Early wins give teams confidence in themselves. This is why they are generally little wins that can be delivered early, as opposed to big wins that take more time. The general guidance is to over-invest in the early wins to accelerate them and pave the way for other wins. The key to setting this up is disciplined delegation.
Early wins are some 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 early wins is disciplined delegation, likely with some sort of team charter that lays out:
- Inspiring Direction: Objectives/desired results/context/intent – what and why
- Enabling Resources: Financial, information, technical or operational, people, time
- Empowering Authority to make mission tactical decisions within strategic and operational boundaries/guidelines/intent – different than superior would have made
- Credible Accountability and consequences (standards of performance, time expectations, positive and negative consequences of success and failure)
Team Charters
Description/Scope: Overall summary
Summary of the work’s what and why (objectives, context and intent) and guidelines and interdependencies, so all can see quickly how this work fits with others’ work.
Objectives/Goals/Desired Result: WHAT
Charge the team with delivering SMART results – what you expect the team to get done:
- Specific – Concrete objectives and goals are easier to achieve and track.
- Measurable – If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
- Actionable/Attainable – Things they can make happen or influence (and achieve).
- Relevant – To the overall mission, strategy, plan
- Time-bound – Including milestones along the way.
Context and Intent: WHY
Share the information that led to objectives/goals/desired result in terms of the organization’s overall purpose, objective, strategies, positioning, values, as well as how this work fits within that and helps move things in that direction. “Need to [what], so that [why]”.
- Provide any insights you have into customers, collaborators, culture, capabilities, conditions (constant, novel or variable) or competitors (6 Cs)
- Get at the expected level of complication (number of parts) and complexity (predictability of parts’ interactions) of the program or project, expected risks and ways to mitigate those risks.
- Discuss the intent behind the objectives. Explain why this matters to your customers, colleagues, you, the team, the community – key benefits.
- Lay out what’s going to happen after objective is achieved, how others, and especially the superior team, will use the team’s output.
Approach: HOW
Resources
Lay out the human, financial, data/technical, and operational resources available. Be specific (like “25% of Murgatroyd’s time for a week)” as opposed to (“someone’s help.”)
Clarify what other teams, groups, people are supporting, dependent on, or note other teams, groups, units working in parallel, supporting or interdependent areas. Help the team understand whom they can, should, and must work with. This may or may not include a steering committee, executive sponsor/champion, program or project leader, program or project manager assisting that leader, project management (PMO) or transformation office helping enable across teams.
Authority/Guidelines/Interdependencies
Clarify what the team can and cannot do with regard to decisions, roles and approach:
- What the team can decide on its own, what it must recommend to its approving authority, and what decisions have already been made, including mandatory executional elements.
- Policies (that they must adhere to,) guidelines (that they should adhere to unless they have a good reason not to do so,) and principles (that should underpin all.)
- Interdependencies between the team being chartered and the other teams involved.
Accountability: HOW KNOW
Be clear on accountability structure (RACI: Accountable, Responsible, Consulted, Informed,) update timing, completion timing. This is about how you’re going to track and measure success. In general, tasks get managed/tracked daily, projects weekly, programs monthly, and core processes annually.
- Approving Authority: Passes accountability on to someone else, retaining approval/decision rights.
- Accountable: Overall ownership of results. Drives decisions. Ensures implementation.
- Responsible: Does defined work (and signs off on their portion of the work.)
- Consulted: Provides input. (Could be advice to be considered or concurrence to be followed) – Two-way conversation.
- Informed: Kept up-to-date – One-way communication either in advance or after the fact.
John Hall
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