Assessing Your Existing Team | The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels

You are likely to inherit some good performers, some average ones, and some who are simply not up to the job. You will also inherit a group with its own internal dynamics and politics ” some members may even have hoped for your job. During your first 30 to 60 days, you need to sort out who s who, what roles each individual plays, and how the group has worked in the past.

Establish Your Criteria

You will inevitably find yourself forming impressions of team members as you meet them. Don t suppress these early reactions , but step back from them and undertake a more rigorous evaluation.

The starting point is to be self-conscious about the criteria you will explicitly or implicitly use to evaluate people who report to you. Consider these six criteria:

Competence. Does this person have the technical competence and experience to do the job effectively?
Judgment. Does this person exercise good judgment, especially under pressure or when faced with making sacrifices for the greater good?
Energy. Does this team member bring the right kind of energy to the job, or is he or she burned out or disengaged?
Focus. Is this person capable of setting priorities and sticking to them, or prone to riding off in all directions ?
Relationships. Does this individual get along with others on the team and support collective decision making, or is he or she difficult to work with?
Trust. Can you trust this person to keep his or her word and follow through on commitments?

To get a quick read on the criteria you use, fill out table 7-1. Allow yourself 100 points to divide among the six criteria according to the relative weight you place on them when you evaluate direct reports . Record those numbers in the middle column, making sure that they add up to 100. Now identify one of these criteria as your threshold issue, meaning that if a person does not meet a basic threshold on that dimension, nothing else matters. Label your threshold issue with an asterisk in the right-hand column.

Table 7-1: Assessment of Evaluative Criteria
Evaluative Criteria	Relative Weights (Divide 100 points among the six issues)	Threshold Issue ( Designate with an asterisk)
Competence
Judgment
Energy
Focus
Relationships
Trust

Now step back. Does this accurately represent the values you apply when you evaluate direct reports? If so, does this analysis suggest any potential blind spots in the way you evaluate people?

Your assessments are likely to reflect certain assumptions about what you can and can t change in the people who work for you. If you score relationships low and judgment high, for example, you may think that relationships within your team are something you can influence, whereas you cannot influence judgment. Likewise, you may have designated trust as a threshold issue ”many leaders do ”because you believe that you must be able to trust those who work for you and because you think trustworthiness is a trait that cannot be changed.

Factor in the Situation

To what extent should your evaluative criteria vary depending on the situation you are facing ? Potentially a lot. Suppose, for example, that you are taking a new job as vice president of sales, managing a geographically scattered group of regional sales managers. How would your criteria for evaluating people differ from those you would apply if you had been named to lead a new-product development project?

These jobs differ sharply in the extent to which your direct reports (1) operate independently and (2) are dispersed geographically. If your direct reports operate more or less independently, their capacity to work together will be far less important than if you were managing an interdependent product development team. On the other hand, the fact that your people are geographically dispersed may restrict your ability to develop them. If so, you will want them to have threshold levels of competence and judgment.

The criteria you apply may also depend on whether you are in a start-up, turnaround , realignment , or sustaining-success situation. In a sustaining-success situation, for example, you may have the time to develop one or two high-potential members of your team. In a turnaround, by contrast, you need people who can perform at a high level right away. Likewise, in a start-up you may be willing to trade off some trust for a higher level of energy and focus, whereas this would not be the case in a sustaining success situation.

It is worthwhile to spend some time thinking about the criteria you will use to evaluate your new team. Having done so, you will be better prepared to make a rigorous and systematic evaluation.

Assess Your People

When you begin to assess each team member using the criteria you have developed, the first test is whether any of them fail to meet your threshold requirements. If so, begin planning to replace them. But merely surviving the basic hurdle does not mean they are keepers. Go on to the next step: Evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, factoring in the relative value you assign to each criterion. Now who makes the grade and who does not?

