14th June 2021.
Dear leaders,
This week I was reminded of one of the more challenging roles I have held and some of you will be about to face.
I call it The Rebuilder.
The rebuilder is a manager who is taking over an existing team or department and their job to truly complete is:
To rebuild the team, rebuild the foundations, rebuild the confidence of the team or department and bring back performance throughout the team.
A rebuilder is often a role many do not hire for but you end up taking on.
A rebuilder for me is a specialist management role and many are not set up to win or equipped to complete the management task. This is a hard-hitting but critical truth.
One of the hardest success factors you face is reshaping the team, you have to get to know the team, get to know the inner workings, understand who is vital, who is the internal influencer of the team, you need to know your hidden leader, your secret weapon and understand the inter persona relationships.
Here are 10 get to know questions to help you with a headstart with rebuilding and understand your new team.
You have to think and operate as a sports head coach or a leader in the armed forces.
Why?
You have to understand the team layout, what the team needs to deliver and who is up for the fight and who is not. It is how you make the right calls, the hard calls and how you communicate that ultimately sets you up to win or to fail.
You have the challenge to understand:
If the team is ‘a good team’,
If they had a bad manager
If there are a few that need to be reshaped or moved on
Or you need to create a holding pattern until the business is in a place to fund your next moves.
One of the hardest changes is to implement your own style and your own approach and gain buy-in, this can take a matter of minutes or a number of months, you will soon see the characteristics of your team and how they adapt to change and change management.
Some sports coaches have weeks to implement this and some leaders in the armed forces only have minutes, these are important to remember when you feel like you don’t have time.
Setting a series of early tasks and meeting the team to understand how they intrepid these tasks will be important to figure out the team and team members.
Remember how we react under pressure typically shows our true personality. Understanding your team's subculture (company culture's misunderstood element) and getting a glimpse of your organisational health is going to be understood in these micro-behaviours.
As previously mentioned, a co-pilot is often needed early on in this process and something many overlook, another benefit of a co-pilot is to observe your team, understand their gesturing and performance and analyse their output, this is something many do not take the time to create and follow through on.
The reason why I brought up the rebuilder?
There is a record number of roles being recruited for in the US and a huge number of roles being hired across the UK and Australia, it is likely that you will either have a rebuilder come in and around you and you might become the rebuilder in the coming weeks.
Consider who you are, if you have the skill set to be a rebuilder or you need to become the rebuilder this summer, it is going to be an essential part of getting many businesses back to normal or to thrive and in other areas the difference between a high performing team and a department that comes under fire and losses headcount.
Have a great week,
Danny Denhard
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