Pitstops and Rules

With all the swirl happening with the US government; potential trade-wars; the wars in Africa, the Middle East, and Ukraine; the advent of AI; and changing consumer preferences, organizations are facing a tremendous amount of uncertainty these days.?I recently had the opportunity to work with a Business Unit Leadership Team (BULT) that was under pressure to turnaround an underperforming business. The unit had enjoyed banner years during COVID, was flat in 2023, but failed to achieve its goals in 2024.? Not only were revenues and profitability well under water, but the unit’s results also were having a material impact on the organization’s overall financial performance. Top leadership was coming down hard on the EVP and his team to rectify the situation.

The organization had a reputation for developing talent and this BULT was seen as a steppingstone for advancement. The team was entirely made up of A players managing to achieve D results.?The EVP believed teamwork would improve once team members better understood each other, so the team did two “get to know you” off-sites. Yet the team’s dysfunction continued unabated.

When teams are experiencing high levels of change and underperforming, the first thing they should do is review their assumptions about the situation and the challenges they face. Customers, competitors, suppliers, regulators, macroeconomic conditions, and geopolitics are likely experiencing considerable change, and team members may or may not be aware of all the changes. This can cause them to make ill-informed decisions, take poorly thought through actions, and question each other’s judgments. Regularly setting aside time to review a team's assumptions about context helps ensure decisions, actions, and resource allocations are aligned with team goals.

The second thing teams should do is to revisit their purpose, priorities, and goals, as new circumstances can affect the why, what, and how of a team. In the case of the BULT, there was a great deal of agreement about the situation and challenges they faced, and their purpose, priorities, and goals did not need to change. Yet team members were making decisions to protect themselves and optimize their functional results to the detriment of the business unit.

What did the BULT do to address the situation??Revisit team norms. The team had vaguely articulated some team member expectations in the a get to know you offsite, but nobody could remember what they were. Team members had very different assumptions about who needed to be involved in what decisions, final decision makers, who attended meetings, meeting behavior, communication and follow-up rules, escalation paths, how they were to treat each other, and how they were to show up to the rest of the organization. The actions they were taking because of these misaligned assumptions were the root cause for much of the BULT’s dysfunction. The team subsequently spent time making the implicit explicit, and the process of defining how members were supposed to treat and communicate with each other, make decisions, and get work done caused festering issues to be raised and worked out.

Taking pitstops also turned out to be a critical norm for this team. As a metrics driven organization, BULT meetings were sprints to get through as many operational issues as possible in the time allotted. The team was taking no time to reflect on what they were doing, why they were doing them, the assumptions they were making, hash out competing priorities, or surface disagreements and challenges. Incorporating pitstops in BULT meetings enabled team members to raise concerns, share assumptions, and work through issues before they became problematic. These team time outs also enabled the BULT to be more strategic, proactive, and break out of the “crisis du jour” mindset.

Is your team experiencing considerable change? If so, then are team members aligned on the key assumptions about the situation and the challenges faced?

If there have been major changes in the situation, then have your team’s purpose, priorities, and goals changed??

Does your team have explicit rules for how people are to treat each other, make decisions, communicate with each other, and run meetings?

Does your team take regular pitstops??

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Gordon Curphy is an Industrial & Organizational psychologist specializing in C-suite succession planning, executive coaching, top team facilitation, scaling effective teamwork, and leadership development. He has developed several successful commercially published leadership and team assessments; coached 200 C-suite executives; worked with over 600 top teams; collected data on 4,000 teams, trained 20,000 leaders; and sold over 100,000 books, chapters, and articles on leadership and teams. You can find more about Gordon’s leadership books and consulting services at:www.curphyleadershipsolutions.comandwww.rocketmodelforteams.com