Meet one-on-one with each member of your new team as soon as possible. Depending on your style, these early meetings might take the form of informal discussions, formal reviews, or a combination, but your own preparation and focus should be standardized:

Prepare for each meeting. Review available personnel history, performance data, and other appraisals . Familiarize yourself with each person s technical or professional skills so you can assess how he or she functions on the team.
Ask probing questions. As we saw in chapter 2 on learning, ask each person the same set of questions, for example:
- What do you think of our existing strategy?
- What are the biggest challenges and opportunities facing us in the short term? In the long term ?
- What resources could we leverage more effectively?
- How could we improve the way the team works together?
- If you were in my position, what would you most want to pay attention to?
Look for verbal and nonverbal clues. Note choices of words, body language, and hot buttons .
- Notice what the individual does not say. Does the person volunteer information or do you have to extract it? Does the person take responsibility for problems in his or her area? Make excuses? Blame others?
- How consistent are the individual s facial expressions and body language with his or her words?
- What topics elicit strong emotional responses? These hot buttons provide clues to what motivates the individual and what kinds of changes he or she would by energized by.
- Outside of these one-on-one meetings, notice how the individual relates to other team members. Do relations with other team members appear cordial and productive? Tense and competitive? Judgmental or reserved?

Test Their Judgment

Make sure you are assessing judgment and not technical competence or raw intelligence. Some very bright people have lousy judgment, and some people of average competence have extraordinary judgment. It is essential to be clear about the mix of knowledge and judgment you need from key people.

One way to assess judgment is to work with a person for an extended time and observe whether he or she is able to (1) make sound predictions and (2) develop good strategies for avoiding problems. Both abilities draw on an individual s mental models, or ways of identifying the essential features and dynamics of emerging situations and translating those insights into effective action. This is what expert judgment is all about. The problem, of course, is that you don t have much time, and it can take a while to find out whether someone did or did not make good predictions. Fortunately, there are ways you can accelerate this process.

One way is to test people s judgment in a domain in which feedback on their prediction abilities will emerge relatively quickly. Experiment with the following approach. Ask individuals whose judgment you want to evaluate about a topic that they are passionate about outside work. It could be politics or cooking or baseball; it doesn t matter. Challenge them to make predictions: Who do you think is going to do better in the debate? What does it take to bake a perfect souffl ? Which team will win the game tonight? Press them to commit themselves ”unwillingness to go out on a limb is a warning sign in itself. Then probe why they think their predictions are correct. Does the rationale make sense? If possible, follow up to see what happens.

What you are testing is a person s capacity to exercise expert judgment in a particular domain. Someone who has become an expert in a private domain is likely to have done so in his or her chosen field of business too, given enough passion about it. However you do it, the key is to find ways, beyond just waiting to see how people perform on the job, to probe for the hallmarks of expertise.

Evaluate Key Functional People

If you are managing a team whose members have diverse functional expertise ”such as marketing, finance, operations, and R&D ”you will need to get a handle on their competence in their respective areas. This can be daunting, especially for first-time general managers. If you are an insider, try to solicit the opinions of people you respect and trust in each function who know the individuals on your team.

If you are entering a general-management role, consider developing your own evaluation template for each of the key functions. A good template consists of guidelines and warning signs for evaluating people in functions such as marketing, sales, finance, and operations. To develop each template, talk to experienced managers about what they look for in these functions.

Assess the Team as a Whole

Besides evaluating individual team members, assess how the entire group works. Use these techniques for spotting problems in the team s overall dynamics:

Study the data. Read reports and team meeting minutes. If your organization conducts climate or morale surveys of individual units, examine these as well.
Systematically ask questions. Assess the individual responses to the common set of questions you asked when you met with individual team members. Are their answers overly consistent? If so, this may suggest an agreed-on party line, but it could also mean that everyone genuinely shares the same impressions of what s going on. It will be up to you to evaluate what you observe. Do the responses show little consistency? If so, the team may lack coherence .
Probe group dynamics. Observe how the team interacts in your early meetings. Do you detect any alliances? Particular attitudes? Leadership roles? Who defers to whom on a given topic? When one person is speaking, do others roll their eyes or otherwise express disagreement or frustration? Pay attention to these signs to test your early insights and detect coalitions and conflicts.