Who's Not on the Team

There are a few employee types you can bypass right away. First, mavericks. Mavericks are typically creative and passionate, and they work better when there isn't a lot of structure. These qualities make them great at the research phase of R&D, but not so great at the development phase, which requires structure and standardization. Instead, I put mavericks to work exploring what our next change should be, and they're generally very satisfied with that.

Hubs aren't on your core team either. Does that surprise you? Hubs are effective because the people they work with trust them. Part of the reason for that trust is that hubs are within safe boundaries. People see them as “one of us” not “one of them.”

Assigning a hub to the change initiative's core team would make the hub “one of them,” eroding what makes him or her so influential. You're going to need that influence, so protect it. Situated outside the core, hubs can also keep the team updated on concerns that others won't voice. They'll relay the information circulating through informal channels (think water cooler, and all the discussion that happens once meetings are over), which can otherwise be hard to tap into. Finally, hubs provide objective and wise counsel when problems develop and tough decisions have to be made.

Finally, leave the tech zealots out of your core team. There is a difference between tech experts, who you need, and tech zealots. Zealots are so interested in the new technology in play that they lose sight of end goals. As a result, they often pick the technology tool without fully understanding the problem, or they overcomplicate the solution with way too many bells and whistles (i.e., “features”). They also tend to assume that their tech know-how trumps all, making them very disruptive.

I saw this in spades when I took over a wood procurement project at GP. The zealots running it were two years behind schedule to implement their shiny new technology system, and they were millions of dollars over budget. They had significantly overengineered things because they were more focused on the tech than on the results. The “Luddites” underneath them, people who were experts in the existing system, knew it. When I came on, they immediately suggested a solution that involved using the new technology on the front end and the old technology on the back end. The zealots were quick to reject the idea, but I was willing to give it a shot. It wasn't easy, but the team got it to work. We got back on schedule, implementing it at all of the sites. I'll never forget the sly smiles on their faces when we got the first site running. The cast-aside Luddites saved the day.

The Two Questions That Count

An interview is like a first date: They're lying to you and you're lying to them, because no employee is that good and no company is that great. That's why as I'm doing interviews to build out my teams, there are only two things I ask to which I really pay attention to the answers:

1. Tell me the worst mistake you have ever made.
2. Tell me about the worst time you've been scapegoated.

Change is never easy. Indeed, the more transformational the change is, the more mistakes you and your team are going to make during the journey. And as change threatens people, the more unfair they're likely to play. Your team needs to be prepared for that.

I don't select people who dance around the question or give me softball answers. I select people who are open and candid in telling me about the mistakes they have made and the times they were treated unfairly. The winners' responses share one common theme: They never end with what went wrong. They end with what they learned and how they benefited from any given situation.

Mike, who you'll recall I picked for Medtronic's ERP implementation, had been extremely frank in telling me that he needed a chance to rebuild his reputation. He took responsibility for several mistakes, but he also told me about times he had been thrown under the bus—not to complain, but to point out where the real sources of problems had been ignored and to convince me that he could fix them.

In deciding whom to interview, I first look within the company before looking outside. I do this because people within the company will have a stronger drive to show what they can do and to be successful, especially if they have made mistakes or have been passed over before and they see an opportunity for redemption.

When screening resumes, I recommend a somewhat unorthodox approach. Rather than picking out the Ivy Leaguers, look instead for applicants who have something unusual in their professional or personal backgrounds that suggests they've had the experience of leaving their comfort zone: someone who grew up in one region of the country but went to college somewhere else; someone who got his undergraduate degree in English or history but is now in IT; someone who was a military brat who moved several times and speaks several languages.

I'm looking for people who have had the experience of being on the outside looking in. I've found that people with that profile are more adaptable, resilient, and empathetic. They have the ability to adjust to new cultures and boundaries, and they are more aware of how their behavior affects the team. I once heard of an elementary school teacher who gave her students a diagram of the classroom and an assignment to plot where everyone went to play during recess. The popular kids could only plot where they and their close friends played. Conversely, the shy, unpopular kids could plot where everyone went to play. They could do this because when you are “all alone in a crowded room,” you see everything that goes on within that room.

In my case, I'm not looking for shy introverts, but for people who've had the experience of being different and the breadth of perspective it brings.

