Does Your Management Team Measure Up to the Winning Formula?

A DISCUSSION OF KEY MANAGEMENT ISSUES VOLUME 26 NUMBER 7
DOES YOUR MANAGEMENT TEAM MEASURE UP
TO THE WINNING FORMULA ® ?
Before you can even judge whether you have a strong management team or not, you
need to answer the more critical question: “For what?” What does your company need
in its management team now to successfully execute the strategy and go forward? To
answer this question accurately, you need to measure your team against the right criteria –
The Winning Formula ® .
Developed by RHR International, The Winning Formula ® is the set
of leadership behaviors and experiences that are required for each
of the senior team members to deliver on their roles and execute on
the company strategy. It is defi ned by the needs of your company at
this moment in time. In a dynamic business environment, The Win-
ning Formula ® cannot be static; it must constantly evolve to address
the ever-changing requirements for success in your particular busi-
ness. The analysis of these requirements compels you to look at the
demands of the external environment and the ability of your organiza-
tion and your leaders to meet those demands.
WHY THE WINNING FORMULA ® ? Many organizations take a com-
petency-based approach to leadership. Leadership competencies are
static, generic, “price of entry” characteristics that do not reveal an
executive’s fl aws in a dynamic environment. They fail to differentiate
the good from the superior for the specifi c strategic and leadership
challenges for which you are evaluating your most senior executives.
Winston Churchill was one of the fi nest prime ministers in Britain’s
history. He embodied all the leadership attributes required for suc-
cess – in wartime. As soon as victory was declared, the people voted
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him out of offi ce in the belief that Clement Attlee and the Labor Party
were better suited to rebuilding the country following the war. Robert
Nardelli was a rising star at General Electric. A Jack Welch protégé, he
would have to be acknowledged to be a competent senior executive.
And yet, his tenure at Chrysler, with its very specifi c challenges, was
marked by disappointing results. At one point in time it was thought
that both these individuals were the right leaders for the job, but
when strategic imperatives shifted, they no longer fi t The Win-
ning Formula ® .
DEVELOPING THE WINNING FORMULA ® To derive The Winning
Formula ® you have to take a look outside and inside – the external
competitive environment and your internal capabilities and organiza-
tional dynamics – and answer the following questions:
Question 1: What is your strategy? Not only do you want a clear
articulation of the strategy but also an understanding of the degree
of senior team and organizational alignment around it. What will
be required for successful execution? How much more thinking and
discussion is required to make clear strategic choices? What are the
reasons for any misalignments? How dynamic does the strategy need
to be given the shifting environment?

DOES YOUR MANAGEMENT TEAM MEASURE UP
TO THE WINNING FORMULA ® ?
PAGE 2
Question 2: What is the extent of change that needs to be implemented
and at what pace? The pace of change is a critical choice
point that determines where you lie on the spectrum of turnaround
vs. evolution. Pressure on the organization increases as the tempo of
transformation quickens. You need to understand how the organization
will react to change and at what rate it can be absorbed. How
much of a change agent do your leaders need to be? How does one
drive change effectively in your company?
Question 3: How are decisions made and how is the power to
make them distributed? The job of the CEO and the senior team
is all about making decisions. As CEO, what is your decision-making
style and how do you use your senior team to make choices? Every
company has its own process, explicit and implicit, that must be
understood to know what leader behaviors are required to get things
done. What is the balance of direct authority vs. infl uence that is
required by different roles for particular decisions?
Question 4: What are the external and internal barriers to your
company executing on its strategy? Another crucial job of the CEO
and the senior team is to remove obstacles and barriers to executing
the strategy. Some of these barriers are within your control and some
are not. Barriers might be external, e.g. severe pricing pressure due to
competitors having the ability to lower prices in your market; internal
– a culture that lacks innovation because it is too risk averse and does
not allow mistakes; or lack of a capability – a sales force that cannot
adapt to a new way of engaging the customer, etc.
Question 5: What capabilities (people, process, technology) and
essential leadership behaviors will be required to close the gap
between what you are and what you need to be? You need to be
able to choose the critical few capabilities that require investment
and change and the critical few leadership behaviors that will make or
break your company’s ability to execute the strategy.
A MOVING TARGET As mentioned before, you must update The
Winning Formula ® to keep pace with changes in your industry envi-
ronment and your strategy that place new demands on your leader-
ship. The same commitment in time and effort taken to ensure the
best strategy needs to be applied to ensuring the right leadership
criteria against which you reassess your management team. These
processes should occur in about the same time frame. Big changes in
the business environment; changes in the CEO position; and mergers
and acquisitions are immediate triggers for reassessing strategy and
The Winning Formula ® for leadership success.
ALIGNING AND ACCELERATING YOUR SENIOR TEAM A good
process for defi ning The Winning Formula ® is to include the input of
your senior team in answering the questions above. Here begins the
process of alignment. The Winning Formula ® becomes the leadership
blueprint around which the senior team aligns as they help create it.
You can now initiate an objective process of assessment and feed-
back of each senior team member against The Winning Formula ® . This
becomes data on which you can now make fact-based decisions on
whether you have the right people in the right roles and what devel-
opmental actions and experiences are needed by some to accelerate
the performance of the entire team.
THE BOTTOM LINE To keep your senior executive team at peak
effectiveness in light of changes in your business environment and
requirements for the company’s success:
• Evaluate your organization’s strategy.
• Update The Winning Formula ® to match the new strategy.
• Assess your management team against The Winning Formula ® .
• Adjust team membership and initiate development to fi ll gaps.
ABOUT RHR INTERNATIONAL
RHR International is a fi rm of management psychologists and consul-
tants who work closely with top management to accelerate individual,
team and business performance. We focus on fi ve key areas of client
need — CEO Succession, Executive Selection and Integration, Acceler-
ated Executive Effectiveness, Senior Team Effectiveness, and Manage-
ment Due Diligence. We have been proven difference-makers for more
than 65 years, unique in our combination of top management focus,
psychologists’ perspective and high-level business acumen.
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