It’s a constant cycle in sports. After the completion of the championship cycle, there is a draft. Rookie players are chosen, then free agents (experienced players) are bid on and a preliminary roster is set. It’s then that the war games begin. Each team tries to outguess each other’s strategy by looking at who has joined which team and how their individual talent will combine and change their opponent’s ability.
They do this because it’s a sound strategy. Yes, coaching can create enhanced combination effects and ‘miracle’ teams can also happen, but for the most part, by looking at the members of the team, we can do a pretty good job predicting the style and pace of play, whether they are offensively or defensively minded, and so forth.
The same strategy applies to business, and this is good and bad depending on what you are working to accomplish. It’s good if you have carefully put together your team to serve the emergent needs of your client. But if you have a team that’s locked into preserving a successful organization of the past? That’s not so good.
If you are seeing your team routinely deliver new value, all you need to look at is succession planning – your structure is right on. If on the other hand you see projects drop into the cracks – even with talented team members – it’s time to do some diagnostic work.
What Happens When we Try to Repurpose our Star Players
The average firm is set up to optimize and improve margins on offerings that are running at scale. Teams are naturally formed along functional lines and hand off between teams is process driven and highly transactional.
In the new world of scarce talent and highly capable subject matter experts, we need to do much better than this to meet the need to continuously renew our edge.
When you look over the current team members and their leaders, you’ll find deep resumes of experience in precision, optimization and efficiency improvement of the firm’s core services. People are promoted on their ability to get gains from the scale offerings and generate bonuses and stock market value. We have data and management systems that support this work and dashboards that show us where we are in the cycle.
Contrast this with the need to very efficiently do the work of seeking candidate businesses for the replacement of a product or service that is long of tooth in the portfolio. The work of searching for a new business model is remarkably different from that of optimization.
To the above analogy, if we take our star players from the optimization team and set them about the task of business model discovery, what is our expected outcome? Yes, they will be drawn to lock in on a new offer prematurely and optimize it. Sound familiar?
Getting the Right Team: 3 Steps to Bring the Hidden Cohort Forward
It is highly likely that in your existing firm you have some members who have natural competencies that could serve the team in forming new value. They are currently using their “superpowers” to support your optimization work because that’s where the action is.
Activating this “hidden cohort” takes some work.
#1: Establish Intent
There needs to be some very solid strategy work that gets to hard truths around valuation and organic growth rates. Many firms today have enjoyed stock appreciation based on share buybacks and tailwinds – from low interest financials to a nice boost in organic growth. The time to get that next wave established is right now, when the balance sheet is in good shape.
Once the case is made for growth, it’s time for the senior team to get to work on setting a growth agenda. We’ve created a unique tool called the Future Capability Process that capitalizes on the typical team’s operational strengths to work through three cycles of dialogue and information to ensure we’re on the same page. For more on this process, see here, here and here.
Once this very clear agenda is communicated to the team (and budgeted for), the word will spread and skilled subject matter experts will start to inquire. This is when we can start to chalk up a “fantasy” roster and get to work on building a team that can deliver.
#2: Identify Talent
Having a clear intent in hand, it’s time to look at our bench strength to accomplish our strategy. In this cycle, we pour over org charts and have some discussion with existing team members to continue to find the ‘hidden’ Growth Leaders who are already on the team. Adding this to the “volunteer” roster from above, we can now update our scouting list.
To aid in this process, we’ve developed The Complete Growth Leader assessment tool that highlights competencies and gaps of the candidates. Once we’ve done the work of assessment, we can put a clean plan in place to improve the strengths of those team members that we need to deliver our plan (and perhaps recruit or borrow new talent to fill gaps).
The intent of this work is to build powerful, laterally competent (cross-functional) teams that can work together to quickly scope out new value propositions and do the work of rapid iteration needed to efficiently seek out the next candidate for scalable business.
#3: Build & Launch Your Team
Now that we’ve identified aligned individuals, we need to put them into an organization structure that allows them to do the work in an efficient and highly adaptive way. This is typically made up of a core team of full-time participants and a very small number of fractional team members. The project framework we use for this work is the STRIDE framework, which bridges the usual chasm between the discovery and implementation teams. By investing in bridging this chasm early, we increase our odds of success and keep our work out of the incubator chasm.
Talent Will Deliver
By “stacking the deck” with growth-oriented talent in a structure that’s designed to quickly find value, you open the path for organic growth to become a regular cycle. Using this approach of periodically forming all star teams is exactly how great work is done by firms like Pixar.
If you’d like to talk about how to get an organic growth-driven cycle, it all begins with a conversation. Call me at 847-651-1014 or use this link to set up a 20-minute, (no-strings-attached) consult.