Picking the Program Leader

Because all major change initiatives have many projects within them, a program management office (PMO) is needed to coordinate them. The PMO's leader is the second most critical role of the overall initiative. Don't try to have the overall change leader fill this role as well. In large initiatives, the leader has too much to do already.

Beyond that, the two roles require different skill sets. The change leader has to be skilled at setting the priorities, navigating the politics, engaging the people, and keeping the team together when times get tough; in short, the change leader needs to master the skills in this book. The program leader (PL) focuses on the tasks, timing, and technologies—they're still important. Not having a program leader is like not having an air traffic controller. There would be constant delays and crashes.

Good program leaders tend to be black-and-white thinkers. That ability keeps them focused on driving the project forward; you're either meeting deadlines or you're not. They're direct, straight shooters who want the same from others. This can lead to an office personality that's somewhat brusque and dry, even though I've found that outside of work, they can be very pleasant and engaging. Part of your job is to help manage the relationship between the program manager and the individual project team leaders. The PL will inevitably antagonize the team leaders at some point with rigid, inflexible thinking. Meanwhile, the project managers will try to defend drifting schedules and budgets. You'll become the buffer, quickly stepping in and helping them reach consensus, then just as quickly stepping out.

A good PL will create detailed project and resource plans and identify constraints and potential conflicts. I attribute all of the success we had at both Medtronic and GP to also having great program leaders and PMO offices. I would never take on a large change initiative without one. They'll make you shake your head more than once during the initiative, but you will also shake their hands at the end because the team wouldn't have been successful without them.

Here are the traits to look for when selecting the program leader:

• During the interview, you'll hear things like, “What do you actually mean?” or “What are you really getting at?” because they want to be certain they're getting the unvarnished facts.
• They tend to be very solution focused: “Which hill do we climb?”
• They will be very specific in answers to questions. They never elaborate.
• Their postures tend to be rigid, as though they have been in the military. (Yes, really!)

Two Key Roles That Are Too Often Ignored

I equate team dysfunction to hypertension: It's a silent killer that too often doesn't manifest itself until it is too late. The solution is to have someone who is checking your team's proverbial blood pressure regularly—someone with a human resource (HR) or organizational behavior background. For large change initiatives, especially transformational ones, this is a formal, full-time role on the core team because this person will keep his or her finger on the pulse of the human side of how the team is functioning, how the organization is functioning, and, most importantly, how you are functioning. Once this person creates trust, he'll be able to provide timely feedback and insight that will allow you to address questions before they become concerns and concerns before they become crises. The trust can't be created if the role is part time because the person would be dropping in and out instead of living with the team and getting to know them and you, the leader.

A good HR person will also help you identify and address nonperformers much more quickly than you could alone, because team members almost invariably know who isn't performing before leadership does. Indeed, it is very frustrating for teams when a member isn't pulling his or her weight or is a rotten apple; however, very rarely will the team go directly to the leader to complain because they don't want to be seen as ratting someone out. As they say, the higher up you go, the more people talk about you than to you. A good HR leader will erase this gap.

One final key role is a communications person. This is also a formal, full-time role. That's what it takes to get in deep enough to be effective—to understand the change initiative itself, as well as the existing priorities, culture, and politics that need to be taken into account when communicating. This person needs to come to know communication styles intimately in order to craft messaging that fits both you and the intended audience. This person will be watching both you and the audience when you are delivering your message. Over the course of the initiative, this person will save you more than once from sticking your foot in your mouth and slowing down the process.

The general manager of Medtronic's largest, most critical business at the time once caused a near HR meltdown that could have been avoided if he had been prepped by a communications expert. He was holding a town hall meeting to discuss some major organizational changes that were needed as the industry slumped. He had prepared his presentation well enough, but during the question-and-answer (Q&A) session, he was asked if there were going to be any layoffs. He danced around the question, and the room went silent. It wasn't because they didn't have anything to say; they were all expressing their anxiety and anger with their fingers, via internal social media. It became a productivity-sucking firestorm, and he had to call another town hall just to address the question directly.

