How to re-organize your Team

As the new year is about to kick-off, now is a good time to look to re-energise and re-organize your team. As leaders it is important for us to continually look at ways to improve our teams and their performance.
Firstly let's look to collect like skills, make a list of all your team members and their skills, then group the like skilled people together. Should all these people be in a group together so their skills can be shared to improve the overall output?
Next let's look at the outputs we need to produce. Do we align our groups in-line with our outputs?
Now make a matrix with our skills down one side and our outputs across the top. Then work through the matrix and assign your team.

Check for any obvious personality clashes and move people around to come up with a best fit.
Brief your functional leaders on why you have formed the team and how they are aligned. By working through the "Why" your functional leaders will fell part of the buy-in and understand your reasoning for creating the teams the way you have them. Spend plenty of time to ensure that everyone gets what you want to achieve and why the groupings are the way they are. It is very important that your senior people are fully aware and are ready to take the task on.

Now look through the team members and identify those that may need some help to move to the new team structure. Book a time with each member and clear your diary.
When you meet with each member, you need to focus on two things: one why you need the team to be structured the way you want and secondly how they will integrate into this to help drive this team to peak performance. Explain how good their work is and how you believe the new structure Will make the whole team perform better.

As the leaders of our teams it is important to continually look at ways to improve our team and strive peak performance.

Create a mid-year review checklist

As we pass through the mid-year many of us in leadership positions will conduct reviews with our direct reports.

Rather than just walk through the process, I believe you need to create an objective review checklist. The checklist will help you identify those performers who are on-track and those that are behind. Of those behind  it is important to understand why they are behind, is it because you have directed their efforts somewhere else or is it because they are not tackling the challenges you set them at the start of the year.

What I find useful is to create a checklist for use at each review. Work through the checklist during the review.

 

 Firstly the checklist should address the formalities of the review.

1.       Why we are here?

2.       Do they feel comfortable to discuss candidly with you how they feel they are going?

3.       How do they rate themselves?

4.       How do you rate their performance to date?

5.       Why is there any delta?

Next look into their individual and team goals.

1.       On they on track to make their targets?

2.       Do the targets need to be revised up or down?

3.       Are there issues blocking progress that you can provide help to free up?

4.       Is there time to take corrective action and get any wayward goals back on track?

 

Assess for business Impact.

 

1.       Which goals are having the maximum impact?  These goals need to be pushed forward, how can we get more traction and better results.

2.       Which goals are having a minimal impact?  These goals should be dropped, save our energy and efforts for the greater impact goals.

Identify risky members

 

1.       Why are these members goals at risk?  Explain why they are at risk and consequences of poor performance.

2.       Have we contributed to the risk position?  If so we must own the issue and re-qualify the goal.

Positive finish

1.       Regardless of performance overall, we must praise all positive work,

2.       Remind team members of their role in an inclusive and cohesive team.

As team leaders it is our responsibility to conduct mid-year reviews. The reviews give us a good time to analyse where the team is and where it is heading. By keeping an eye on the goals we set for the team we can develop action plans to support our team and lead the strong performers to a position of excellence. Don’t be tempted by the leadership conundrum of who to allocate the most time too.  Time and time again it has been proven if we have limited time available we must give it to our top team members as any boost in their output will be more beneficial than the same improvement in our weakest members. It’s our duty as the leaders to manage and lead or teams to the highest performance we can, this way our team will be making the maximum contribution to the company.