Jeff Standridge:
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. My name’s Jeff Standridge.
Jeff Amerine:
Hey, it’s Jeff Amerine. Glad to be back on with you.
Jeff Standridge:
Hey man. Yeah, me too. So we started this series, uh, last week on operational effectiveness and financial disciplines, a couple of cornerstones to, to companies that are trying to scale, uh, grow their company by 200, 400, 800, 10, uh, a thousand X, uh, and so, um, what we’re talking about today, we, we introduced the concept of operational effectiveness last week today. We’re going to be talking about the role of teams and talent in this whole concept of operational effectiveness.
Jeff Amerine:
Well, from that standpoint, it all starts with the team, right? Not much is accomplished in any kind of business just based on technology or intellectual property, it’s really about the team. And if you’ve got them in the wrong seats or there’s issues with role conflict, that can cause a big problem and a lot of confusion. And ultimately, it will erode the value that the culture may have had at one point.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. Yeah, you know, I have a couple of processes that I like to use with teams before they start the process, executive teams predominantly, before they start the process of trying to scale or really trying to grow exponentially. And they’re really two different processes. For an executive team, I like to do what I call the total team process. And that really involves having every member of that executive team anonymously evaluate every other member of that executive team. And there are a couple of ways you can do that. I usually have a tool that I use with them where basically we figure out what we want them to assess each other on. And usually, it’s four or five criteria. And we have them rate themselves. But we also have every other member of the team rate them. We give it off to a third party. Let them, let them tally all the results and put it back in an anonymized, uh, anonymized, um, report so that each individual is able to look at, you know, two things. Here’s how I rated myself and here’s how all of my peers collectively rated me. And, uh, invariably it exposes a ton of gaps. You know, our tendency is to see ourselves much more favorably than our peers, colleagues, and others see us. And so it begins to expose some blind spots. But then the other thing that I like to do, and so I call that the total team. The other thing I like to do is what I refer to a lot of times is the relative talent review or the collective talent review. You know, most organizations evaluate individuals against the job description, but what they don’t do is evaluate individuals, the contribution of individuals against the contribution of all of their peers and colleagues. And so I am a big fan of forced rankings throughout an organization in order to understand the major buckets of talent that you have, who are the absolute top performers. And I like to call those the top 20% of an organization. Who are the next 30% of performers? Cause that gives you the, not only the top 20%, but it allows you to delineate the top half, then who are the lower 40%, the 40% that’s directly below the average, and then finally who are those that are in the bottom 10. And that really provides you as an executive a lot of impact in being able to assess your talent and decide, do you have the right people in the right places? And so, do you have any experience with that yourself?
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, well, definitely. And one of the outcomes of that is, I mean, there can be a number of different ways of looking at our outcomes, but one that’s really important is it’s a really good person, but they’re doing the wrong thing. We’ve got them assigned in the wrong place. Classic case of that is we promoted an engineer or technology, strong individual contributor into a leadership role with the expectation that just because they were a good engineer or a good scientist, they’re going to be great as a supervisor or in a leadership role. And it, and it’s not, it’s rarely the case. And he also assumed that, well, since they were very bright and could be a good engineer or a good scientist, that they’re going to have the skills to be a leader. And that’s something that requires training and education. So those are the sorts of things that, that can come out pretty frequently on that sort of an assessment.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, you know, sometimes technical acuity or technical proficiency and leadership competency are antithetical to one another yet in a lot of technical professions like software development, IT, healthcare, we tend to more rapidly promote the most technically proficient, not recognizing that many times will, will forecast a leadership deficit, not always, but, but frequently enough that it can be a challenge. Yeah, and so understanding what you have from a talent pool perspective, it’s not uncommon for a leader who engages in these total team assessments and or a relative or collective talent review to recognize that 20% of their organization of their executive team may be in the wrong roles, right?
They may, they may be in, they may not be aligned, uh, with the work that they need. You know, and there’s another observation I’ve made as well. And it just, it just came to me as I was thinking about this. It could be that you promoted someone who was most technically proficient into a leadership role and they’re struggling, but it could also be. That for a period of years, they performed very, very well in that leadership role, but the complexity of the, of the, pardon me, the complexity of the company has outgrown their ability to continue contributing at such a high level in the organization or such a senior level in the organization. So it’s not uncommon that I’ve had to go in and say, hey, look, you’ve been a great executive on this team for a number of years. Where we are going as an organization and what has happened in the industry over the course of the last few years have kind of outpaced your professional development in that regard. And so what I want to do is get you aligned to where you can be optimally effective. And that’s maybe one more level down or two levels down in the organization, running something that you’re highly proficient and skilled at running, but I’m going to bring somebody else in who’s got some more recent industry experience to lead as an executive at the top level. And that’s okay too.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, it’s important. It, those can be very difficult conversations, but a lot of times, many times there can be a sense of relief on the part of the person you’re working with because they realize I don’t really love what I’m doing. I wish I was doing something else. I mean, you see that in the military a lot. People that are pilots or aviators, when they get assigned to a desk job, some kind of leadership role, they’re not really super happy with doing it because they miss the thing that they loved. And they reall, wanted to spend their time doing. And so I think in, in organizations and commercial business, having that same kind of view of, is this the best and highest, and then how can I bring that person to understand that their best and highest is something different than what the box that we’ve had them, you know, stuck in, so to speak.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. How can, how can I honor their past without hamstringing the organization’s future? Yeah. No, you’re right. Uh, so teams, talent, um, any other observations or maybe experiences you’ve had with organizations trying to scale and, and when they ran into snags as it relates to team or talent.