Change leaders need communication and HR people on the core team that have their fingers on the pulse of the team, the organization, and you. They need to understand your strengths and weaknesses. For example, I like to use stories when I speak and need help in making sure that their points are clearly linked to the practical issues I'm addressing. Before any important presentation, I recommend a rehearsal that includes Q&A with a communications person, and preferably your HR person, too.

Too many times, because of budgetary reasons or because the leader tries to do too much himself, these two critical roles are either absent on the core team or are part-time positions. Don't make that huge mistake. The “people” part of change should be prioritized in your schedule and your budget, and it requires full-time help.

Moving beyond “Off with Their Heads”

I've seen new leaders arrive on the scene with an “off with their heads” attitude that ultimately leads to unnecessary disruption and wasted resources. A better approach is to start with an open mind, prepared to listen. Evaluate everyone individually before making any personnel decisions.

Even when you're brought in for a radical initiative—or to rescue one that has gone into the ditch—very rarely do you have to replace everybody. Let's start with the leadership team. Yes, you almost always replace some, but not all. The senior people will each readily tell you what was wrong with the leader who was there before you, but only a few will be able to tell you what needs to be done to fix the problems. Those are the ones you keep.

Speaking more broadly, watch out for employees who, thanks to faulty leadership, have succumbed to a victim mentality—the thumb-suckers. These people no longer take accountability seriously. You may be able to reform them, but it will take focus and energy that might be better used elsewhere. In my experience, thumb-suckers have to go. I learned this the hard way during an acquisition integration. Everyone in the IT group of the company we were acquiring was a thumb-sucker. We did everything we could to reengage them, including giving them leadership roles during the integration. That backfired when a major system upgrade failed, and the team just pointed their fingers at the project leader, despite having recommended him in the first place. Meanwhile, they accused management of “never listening.” I knew at that moment that this was one of the rare times the whole team had to go. Once we had new leadership in place, we successfully finished the integration, but I lost a lot of time by not removing the thumb-suckers immediately.

You can easily spot the thumb-suckers by asking people why an issue exists or a particular solution hasn't been tried. You won't hear “I tried and failed” or “I asked for the money and was denied.” Instead you'll hear, “Because I knew they wouldn't do it,” “because we didn't have the budget,” or “because management won't listen to us.”

At the end of the day, the people you keep are those who are willing to approach their jobs with a fundamentally different mind-set. Some will be, some won't, and how you approach the transition will determine the percentages in each column. In other words, leadership has to change its mind-set first.

One of our Medtronic projects completely transformed the requirements of our customer service call center. In the effort to make business easier for our customers, we had automated routine transactions through Internet and mobile applications. As a result, almost 100 percent of the calls the center was receiving were problem cases. That meant our front-line people had to be able to resolve the problems instead of escalating them and having someone else solve them. More important, they needed the mind-set of a nurse treating a patient in acute pain instead of an employee who was processing a transaction.

As leaders, we had to stop viewing customer care as an expense to minimize. It was now a core competency to maximize. We provided training, we created new success metrics, and we found new ways to recognize and reward stars. In short, we stopped treating the team as administrative personnel. By the end of the project, we had given everyone raises, and yet customer service cost less overall because we were able to meet demand with fewer employees. Customer satisfaction went from being less than three to almost five on a scale of one to five; employee turnover went from being over 25 percent to around 7 percent. Seventy percent of the original staff made the transition, and I've never been prouder of a team.

Don't Partner with Cab Drivers

If you're in the business of change, third-party partners are inevitably in your future. The most important advice I can offer here is this: To maximize success, make sure the third party has some skin in the game.

I'm talking about shared risk. Most of the time, the software providers and consultants get paid regardless of whether the system works or whether the project comes in on time and on budget. Even worse, in some cases, it is to the third-party's advantage for the project to go over schedule because they can bill more hours. It's like getting lost while riding in a taxi: The driver wins, you lose.

Instead, build a close enough relationship with the most senior executive of the third party that he or she is willing to work out some type of risk-sharing agreement. You want more than a fixed-price bid, which doesn't work when the change is a high-risk one—in other words, when you're likely to get lost along the way. Penalty clauses within contracts are sometimes used to hedge the problem, but they're not all that effective. When things go wrong, everyone becomes more focused on placing blame than on solving the problems. This infighting becomes very public to key stakeholders and can cast doubt on the entire initiative.

