In building a high-performing team, it’s not about having the best players. It’s about collecting individuals with complementary strengths and doing a role sort to best leverage those strengths across the team now and over time.
The role sort is one of the building blocks of Tactical Capacity that together accelerate executive onboarding and the development of high-performing teams. Each building block has a key component. It’s important to put all the building blocks in place and even more important to focus on the key components:
- Burning Imperative: Co-created shared purpose
- Milestone Management: Systemic approach to learning and adapting
- Early Wins: Disciplined delegation
- Role Sort: Leveraging complementary strengths
- Communication: Two ways all the time
The key to a role sort is leveraging the complementary strengths you’ve got now to craft the best team for the current mission and acquire or develop the strengths you’ll need for the future.
This requires three different processes:
- Talent Management (Short-term)
- Succession and Contingency Planning (Mid-term)
- Future Capability Planning (Long-term)
Talent Management
When managing talent most organizations fail to differentiate. Treating everyone the same produces schools of average ducks. Instead sort people by performance and role fit and invest, support, cherish, move up, over or out as appropriate. Expect to find most people effective and in the right role. Support them as a top priority. Then treat your other people differently, cherishing outstanding performers in the right roles, and doing what it takes to help others improve their performance or circumstances.
Investing, supporting, and cherishing all helping people develop their strengths. Think in terms of a modified Gallup Strengths model in which strengths are made up of:
- Innate talent
- Learned knowledge
- Practiced skills
- Hard-won experience
- Apprenticed craft-level caring and sensibilities
Help people get the learning, practice and experience they need to build their strengths. Many organizations focus just on fixing areas in which people are deficient. That leads to a class of average ducks. This is why you need to help people develop things at which they are already strong. Help the eagles fly better, the rabbits run better, the fish swim better to have even greater complementary strengths.
Succession and contingency planning
Things change. Succession planning is about figuring out who’s going to take someone’s job when they leave at a pre-determined time. This links closely with future capability planning and can generally involve planned overlaps.
Contingency planning is about figuring out who’s going to take someone’s job if they move out of the job suddenly, often with no notice. Shame on you if you’re not ready.
Future capability planning
Future capability planning is the logical, essential next step in a strategic planning process. Once you identify the strategic options you are going to pursue to bridge the gap between your aspirational goals and current reality, you need to figure out how to bridge the operational and organizational gaps required by those strategic options.
Strategic Planning – Future Capability Planning Linkage
Strategic planning and future capability planning need to be hard wired together. As soon as you’ve locked into your strategic priorities, your very next question should be what future capabilities are required for us to be able to deliver those priorities? Think in terms of these steps:
- Determine your strategic priorities.
- Envision the future organization, culture, capabilities, and perspectives required to deliver those priorities.
- Assess your existing organization, culture, capabilities, and perspectives
- Identify the gaps between the future culture, capabilities, and perspectives required and existing capabilities, culture and perspectives.
- Build the future capability plan to fill the gaps (human, financial, technical and operational.)
Note the three ways to fill the human gaps:
- Invest in talent development for current people
- Recruit people now and invest in developing them
- Recruit “fully formed” people later
Invest In Talent Development
The first approach has the advantage of leveraging your existing resources and is the least disruptive culturally. It only works if your existing people have the required talent and you have enough time to develop their strengths.
Recruit People Now
This approach gives you the ability to recruit people with the talents and attitudes you need, and then develop them. This still requires you to have enough time to develop them.
Recruit “Fully Formed” People Later
The advantage here is that you don’t have to invest time developing these people. On the other hand, they are going to be more expensive and have a greater risk of cultural miss-match.
Use one or more of these approaches as you see fit. Just have a plan.
John Hall
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