Zipper theory | How to get the most out of your team
Advice Squad is written by members of the Maine chapter of the Association for Consulting Expertise, a trade organization of 88 consultants around the state. This issue’s column is written by Liz Incze, CEO of Pathways for Impact in Cumberland Foreside.
Leadership comes with many responsibilities, and one of the greatest is managing the performance of your team. Most managers don’t like confronting performance problems, and do everything they can to minimize them. Effective managers know that good hiring processes, clear expectations, regular feedback, coaching and development certainly help. What they may miss, however, is the opportunity to match up teams.
In 2000, I was recruited to start up a new regional customer service and pricing operation for an employee benefits company based out West. I had four months to secure and train resources, establish teams that could handle all aspects of a customer’s needs, ensure each team had defined accountability and start working with customers. I interviewed well over 1,100 candidates for 100 jobs and quickly learned that while the screening process usually generated good candidates with the requisite skills, and the interviews answered the traditional questions a hiring manager poses, I could also discover what kind of work gave a candidate intrinsic satisfaction. In other words, given a choice, the applicant could tell me their approach to work they love, shy away from or do “just because.”
I wanted to create exceptional teams focused on delivering exceptional results to our customers. Because the teams were going to have different functions, I had specific and unique technical expectations for the individual team members. With the focus on customer results, I also needed a breadth of strengths in analytics, problem solving, verbal communications and written communications. Finally, given the startup nature of the operation, I was looking for people who were flexible, confident and willing to deal with some ambiguity at the beginning.
The interview question that yielded great insights was: “Please rank the following four activities in order of preference — the first being the one you would most like to do, and the last being the one you’d least like to do. You may like them all, or none of them, but please rank them one through four. The activities are: working on a jigsaw puzzle, talking on the phone with a friend, doing research for a scientific grant, and writing an ad for an apartment building you want to sell.”
My first observation was how people handled the unexpected question. Some had to write down the choices, while others wanted to explain their thinking as they worked it through. Some went immediately to their answer. They knew themselves and weren’t worried about providing the “right” answer. A few couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. I got a good sense of each person’s confidence and style of decision making as they processed the question. What I also learned was their individual preferences and passions for the way work gets done.
After they answered, I explained why I asked the question. It was designed around personal activities unrelated to the job so the answers could be simply “top of the mind.” While the question isn’t based on statistical data, I linked jigsaw puzzles to problem solving, research to analytics, the phone to verbal communications and the ad to written communications.
Getting to work
Soon I was putting employees into teams of 10 each, with all the required skills and technical knowledge needed to work with our customers. More importantly, I made sure each team had a balance of individual strengths, decision-making styles, and passion about how they accomplished and processed work. That empowered the teams to deliver on defined expectations.
The results were amazing to watch. Team members started relying on each other’s strengths, while each team took great pride in their collective sense of accomplishment. They consistently found ways, within the team, to tackle problems and ultimately increase performance. As we grew and had to add or change teams, we followed the initial approach of blending skills and intrinsic motivations to make up the teams. And the results continued.
That’s not to say there weren’t some performance problems and conflicts. But the problems were fewer than I had experienced in other organizations, and the results in performance, employee engagement and customer satisfaction were gratifying.
So we had effective hiring practices, clear expectations and good feedback mechanisms. We also learned that preventing performance problems started with the makeup of the team and thinking about, of all things, zippers. Zippers hold strong because there are no gaps, no duplication, and yet also some overlap of the teeth. Each “tooth” adds to the power of the zipper. By thinking about each member as a tooth in a zipper and lining them up accordingly, we created teams that held strong and performed well.
The next time you’re putting together a team, try thinking about zippers. You won’t be disappointed.
Liz Incze can be reached at Liz@PathwaysforImpact.com. Read more Advice Squad here.
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