One of the most critical ingredients for a growing organization is a leader with a vision. It would be ideal if he has a team whose members who dream together, is motivated and capable to decide on the course of action to make this dream come true. Such ideal team I suppose happens only in heaven and fairy tales or may be in Google :-)
In real life when you take a leadership position, you need to identify a core team who will share your dream. In my opinion you will be lucky if you can manage to get 5% of your team to be of this variety. If you are successful and lucky you may be able to increase this to 20%.
Then you need to find a way to get the best of the remaining.
Does it mean that the majority is not capable and don’t have the potential. The answer is yes and no.
Yes, because for all practical purpose, majority of people in most organizations are just doing a job. “Jamming for daily bread”.
No, because I accept the possibility that there could be many reasons, some correctable and some not correctable, for this state of affairs. You may not have been able to trigger their imagination or some of the team members are misfits in the current environment or some are slow starters and so on and so forth.
If you want to succeed in building and scaling up a team you need to accept this reality.
When you identify a core team of self starters who are able to tune-in to your dream and take the necessary initiatives you should do it with utmost care. If you are not careful, these catalysts may be seen as or degenerate to a coterie restricting and limiting you from reaching out to others.
Your next challenge is how to get the best out of the big majority. For this you need to break down your dream to well-defined actionable tasks for the vast majority who have been grouped around these tasks. This is one of the most difficult challenges in scaling up. If you don’t do this well, these members who are not yet ready to manage the uncertainty will become very inefficient and unwieldy or even de-motivated.
I am not suggesting that the vast majority is incapable of independent thinking and you should treat them like robots who will dance to a tune.
I am suggesting that you accept the reality that the vast majority will need time to get to speed and the systems and procedures in place and clear delineation of tasks will help you to achieve maximum productivity. As Chris Argyris observes in the article ‘Empowerment: The Emperor’s New Clothes’ published in Harward Business Review “Both research and practice indicate that the best results of reengineering (a change management program embodying empowerment) occur when the jobs are rigorously specified and not when individuals are left to define them”
Some of you who have read Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull may remember what Jonathan told Fletcher when Jonathan realized that Fletcher, to begin with, was at awe at the concepts Jonathan was expounding and unable to get going. Softly he tells Fletcher:
‘Let’s start with level flying.’
You may need to get each of your members to perfect the art of level flying before you push them to do loops.
Do you stop here? No. You need create an environment that will spark more of your team members, even though some may take longer to spark.
“A rule book to follow for daily chores and an environment that brings out the innovative spirit of each team member” is what you need to build
Your skill in managing this spiral will determine your ability in scaling up; whether you can scale up your road side mechanic shop to a chain of service centres or your specialty clinic to a large hospital or your mom and pop restaurant to a chain of hotels.
The last and one of the most difficult part in managing this spiral is weeding out the misfits. I am not suggesting that you have to identify some as useless. But develop the skills to identify the misfits in your team and help them to find where they can fit in. It is better to spend your time on enabling those who can fit in. In this world of political correctness, this may sound like blasphemy.
No comments:
Post a Comment