Jeff Amerine:
Exactly. Exactly right.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, you know, when you, when you see for whatever reason, you see high level, uh, departures from organizations and then other people step into that role through some kind of normal succession without there being a real process around it. You can find some real difficulties and, and it begins to expose some of those things that maybe a charismatic leader was able to gloss over or to, it could, could be kind of the, the fabric of the culture and whatnot. And so some of that stuff, it can be exposed through this type of process. And that’s where things like the accountability chart can be really important as well. And making sure that you have a good understanding of do they get it? Do they want it? Do they have the capacity or the capability to do it? Another Gino Wickman EOS concept.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, you’re right. You know, um, uh, I know Whitman likes to talk about, and we do as well as this concept of boxes, bullets, and then bodies. Right. So what are the functional boxes, the high-level functional boxes within your organization, uh, you know, is there, is there a, uh, a vision strategy leader and then an execution leader, sales and marketing leader and operations or engineering leader, uh, technology box, so to speak, or an HR admin or a finance and admin box. So what are the five to seven boxes within your organization? And then what are the bullets within each of those boxes that actually describe the boundaries of responsibility within that box? What things are they focused on? What are the priorities that they’re focused on? And then and only then you’ve got the boxes identified, you’ve got the bullets identified, then and only then should you really start talking about, okay, who are the bodies that need to go in those boxes. And it’s not uncommon to find that you’ve got someone straddled across two boxes and they really have no business even having a toe in one of the boxes that they’re in because they don’t have the skills, they don’t have the capabilities, they don’t have the background. And this gives the opportunity with your total team, your relative talent review, and the creation and construction of your accountability chart, that gives you some really robust information as an executive to be able to realign responsibilities and hopefully honor someone’s past without hamstringing the organization’s future. Because you’ve got the objective data there to kind of help guide you in that regard.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And it’s something that needs to be done on kind of a regular basis. You don’t want to enter into those types of activities when it’s a crisis. It’s something that you probably, what kind of interval would you suggest in terms of keeping that up and doing that kind of assessment and review?
Jeff Standridge:
Well, so, uh, so in terms of the accountability chart, um, you know, uh, a, Wickman will tell you it needs to be updated every 90 days. And I would say it needs to be updated whenever there are changes. If, if that means, if that means you change someone’s responsibilities and, and the count abilities in 28 days, then you need to update your chart and distribute it back out to everyone and make sure everyone agrees it. Uh, if there have been no changes or you don’t remember any changes, then at the very least it needs to be revisited every 90 days when you do your quarterly business review to say, have there been any changes that we overlooked that we need to make sure that we reflect here? As it relates to your total team and your relative talent review, I say a minimum of annually, particularly on the total team. On the relative talent review, again, annually at the least every six months is probably even ideal.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. The key thing is to get into a cadence on this type of stuff at the right interval so that you’re not putting out fires, you’re being proactive in the way you think about these sorts of efficiencies with the organization.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. And you know, I’ll make a shameless plug for our GrowthDX, our strategic growth diagnostic again, because I have seen that work for new leaders who are coming into organizations. A new CEO comes into the organization or they’re relatively new within that organization and having them actually execute a growth diagnostic on the organization to look across the seven domains of revenue velocity, organizational, operational, and leadership effectiveness innovation readiness, digital readiness, and financial disciplines, that gives a really good view across the organization of how the company is performing against a number of about 75 some odd best practices across those seven domains can also serve with that relative team and total team assessment, or relative talent and total team assessments can actually provide some really good useful data as well.
Jeff Amerine:
No doubt about it. I mean, it’s a sort of intervention and self-reflection that puts you on a path to making changes that can lead to much better operational efficiency. No doubt about it.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. That’s right. All right. Next episode, we’re going to delve into the areas of financial disciplines. We’ll spend some time talking about the importance of those in helping an organization scale and grow as well. This has been another episode of the Innovation Junkies podcast. Thank you for joining.
Jeff Amerine:
See you next time.