The attitude you want to cultivate is that of true partnership. I once came onto a project in which this kind of infighting was preventing things from moving forward. I held a town hall meeting and surprised everyone by inviting the third-party executive to attend. I opened the meeting by saying that I was making two bets: one on the internal people on the team, and the other on the third party. Everyone in the room stopped looking at me and started looking at each other.

I told them we were in this together. Everyone's reputation was at stake. I then outlined what each party was bringing to the table and what we would do to become better coordinated and to build a trusting partnership. We stopped using the divisive language of us versus them. We started having group after-hours functions where people could really get to know each other. We also held weekly meetings with all leadership present. Ultimately, we became one team who were just on different payrolls, and we saw great success.

Whenever possible, give those tight-working relationships a head start by choosing third parties that you have worked with before. When you don't have that luxury, ask them to describe their last handful of engagements. If a company only references engagements in which the projects worked well, watch out. Just as with internal team members, I want to partner with companies whose people are open and candid about engagements that didn't go well. I want to hear what they learned from them and how they tried to fix what went wrong.

Finally, hold the third party to the same standards and values you hold the core team to. The third party has to see it as more than a revenue line item or a one-off engagement. For example, when we consolidated data centers at Medtronic, one of the centers had been outsourced to IBM, making them a key partner. The overall account executive knew that they would lose money once the consolidation was complete, but he was looking at the bigger picture. If IBM was successful in helping us consolidate, they might open doors to a much more extensive partnership between our two companies. When we ran into issues, IBM senior executives were in the war room with us. They brought in their best people—even someone from another continent when his expertise was needed—to troubleshoot. IBM didn't know what the future relationship held, but they viewed their role in the consolidation as an investment, not a one-off. That's the attitude you want.

Team Diversity

Diversity on the core team is essential. I strongly advocate for building teams whose members not only look different but also, more importantly, think different. I once fell on my rear end because I failed to make sure a key team was cross functional.

We were implementing a new IT system. The launch deadline was approaching, and some critical reports hadn't been completed and tested yet. These reports would be used to determine total quarterly sales, which determined sales people's commissions. If we missed the deadline to implement the new system, our next opportunity was six months away. After a third-party audit and a lot of discussion, we made the call to launch on time. Well, sure enough, it came time to go live and the reporting piece still wasn't finished. Until we got things fixed, we endured, and rightfully so, the wrath of our affected colleagues.

The mistake wasn't in the call we made or even in the fact that the reporting didn't get finished. The mistake was that the team hadn't put a better contingency plan in place. They knew weeks in advance that they might not make the deadline; there was time to develop a better strategy. But groupthink had set in. Instead of telescoping back and figuring out how to change their approach, they just kept grinding. If I had put some hubs on the team from other parts of the division, they would have pushed the conversation toward new solutions. Instead, we saw a mess ahead of us on the sidewalk and kept going until we stepped in it while the rest of the company watched.

I never made that mistake again. Since then I have seen many breakthrough ideas that came from nontraditional team members. I remember one time in particular at Medtronic. We were driving a significant companywide cost-reduction initiative. I brought in Wendy, a woman from the facilities function of the company, to join the team. People raised their eyebrows, given that most of the members had accounting, process improvement, and program management backgrounds. One day we were discussing where our next round of reductions would come from, knowing full well that companywide, people were sick of being asked to cut costs.

Wendy piped up: What if instead of focusing directly on cost reduction, we focused on sustainability—reducing energy consumption, recycling, and so on? Great idea! We put it in motion and instead of getting complaints and low morale, we saw employees enthusiastically embrace the new initiative. We saved over $100 million in the process. It seems obvious enough, yet it was an approach we never would have considered without Wendy in the room.

Homogenous teams are fine when you're dealing with problems, which I define as situations with clear right and wrong answers. Data in, data out. Problem is, when you're engaged in change—which in today's world we always are, whether we're in the middle of a formal initiative or not—you hardly ever have problems. Instead, you have dilemmas. With dilemmas, the potential answers seem infinite because the algebra of the space you're playing in hasn't yet been defined. Here diversity is extremely useful because, collectively, the team can evaluate the situation without the prejudice of the old algebra. Together they can come up with the best answer, if not the right answer.

Coaching Moments

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