By Kevin Bonfield, founder and managing partner at Concentre and a member of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization in Dallas, Texas. Your leadership team is truly the driving force of any change you want to bring to your organization. Leading change, thus, requires knowing how to get your executive team and managers on board. It’s easy to underestimate the number of changes that will happen to our leadership or executive team when we begin a transformation journey. When it comes to implementing major change I often see over half the leadership team turnover during the next two to three years. So, if we know that there are going to be changes, how can we take a proactive view of getting the right people in the right seat? This is the first step towards building the team you need to be successful. Assessing the Team: Bringing RealismLet’s start by understanding that assessing your team requires a degree of art and, where possible, can involve getting more than one perspective. That said, it is only when we assess with a level of realism that we can begin to take the appropriate actions. Underestimating and overestimating both lead to problematic outcomes—either that we underestimate or overestimate the depth and breadth of changes that are required. This is where a Team Assessor can help you. The Team Assessor evaluates your change team on two dimensions:
A number of factors should go into the assessment of your leadership team’s capability and readiness to lead the change, including:
By assigning a rank between 1 and 10, where 1 is the lowest and 10 is the highest, for each person’s capability and readiness for change, then plotting each person’s position on a table, you will have a clear view in which you can assess your team. For example: On the Capability to Lead Change dimension, those with the highest capability should be placed on the upper half of the table, those with the lowest capability should be placed on the lower half of the table. On the Readiness to Lead Change dimension, those with the highest readiness should be on the right side of the table, those with the lowest readiness should be on the left side of the table. Do the relative placements—each leadership member relative to each other—make sense? Did the results come out as you expected? Defining ActionsThe assessment places members of the leadership team into four quadrants:
As stated above, this assessment requires a degree of art. As a result, some team members will be placed closer to the edges of the “Driver” box (team members who both have the capability and readiness to lead the change). Where there is proximity, I have found that the best course of action is to assume that they can be “Drivers” and give them an appropriate assignment to test your assumption. Some of the best change leaders I have seen just needed that opportunity to prove themselves. From here, determine which actions you are going to take and how you want to sequence them:
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November 2020
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