‘What’s Your First Team?’

 In Patrick Lencioni’s fable ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team’ this is the question the new CEO asks her team of direct reports. Her point is that her leadership team: first, has to be a team; and second, that the leadership team itself has to be their priority. Too often this is not the case, leaders are closer and more loyal to the functional groups for which they are responsible.

 In our last post we discussed the temptation to reorganize that afflicts many leadership teams. Such reorganizations are often not successful because they do not begin with an understanding of the purpose of the organization chart. The result is that the chart is reordered, but the organization and the way it goes about its work is not truly restructured.

 In his recent ‘Predictable Success’ Les McKeown states that the organizational chart is meant to be a tool for decision making. To be an effective machine for decision making, management roles must be clarified and the organization must be prepared to work cross-functionally. Each management level must see their peer management team as their first team. This must begin at the highest leadership level.

 Most organizations do not evolve in this way and this is particularly true for most IT shops. We can illustrate this:

 The above graphic is a whiteboard that lists the brainstorming responses to the question, “What tools do you use to track your work?” This question was posed to representatives from an IT organization of about 500 people. (Yes, these responses were all from within the same organization).

 This graphic leads to some questions:

• If there is no central repository to track (and measure) the work that is being done, how can management obtain an accurate and consistent understanding of what is happening in the organization? We mean the whole organization, not just the separate functional units.
•  If there is no such clear understanding, how can the leadership team be a leader’s first team?

Clearly, the lack of coordination at this basic level of tracking and monitoring work indicates an organization for which the leaders are closer to their functional teams.

 If this is not addressed, if the work is not restructured such that everyone is doing similar things in a consistent way,  no level of shuffling an organization chart is likely to lead to lasting improvement. The first task is to address the symptoms and that means understanding and structuring how the organization does its work at its most basic level. Only then can the organization chart be turned into an effective machine for decision making.

- Bill Cunningham
bill.cunningham@cppit.com