Analyze Your People Assets.

An excerpt from Team Reconstruction

Organizational change resembles a card game: shuffle, cut, and re-deal. The changes leave you with fewer people, new people, or the same people facing different challenges. For one reason or another, you need to rethink what you have to work with in terms of talent.

The casting of people—determining who goes, who stays, and who goes where—carries a lot of weight in the team reconstruction process. Put people in the right places to begin with, and you won’t be forced to make shifts later on because people don’t pan out. Too often reorganizations spawn further reorganizations because teams were thrown together in a haphazard manner.

Change rewrites job descriptions. So start from scratch in analyzing your available people assets. Approach the exercise as if all employees were “new hires.” Even the incumbents will face new demands, and you need to evaluate their adaptability. Ask yourself if some of them should be repositioned or even eliminated. Do you have good people who are poorly suited for their positions? Should you seize this window of opportunity to eliminate lightweights or leftovers? If you can’t get rid of the weaker players, at least position them where they’ll hurt the team the least. Since the situation is already destabilized, the timing is right to make needed personnel moves.

Size up your crew with a dispassionate, discerning eye. You need good data, and you need to gather it in a hurry. You can’t afford to sit back and figure out your people as the months go by. Eventually, of course, time would tell you who is bringing what gifts to the party, but that’s a slow and expensive proposition. You need to make informed judgments now. If you don’t trust your skills at this, or if you feel you just can’t take the time, get help.

Look for strengths. Weaker points. Aspirations and work preferences. Experience and areas of expertise. Concerns and points of resistance. Be wary of the adage, “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.” That can be a misleading notion during team reconstruction. Change has a way of bringing out the best in some people and the worst in others. Also, change has a nasty habit of causing some employees’ strengths to become weaknesses, at least temporarily.

The sharper your insights into each individual, the better the odds that you’ll manage him or her effectively. The more you’re going on guesswork, fumbling along in the dark, the more likely you are to slot people wrong. So find the soft spots. Identify the people you’ll have to shore up or work around. Recast employees whose liabilities in one position could be assets in another. Figure out who the heavy hitters are so you can play to their strengths.

You make team reconstruction harder than it has to be if you proceed with only a superficial grasp of your people assets. You also might program people for failure . . . including yourself.