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Building a Unified Team: Duplicating What Works in Your Inner Circle
From The Insider - News and Views for Members of Inner Circle
David Kirsch started working at Shippers Supply in Hopkins, Minnesota when he was in high school, continued to work there weekends and summers as a college student, and then came to work there full-time in 1993. He finally bought the company, originally owned by neighbors of his parents, in 2001.
When he joined Shippers Supply full-time, the company — a supplier of products to bond, palletize, protect, shrink, stretch, identify, secure and ship goods — had just seven employees. Now there are twenty-one, which makes it large enough to have pushed Kirsch beyond his ability to maintain hands-on responsibility for it all.
Deciding that he needed to have key managers in place was pretty clear cut — there were just too many details that weren’t getting the attention they needed — and finding great candidates for those positions was also pretty straightforward. The real work came in trying to figure out what leadership style and practices he would use to transform a group of individuals into a unified management team.
Faced with the challenge of melding the group into a high-functioning team that would hold one another accountable, keep each other focused, and push each other to take bold action, he implemented a multi-step plan — perhaps more by instinct than by design — to clone many of the characteristics he valued in another cohesive team to which he belonged, his Inner Circle.
What Accountability Looks Like
First step, create accountability. “One of the things I really appreciate about my Inner Circle is the way the group holds me accountable,” says Kirsch. “I don’t just show up every month and give an update about where I’m at — the group has a memory like an elephant and they force me to do more than give a status report. They push me to recall what my previously stated goals were: where I intended to be and what exactly I had agreed to do to get there. And I’m answerable for any discrepancies between where I was aiming and where I landed.”
That’s an atmosphere Kirsch has worked to recreate within his own management team meetings. “With Inner Circle it’s not about my facilitator alone holding me accountable. We all hold each other accountable. That’s what I need within my own team. I don’t want to be the one holding the whip. In fact, I don’t want anyone holding a whip! My vision of accountability, modeled after my own experience, is about team members acting like general contractors, not slave drivers.”
With that end in mind, he has been coaching the team to ask each other questions that foster both accountability and a supportive learning environment: What did you learn? What mistakes did you make? Knowing what you do now, what would you do differently?
“It’s not about asking, ‘Why in the hell isn’t this done?’ It’s about reaching the goal and helping each other overcome obstacles that stand in the way,” says Kirsch. “We’re not shying away from open discussions. And we’re not attacking each other. I would say we have a healthy level of tension.”
Rule of Three
Second step, get focused. “Within my Inner Circle, our facilitator routinely asks us, ‘What activities are you spending time on that add value to the business?’ Every time the question comes up and you contemplate how you’ve spent your week or your month, you realize that you’ve been doing things that aren’t your highest and best use,” says Kirsch.
“I knew my team needed to adopt the same focus and discipline. We were stuck in a trend of doing a lot of things and not getting a lot done. We were making painfully slow progress on a list of twenty projects rather than moving quickly and solidly through our top three.”
Kirsch and his team agreed to doggedly pursue their top three priorities — which they determined was the greatest number of initiatives they could effectively tackle at one time — and let all of the others assume a place on the sideline. He says, “Now when something comes up at a meeting and it doesn’t fall under one of the three identified priorities we just say, that’s a great idea and we don’t want to lose sight of it, but we can’t chase it now. Once something from our current list wraps up we can re-shuffle the deck and see if we want to add it to the list. It’s been a big boost to our effectiveness.”
If You Know It’s Got to Get Done, Do It
Third step: create a culture that pushes people to action, even if it’s out of their comfort zone. “I know from my personal experience that change is not always easy to swallow,” says Kirsch. “As an example, up until four months ago I was doing payroll and some HR functions myself because I felt the information was too confidential for anyone in the company to have access to it. My Inner Circle confronted me and said, ‘Holding on to tasks like these is impeding your ability to run your business. You’ve got to let go.’”
“I did end up delegating it, knowing there’s a risk that that person might break the confidentiality, but feeling pretty darn certain that they won’t,” says Kirsch. “My Inner Circle has helped me learn that taking a certain amount of risk is necessary with some decisions — you don’t ever get a 100% guarantee and it’s way better to take action sooner rather than later. You can make adjustments as needed, but it’s better to opt for taking thoughtful action over sitting paralyzed in a status quo that isn’t working.”
Kirsch keeps his own management team on the cutting edge of their comfort zone by setting a similar tone with them. The theme is, “If you know it’s got to get done, do it.”
“I try to help them strain the emotion out of situations and focus on the intellect behind the decisions they need to make. A lot of our discussions have been about using shared labor and lending staff to other areas to help deal with bottlenecks. That can feel personal, like somebody is stepping on your turf, but it’s the right action to take,” says Kirsch.
“When I see my management team making decisions like that, choices that place the needs of the company above the needs of their specific area,” he summarizes, “I know we’ve made great strides in becoming a team in the truest sense of the word.”
David Kirsch is an Inner Circle member in Twin Cities.
Copyright 2006, Inner Circle International, Ltd. To find an Inner Circle group near you, please visit http://www.theinnercircle.com/current.htm
The Beyster Institute has joined forces with Inner Circle and offers CEO Peer Groups in Washington DC and San Diego. These groups are designed specifically for leaders of employee ownership companies.
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