Successfully managing a problem when something does go wrong starts long before any challenge even has a chance to present itself. It begins with finding, enlisting, training, and managing the staff, colleagues, contractors, and vendors who you will trust not only to do their jobs to make things go right, but also to help avert disaster when things don’t.
If you build a team and can’t trust them to do their job and do it well, you have one of two significant issues: (1) you either have the wrong team; or (2) you are the wrong leader. The first is avoidable, the second is fixable.
Many project teams are composed of more than just our day-to-day teammates. We may require the help of outside resources such as temporary staff, third-party agencies, vendors, and independent contractors. How do our customers and business partners tell the difference between a full-time permanent staff member, a temporary employee, a contractor, or a vendor? They can’t, and we shouldn’t expect them to.
Every participant on the team represents our brand, whether he or she carries a company business card, is a vendor employee providing specialized expertise, or is a short-term, part-time laborer. In the eyes of our customers, they are all part of the brand experience and there is absolutely no difference from whence they draw their paycheck.
Our permanent event staff at the NFL was a group of 28 event planners. On Draft Day, our team numbered in the hundreds; on Super Bowl Sunday that number increased into the thousands. If any one of them did their job poorly or contributed to a bad customer experience, it didn’t matter whose employee they were. It would be our failure as far as our fans were concerned. We and our teams need to recognize and embrace this fact as soon as we can.
A team is a blended family comprising everyone who contributes to the product, service, and brand experience they provide. Since every contributor is viewed as a member of the team by the outside world, they must communicate the same messages and expectations, be adequately trained to be ambassadors of our brand, and be managed similarly, as well. In short, we must make our nonstaff team members our teammates.
It is common to bring on outside resources when we require expertise that is not resident within our company. Importing temporary talent enables us to accommodate inconsistent workloads, such as projects and seasonal spikes in business activity, without having to hire permanent staff for the busiest times and have them be idle the rest of the year.
When we bring new, transient teammates on board, the probability of something going wrong can increase if we do not imbue them with the same sense of belonging and responsibility as though they were permanent employees. That’s why I believe that we should take as much time and care to qualify temporary employees, contractors, and vendors as we do for full-time staff.
Our onboarding and training regimen for a temporary workforce includes: how to dress and behave in the workplace, how to invoice or report work hours, how to fill out expense reports, and how to report an illness. These and other processes are all very important operational necessities, but are simply procedural instructions. So, too, are most job descriptions (or for vendors, scopes of work), which are often just lists of what each teammate’s specific responsibilities will entail. None of these truly inspires, motivates, or creates a teammate out of anyone.
We can add great value to our orientation strategy by adding an hour or two to share not only “what and how we do things” but “why we are doing them.” This provides temporary teammates and vendors, along with permanent staff, with a greater sense of our collective purpose. What can be even more transformational is an overt admission that our success is in their hands. By sharing how and why we will rely on them, individually and together, we begin to instill a sense of shared ownership in the end result. Teammates begin to appreciate how their individual jobs matter, and how they fit into the bigger picture.
I like to communicate these perspectives in person, in sessions that blend permanent, temporary, and vendor staff. When we do this, we further break down the walls otherwise defined by who people work for; this is a vivid demonstration that we are all part of the same team. It is one thing to require permanent and temporary staff to attend a team-building orientation. But, is it realistic to expect key vendor staff to participate as well? You bet it is. In fact, make it mandatory if you can. If they are reluctant, they may not be the right partner for you. Wouldn’t you like to know that they might not work as part of a collaborative team before something goes really wrong?
When we first compose our team, we start filling our roster with the most important position players, the people with the skill sets that our business or project requires—designers and engineers, accountants and analysts, planners and marketers, operating staff and subject specialists. Perhaps we already have a core team in place or must manage a project team stocked with “volunteers” from our company’s internal departments. Often, corporate titles and job descriptions, and if we’re lucky, actual skills, will define the individuals best applied to the effort. If nothing else, they already know the processes, procedures, and politics of the corporate environment.
If you can be selective for any of the essential functions, it is relatively easy to identify candidates with the technical or operational expertise you require. With a minimal investment in time and training to indoctrinate them with knowledge of the nuances, idiosyncrasies, and processes of your project, you will soon be able to trust these people to get the job done to your specifications. But, more importantly, will you also be able to trust them to deliver to your expectations?
