Forming your leadership team

Objective

Let’s start with what forming a ‘leadership team’ is not about. It is not about:

• selecting individuals;
• determining who attends your management meetings;
• deciding who will have which job title.

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.

Context

Several other factors will affect the view or review of your leadership team.

• Broader questions about the vision, strategy and goals – do these require a structural review?
• Planned and exceptional timetables for strategic reviews – how do these relate to your timetable for looking at your team?
• Current business performance – does this suggest a non-strategic team change?
• Immediate evaluation of the staff you have inherited – does this raise any immediate concerns?
• The extent to which wide-ranging change programmes are required – do these impact on the structure and composition of the leadership team?
• An overall view of corporate talent – is there a strategic view that a skills audit beyond your team is required?

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.

Challenge

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:

• a leadership team is never fixed;
• it will be reviewed continually in the light of strategy and performance;
• roles will be defined by market needs;
• change is normal rather than exceptional.

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.

Success

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:

• put strategy first – understand that organisation structure and the consequential leadership team are instruments of strategy, not an end in themselves;
• put jobs before people – design the structure and team to be driven by success, not by the people you happen to have;
• be uninhibited – in changing the composition and members of the team you inherit;
• maintain a personal distance – remember that the ability to make tough decisions about structure and teams is compromised by over-friendly relationships;
• be flexible – expect that the structure and members of a leadership team will change repeatedly as the business constantly adjusts to market circumstances;
• take advice – from those who have organisation-design experience, for example your HR professionals;
• sound out your line manager – keep them in the loop so there are no surprises.

At all times the leadership team is your team, your creation. It is yours to mould and refashion. With that control comes ultimate accountability.

Pitfalls

You must be especially aware:

• not to decouple structure from strategy – this risks undermining the credibility of strategy and leads to uncertainty about focus;
• not to review structure virtually constantly – maintaining a structure and team can be a comfortable situation, but if they are kept too long they can become an operational and performance drag;
• not to recognise where structure itself can contribute to poor performance – poor structure design and poor job recruitment can themselves lead to weak performance, which may otherwise be mistakenly blamed on other factors.

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.

Leaders’ checklist

• Strategy first, structure second, roles third, people selection fourth!
• Ensure that you design your structure first and identify relevant jobs second – don’t make a structure to fit jobs.
• Constantly remind your leadership team that you are an agent of change and that nothing is sacrosanct – including the team structure of which they are a part.
• Learn to identify when repeated problems are caused by an ineffective structure or team membership rather than by process factors.