Your leadership team is your key group of direct reports, with whom you spend most time – selecting them and defining their roles is one of your main priorities.
Frequency – periodic, but more often than you probably expect.
Key participants – you’re largely on your own on this one.
Leadership rating: Leadership7
Let’s start with what forming a ‘leadership team’ is not about. It is not about:
Any or all of these may be outcomes. But crucially forming a team starts with your customers and your team’s interface with them. You may have a responsibility for an entire business covering all functions. You may, alternatively, be responsible solely for customer service. Your customers may be external, they may be internal. Either way, your first task is to analyse these points of customer interface, and assess whether your structure reflects your customers’ needs and priorities. In so doing you also consider if these needs are appropriately matched by necessary competencies and commitment of resources.
This approach will generate a review of your organisational structure. Irrespective of whether it needs changing, it should always be reviewed so you feel ownership of it; only then should key leadership roles be defined (or redefined). The last stage is assessing what skills are required for each role, and whether this process of appropriate ‘fit’ is going to involve any changes to existing personnel.
It is an absolute prerequisite that the structure meets the needs of the organisation’s marketplace, and that you fit people to jobs and not jobs to people.
Your goal is to ensure you have an appropriate customer-facing structure with your direct reports fitting their jobs, not jobs tailored to suit them.
Several other factors will affect the view or review of your leadership team.
Managing and balancing these factors requires considerable pragmatism. You will have a team in place from day one and the formation/reformation of this team must be flexible and ongoing. It is unlikely to be a one-off process.
If your leadership team is unlikely to be static, then it will have some element of built-in uncertainty. The risk here is that this could be destabilising – team members will be more concerned with defending their existing positions than focusing on the future.
You must be determined and consistent. From the outset you should state plainly and unambiguously that:
This is perhaps the greatest challenge of all that you set your team – namely that they simultaneously represent both stability and change, both continuity and adaptation, both authority and fragility.
To succeed, an organisation must incorporate change as a normal process – this applies no less to the formation, maintenance and re-formation of your leadership team.
The watchword for success in forming a leadership team is pragmatism – acceptance that it is always a work in progress, always susceptible to the need for change. To maximise success you will:
At all times the leadership team is your team, your creation. It is yours to mould and refashion. With that control comes ultimate accountability.
You must be especially aware:
I have indicated several times that leaders must not design structures to suit their team members. More risky, potentially egregious, is to make new appointments which are clearly not merit-based. This might include appointing colleagues with whom you have worked previously. To some extent this is understandable – leaders frequently seek an anchor in such ‘repeat’ colleagues because they bring a relationship of trust which can otherwise take years to develop. But you should beware of appearing to give to these known colleagues preferential roles or access – this may be divisive and leave you open to challenges concerning integrity.