What’s the difference between the two? Anyone who has managed people knows that having a team of good, hardworking people who faithfully and meticulously follow specific instructions and processes is the hallmark of an efficient, productive organization. These tireless, often selfless workers can methodically apply proven procedures, meticulously adhere to exacting schedules, complete complex checklists with precision, and contribute to guiding the process from Point A to Point Z. You can trust these dedicated, talented teammates to routinely make things go right way more often than they might otherwise.
Expectations, however, can and should go well beyond simply meeting specifications. To contribute to success in a more impactful way, removing threats and dealing with their consequences, our teammates need to be able to think three steps ahead, to imagine and plan, and to respond to things that go wrong with creative and effective solutions that are not necessarily written in an operating manual. Our expectations should also include teammates proactively collaborating with their colleagues across the organization to identify and manage weaknesses, threats, and areas of concern. If they do, we have a much easier time trusting them to do what is required without constant direction and that they will contribute to getting things back to right when things go wrong.
By now, I’m sure you’ve grasped the common denominator in delegating responsibility and authority—trust. This is very easy to say and extremely hard to live by. After all, it challenges the pervasive ideology that the careers of staff members are solely in the hands of their superiors. The truth is a leader’s career is just as much in the hands of the team. Successful recovery when things go wrong will be just as reliant on the skillful contributions of individual team members as on the deft management of their leaders.
As leaders, we must communicate our expectations in clear, understandable terms, whether we are managing a wholly new team, an inherited staff, or a work group composed of colleagues drafted from other business units around the organization. Selecting and applying competent individuals with the necessary skill sets to tackle the right job is the most basic requirement to keep things going right. Molding individuals into an invested, collaborative team that we can trust to proactively evaluate threats and work together to correct the damage when it matures into a problem is a great deal more difficult. So, how do we look beyond work histories, titles, and job descriptions when we select our team members and search for character traits that are not often evident on a resume?
JP Morgan Chase alumna and veteran talent development expert Nancy Gill views the process of building a collaborative team as a two-sided coin, and the responsibility for both sides is entirely on us. Our first task is to assess how prospective teammates will work cooperatively with their colleagues under pressure, and cope with the stress that will inevitably be generated when things do not go as planned. Clearly, there is no way to be completely assured that a candidate will contribute positively, collaboratively, and confidently when problems arise simply by looking at a resume.
Recognizing that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, Gill recommends paying careful attention to a prospective teammate’s responses to strategic screening questions that probe for desired “behavioral competencies”:
• “Give me an example of a situation where you understood ahead of others what was called for.”
• “Tell me about a time when you had to make a quick decision in a difficult situation and your judgment turned out to be right.”
• “Give me an example of where your self-confidence permitted you to take an action you would have otherwise avoided.”
• “Tell me about a time when you brought up or said something that others were avoiding.”
Answers to these open-ended questions, and others you may add that are specific to your industry or project, can reveal a great deal not only about how the candidate team members have approached problems, but also some key behavioral indicators. Aside from demonstrating good problem-solving skills:
• Do the answers indicate a tendency toward collaboration and a shared responsibility for the outcome, or a fondness for recognition, credit, and self-promotion?
• Do the responses show initiative and leadership, or instead assign blame or focus on the shortcomings of others?
• Are the answers delivered with confidence and candor, or is the prospect nervous and uncomfortable sharing information?
Look for responses that indicate a behavioral competency for a calmness under pressure and an ability to think quickly. But also take note of how the candidate team members tell their story, and whether they portray themselves as a single character, or one in an all-star cast of problem solvers.
After interviews have narrowed the field to those being seriously considered, Nancy Gill is also a strong advocate for the use of assessment tools, which are available through many talent development and coaching companies. These tools objectively gauge responses to carefully crafted questions designed to tease out attitudes, inclinations, and tendencies as indicators of likely behaviors in the workplace. Gill made certain to have a test like this administered to me when she was the senior vice president of human resources for the National Football League. The more essential the position and the more likelihood that the individual being evaluated will be responsible for leading the response to a crisis, the more essential an assessment tool may be to a successful response and recovery when things do go wrong.
