue to develop products through functional channels and in a process of handoffs. Most all of the decisions are made by engineering, marketing, manufacturing, and all the resources are controlled by these three as well. Moreover, traditional functional departments, worried about loss of control, may slow or even defeat any attempts to move toward meaningful project based teams. So how can a company move successfully toward multi-disciplinary teamwork. Here are several factors or keys for success. 1.) Articulate a compelling case for change. Everyone must understand why the change is necessary. Increase the communication about the need by a factor of ten. 2.) Gain senior management's commitment not just approval - even to the point where his or her job is on the line. 3.) Select the team carefully. The leader must be a person identified as a key player in the future of the organization. Members must be credible, knowledgeable, and experienced. This is no place for representatives, liaisons, or trainees. They should be people who are open to new ideas, who do "real work", and who are biased toward a cross functional systems approach to problem solving. 4.) Collocate and dedicate team members. Set impossible (big hairy audacious) goals. Collocate is physically moving core team members to the same site in order to improve communication, focus, attention, and response time. Perhaps the best single example of this was the collection of geniuses under the banner of the skull and cross bones flown over a physically separated building housing the Apple Macintosh development team. 5.) Use creative incentives tieing individual contributions to team performance. It is important to modify incentives so they not only encourage the use and development of technical skills, but also include contributions to team effectiveness and enabling the performance and contributions of others. The most important role for a senior management team, its reason for being, is not that of managing the day-to-day budget, sales targets, quality and personnel issues. It is getting to the future first, seeing, exploring, and exploiting opportunities not seen by other teams. It is "consistent and preemptive capability building that other companies can't or won't pursue". (Gary Hamel) Few senior management teams can paint an enticing view of the new industry space the company hopes to stake out over the next decade. Debating the future, deciding which alliances to pursue, how much to invest, what kind of people to hire demands a significant expenditure of senior team intellectual energy. Learning how to understand the significance of events, trends, and changes in the market, demographics, competitor and customer actions without being influenced or biased by current opinion, changing (or unchanging) attitudes, personal prejudices or internal political forces is critical. So too is the ability to make decisions quickly, to be brutally honest, and to take the indicated action without being deterred by a perceived danger. Jack Welch CEO of General Electric, perhaps our best example of executive as strategist, says, "Strategy follows people; the right person(team) lead to the right strategy". Strategists, like leaders, spend a great deal of their energy training other strategists and helping other teams think strategically. What does thinking strategically mean? Some possibilities, according to Hans Hinterhuber (H.B.R., January-February 1992) include emphasizing the directions strategists take, not the limits they set; the projects, programs and initiatives they take, not what they finish; the questions they raise, not the answers they find or already know; the paths they take, not just the objectives they actually attain; the employees they select to carry on their vision, not the buildings they erect. Think about your own organization in this context. It has been my experience in consulting with dozens of organizations on strategy building that there is an intuitive belief in or acceptance of these ideas. The fact is, however, that most policies and practices reward, demand, and trust non-strategic practices. A high performing product development team, once successfully launched, can become a bedrock of learning and experience for the rest of the organization as well. As team members succeed and are then rotated into other teams, this wealth of experience can be shared more broadly throughout the organization. |
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