Case Study
Team Performace
“We need to reorganise, who do I keep for a successful team?”
“We will be restructuring, who do I keep to have a team that performs well together when it is done?”
Exceptional situations require exceptional leaders.
In volatile markets we have to respond to changes fast. With companies bracing for a recession/market change, cutting personal costs is at the forefront of actions taken to keep numbers in the black. You don’t want to let go of people who possess critical skills to the functioning and there for future growth of your company.
How do you prevent this from happening? And how do you ensure a team goes from storming to performing in uncertain conditions?
We are facing headwinds and need to make changes to cut costs.
Sander is the CEO of his company. He is concerned about how to turn the company’s trajectory and stay on top of the game while market conditions are worsening. In the past, Sander has given his C-suite team percentages of people that needed to be laid off and left it up to them to determine who this would be. In the past, a layer of ‘middle managers’ was removed. Most choices on who to lay off were made based on performance; only the so-called ‘A’ players with an exceptional rating over the previous year got to stay.
After the new situation settled, it turned out that performance was down. Motivation and collaboration were at an all-time low.
To make matters worse, the A players were abandoning ship and revenues were falling. This triggered the need for a new round of layoffs. Sander is wondering if there is a different way of approaching it this time.
While evaluating what happened in the last reorganisation, Sander realises he needs to address more than just cost-cutting this time around. The cost of underperforming teams, high turnover and low motivation, as well as coming back from that, costs more than the initial cut was worth in his eyes.
This time, Sander wants to look deeper than the ‘A-player’ list when determining who to keep and who to let go. He knows that teams can perform better than individual high performers, but who will make the best teams? Sander wants to empower and train his C-suite team to lead the upcoming changes to improve outcomes. He can already see the increase in conflict and has noticed a rise in jockeying for position, and is concerned that his team will not survive the reorganisation intact.
We will sit down with Sander and the C-suite/leaders, who will have to make decisions to and understand what changes are required. During this initial investigation phase, we will advise on whether starting with a leadership architecture program or a team architecture program would be most beneficial for the organisation and synchronise that with Sander’s envisioned restructuring phases. Most often, restructuring starts from the top. Our customisable leadership architecture program is the preferred starting point in such cases.
During this process, we will examine the characteristics of the individuals, their contribution to team dynamics, and the critical drivers, skills and attributes needed for the leader or team in question to be successful. But we don’t stop there. Based on the outcomes, we will sit with Sander and his team to help him make decisions and start the transition process.
Providing his leaders with the right tools through specifically selected training, they not only grow as exceptional leaders but will also be able to help build a resilient company culture and create a place of psychological safety while changes are happening.
When forming new teams, conflicts and divisions often take over eight months to resolve and achieve high performance. With our Team Architecture transformation program and Exponential Leadership Architecture program, we reduce the time to resolution and arm the team with interventions that will let you see significant improvements within eight weeks.
Necessary cost-driven changes are utilised positively to optimise performance, leadership growth, increased satisfaction and goodwill amongst employees and overall company performance in the long term.
What makes this worth even more to the organisation is that once these skills are learned by the individuals participating, their future teams will see them integrate faster, be more engaged, deliver more consistently as well as be more resilient to stressors.