For all companies, especially those that have neither the time nor the resources to avail themselves of a third-party assessment tool, Gill recommends benefiting from the richness of intelligence that can be amassed through a hiring panel, a series of interviews hosted by other teammates and project stakeholders, rather than only by a single individual. “A greater diversity of subjects, perspectives, and questions from different points of view make it harder for the candidate to prepare for the different areas that they will be probed on. It is also more interesting and engaging for the candidates,” she adds. The more engaged the candidate feels, the more information and intelligence will naturally emerge from the interview.
In some cases, we will not be hiring an entirely new set of teammates to undertake a project. We may, instead, be drafting colleagues from other areas of the company who possess experience and expertise that will contribute to the success of our project. Often, we may have no voice in the matter and will not be drafting them at all. Rather, we may be working on a project with colleagues who are assigned to the effort by their respective leaders, and hopefully have the expertise that is required. In this frequently encountered circumstance, there is no way to ensure our colleagues possess the behavioral competencies that will embrace the cohesive, team-oriented environment so critical to the outcome whether things go right, or horribly wrong.
“In my humble opinion,” says Nancy, “the single most important contributing factor to a team’s ability to succeed in the face of a big problem is the leadership that built the team and the collaborative culture they inspire.” That’s the other side of the coin, whether we are leading a team of colleagues, an entirely new one, or a hybrid of the two. Expectation, collaboration, and trust have to go both ways, not just from the bottom up, but also from the top down. The culture we as leaders establish and maintain is as important to our success when responding to challenges as the expertise and attitudes of the team with whom we have surrounded ourselves.
Leading is indeed a big job, but it is not the same as doing everyone else’s job. Leaders set the vision, expectations, and culture for a business or project. They guide, motivate, and coach their teams, hopefully to a successful outcome. Leaders, when all appears to be going well, let their teammates do the jobs they were hired to do to contribute to that success. Leaders share credit when things go right and take responsibility when they don’t. When things go wrong, leaders manage the response and provide decisive and timely direction, while also inspiring confidence from and in their team.
Between the light of success and the darkness of failure is the looming specter of the threat not yet realized. These are the situations that can put our leadership skills to the ultimate test.
On one hand, we recognize that there is nothing as dispiriting as second-guessing our team and jumping in to “rescue” what they were already in the process of solving. On the other, we would be derelict if we allowed them to fail because we didn’t act or help. Where’s the balance when something starts going wrong? When do we step in? That’s the million-dollar question. It depends on your nerves, your degree of trust and confidence in your team, and the scope and scale of the problem. We trust our team to do the job when things are running perfectly. In many cases, they are still the right people to trust when things start going wrong. (Admittedly, I’m still a work in progress.)
It’s our job as leaders to ensure that the people best suited to manage a particular problem are aware of our concerns when we perceive an emerging threat. Many times, the “best-suited people” may, in fact, be us. More often, our teammates are the right people because of their skill set, their proximity to the problem, or because we have other pressing concurrent priorities. Let them know that you know there’s a problem. Ask them if they are prepared to handle it, and how you can be helpful. Make them responsible to let you know if they need you to step in. Then, let them solve the problem and keep you informed of their progress. When they are forced to manage us, they are diverting some of their focus and attention away from whatever went wrong and often at the worst possible time.
Here’s an example. Removing the Super Bowl halftime show from the field was one of the most stress-filled moments of the day. We only had eight minutes to get hundreds of people and tons of staging off the field. Every year, the halftime team executed this flawlessly. One year, though, it seemed like that was never going to happen. As the clock ticked down, big pieces of the stage got snagged in the access ramps, blocking anything else from leaving. Our stage manager and his team worked through the solutions and were able to remove the very last bit of the show just as the clock hit zero and the broadcast resumed. If, however, I had diverted their attention from finding ways to accelerate the stage removal to fielding less-informed (and less-valuable) suggestions from me, I would only have wasted more of their time. I won’t tell you it was easy. I desperately wanted to contribute to the solution, but this problem needed their expertise far more than they needed my input. I let them know that I trusted them to do what they needed do and they delivered. Could I have similarly trusted a team that was composed of contractors and vendors? Absolutely. None of the halftime crew worked for the NFL.
When problems strike that rely more on your team’s prowess than your own, let your teammates know what the non-negotiables are (in this case, being late was not acceptable) and let them work out the problem, especially when time is of the essence. If you select your people and partners well, clearly communicate your expectations, and give them the responsibility—and the authority—to get their job done, your crisis will never be one of confidence.