Aligning your people

A bit of a follow-up to last week's post on personal (or personnel) development.

Teams (as well as larger organizations) often have a tendency to suffer from inertia. In other words, we keep doing something in the same way because that's the way we have "always" done it. A key manner in which this can hurt a team is in terms of job assignments.

Your team changes. New people come onto the team, sometimes people leave, sometimes people alter the amount of time they can spend on your team, and sometimes people go out and learn new skills & knowledge. However, we rarely sit back and systematically look at the (human) resources that we have and how they map onto the jobs/demands that the team must fill. Your financial advisor will tell you to systematically look at and adjust your financial portfolio every 1-3 years. However, they will also tell you that this doesn't hold if certain things change - most notably your own financial goals or the goals of an individual fund.

Similar logic holds for systematically analyzing the resources your team has at its disposal. You don't need to do this every 6 months, or every year. However, there are certain situations that should trigger a systematic evaluation of the team's tasks and the roles of team members.

These will include events such as:

• A change in the team's tasks and responsibilities. Don't just assign someone to the new task, make sure that your overall "portfolio" of people and the roles that they perform make sense. This includes not only what is someone's availability and technical skills/expertise, but also what relationships and people skills can a team member take advantage of?
  
• A change in the team's membership. Obviously, if you have different members on your team, you have a different set of skills & abilities at the team's disposal. We often see this in terms of new skills added to the team (by a new team member), or skills lost to the team (when a veteran team member leaves). However, we rarely think about moving people around within the team to better position the team as a whole after the arrival of a new team member. An example: John has been our team's liaison to Operations over the past 9 months. He does a pretty good job, and he is not dissatisfied with this aspect of his job. Now Lisa joins the team. She has a background in Operations, worked there for 15 years. Most managers don't think about giving her John's liaison responsibility, they just give her any "open" jobs, or a job that someone is performing poorly. However, this is a lost opportunity.
  
• A change in the way key tasks are performed (e.g. new software, a new business partner, etc.). "I've been doing this task all along; so yeah, I suppose I'll learn the new software...". As a team leader or manager, your response should be "no, wait". Its one thing if this team member wants to learn this new skill for other reasons. But if someone else in the team has that skill, this may be a good time to reposition a few team members and the roles they perform.

And don't forget, there is also a long-term advantage to shuffling people around to get the "optimal mix" of people to roles on your team. Six months down the road, when one of these people is pulled from your team for another project, you now have someone else on the team who is already familiar with that role and can fill in for a while if needed.

So mix it up!