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Assessing Your Team

July 24, 2009

ASSESSING YOUR TEAM IN TIMES OF HIGH RISK Is your management team up to the herculean task of navigating through the current recession, identifying opportunities, and assuring your company will survive? If not, then maybe it’s time to perform a reassessment of your top team members. Here are the top three reasons CEOs avoid evaluating their executives: • They believe changing players during the midst of a severe economic downswing is riskier than leaving an ineffectual manager in place. In fact, there are many positive outcomes of disposing of underperformers and bringing in the right kind of new leadership, particularly in a downturn. • They think changing the guard in mid-stream may demoralize the rest of the company’s workforce. On the contrary, employees are often re-energized and motivated by new leadership and new energy from the top. • They lack the necessary knowledge, skills, or will to perform an equitable and unbiased assessment. This knowledge can be easily attained from experts in the executive assessment and recruitment fields. Here are three steps to take to initiate and complete an assessment of your executive team: 1. BE BRUTALLY HONEST & COMPLETE THE TASK When times are good, much gets overlooked; it’s human nature. The first step, therefore, in assessing your team during a downturn is a personal commitment to intellectual honesty, and the will to follow up with the appropriate actions. You must be brutally honest with yourself, and ultimately your team, to make the tough but right decisions. You need the will to carry them out. 2. USE AN INDEPENDENT PARTY TO FACILITATE THE PROCESS The nature of this process is sensitive and can pull at the fabric of your organization. An HR or OD Director, if they are seen as honest brokers, could act as a facilitator. I suggest using an outside consultant with expertise in Executive Selection and assessment. 2. CONDUCT A SURVEY AND “WHERE-WE-ARE” ASSESSMENT Ask your managers to answer, on no more than one sheet of paper the following questions. (Winston Churchill once said; “Please be good enough to put your conclusions on one sheet of paper in the very beginning of your report, so I can even consider reading it.”) • The best and worst decisions the company has made in the last 24 months • The best and worst decisions that they personally made in the last 24 months • Key strengths and weaknesses of the company • Their own individual key strengths and weaknesses • Three ideas to improve their own performance, three ideas to improve company performance 3. ASK TEAM MEMBERS TO UPDATE THEIR RESUMES Have your team members put together updated resumes. This process will allow them to consider their success and failures as it must be articulated in brief written form. It will also expose their writing skills, and provide a common platform when you meet with them. 4. GET TO KNOW YOUR STAFF ON A MORE PERSONAL LEVEL As a CEO, owner or founder, it is never too late to ask questions about your staff’s childhood and early education. After all, the better you know them, the better decisions you can make: • Where did you grow up • What did your father/mother do for a living • How many siblings do you have • What activities were you involved in grade school, high school, college • Describe your high school experience • How did you decide to go to college, how did you choose your major • How long did it take you to finish, who paid for it While these questions may seem out of line, they are valuable in uncovering a plethora of information about who the person is and what drives him or her. It helps you paint a picture beyond the usual data about experience and education. 5. CONSIDER PSYCHOLOGICAL AND APTITUDE TESTING SERVICES Complete the internal assessment process with testing instruments. Some I’ve used successfully include Hogan Assessment Systems, CPI and Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisals. Using a trained certified professional to administer and interpret the tests allows you to understand what they mean, and how to properly use them in the assessment process. Once you complete these five steps, you will have the following information from your key executives: • An updated current resume • Their own view of the strengths and weaknesses of the organization and themselves • Ideas for improvement • Survey data from peers, subordinates and superiors regarding their management style, strengths and weaknesses • Interview results which include personal data Everything is now in context. It’s a level playing field. You now have the same body of information on each executive. It’s time to make some decisions. 6. DRAW PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS One can learn a lot about individuals just by observing their reactions to these types of exercises. Some of your team members may resent this intrusion while others will be threatened or distrustful. These reactions are definitely red flags. Don’t fight the fallout. If someone resists the process and draws a line in the sand, you have learned something about this individual. 7. ALLOW FOR INDIVIDUAL IMPROVEMENT Certain character traits uncovered in these assessments can be improved and mitigated while others will never go away. Have an expert take a look at these results and provide detailed analysis about what can be fixed before you act. Most individuals know when they are failing in their current assignment. But, failure does not mean the individual lacks talent altogether; they may just be in the wrong job at the wrong time. 8. DON’T HESITATE TO ACT No one enjoys firing a colleague or peer. But failure to act, once you have the objective assessment, is a dereliction of duty. Having the wrong people in the place is a very expensive luxury. As a consultant for 32 years I have helped hundreds of companies perform assessments on current and potential executives. The sum is greater than its parts. In other words, a company’s survival is more important to its shareholders, employees, customers and communities than any one person’s longevity. It behooves CEOs and company owners, therefore, to conduct executive team assessments during this economic downturn – and to do so with compassion, fairness, clarity and reason. Once they have the information, they must move forward, take action and build the best team in their industries for the future. ©2009, All Rights Reserved, The Douglas Reiter Company, Inc.