Temporary Team Leadership

I've had direct reports temporarily assigned to me a few times.  Normally that meant that I didn't manage their "HR" tasks (e.g. time cards), but for whatever reason I needed to step in to help a team achieve a turnaround that was durable enough that the people could be "handed back" to their regular manager after only a few weeks or months and the benefits would continue.

I understand management expectations, set team expectations, and manage the team while improving their processes and tools.

Setting management expectations

When I take over teams, the first tasks are to a) understand the expectations of my manager and/or the manager handing over the people, and b) to set expectations for the team. In the first conversations with the senior manager (i.e. the one asking me to take over) and the team's manager (i.e. the person who is offloading their people temporarily), I want to understand why I'm needed.

In the most recent example, the team included a few people who were newer to the role and a large chunk of work had fallen on the team from its internal customers, so the team's manager didn't have enough time to either train his new people or help the entire team burn down their backlog. The expectations for me were to:

1. Help the senior manager and team's manager (let's call him AK) establish a logical set of responsibilities for the team so that it could be split without duplicating effort or dropping any responsibilities
2. Manage the more-experienced members so that AK could focus his time on the new members
3. Improve the processes in the team to burn down the backlog faster and increase capacity in the long-term.

Task 1: logical set of responsibilities

I had previously facilitated the team to collect their lists of responsibilities and time-per-task, so we already had a good foundation. The senior manager, AK, and I were able to divide the responsibilities by aircraft platform so that our internal customers knew who to talk to for any project (because the internal customers knew which aircraft they needed) and we could minimize any confusion within the team. We did have to reassign some aircraft among the team to create a more balanced workload, so the team members had to talk to each other to share expertise, but they were good at managing those issues peer-to-peer.

Setting team expectations

Once the senior manager, AK, and I had a plan for how we would divide up the team, the three of us hosted a call with the entire team to explain the plan to them. That included explaining the objectives, the division of tasks, and a rough timeline on re-merging the team. I afterwards set up a call with "my" team to brief them further on my expectations regarding their tasks and keeping me up-to-date. At this kickoff I also shared a little about my own background with the company, where I was in my personal life, and most importantly my philosophy on communication channels. We talked about any obstacles the team faced and I warned them that I was a big believer in regular team meetings (we had multiple brief calls weekly to discuss current projects and any help needed) and one-on-one meetings. Finally, I urged them to think about anything they were doing which seemed harder than it shofuld be. These gripes would help us with process improvement. After the call, I set up weekly half-hour 1:1s with every member of my new team.

Managing the team

Task 2: manage a subset of the team

After our initial expectations-setting call, I had regular staff calls and 1:1 meetings which meant that the team members very rarely had to talk to AK directly. I frequently checked in with AK to ensure that he knew what his team was doing and make any course-corrections necessary to ease re-merging the team later. I got myself added to the various status reports and meetings with our internal customers so that they also knew to talk to me rather than AK when they had a question or escalation about "my" team. I had worked with several of the internal customers before and had some credibility with them that I could draw on.

Task 3: process-improvement

The senior manager had brought me into this role because he knew that process improvement was one of my strengths. After emphasizing "harder than they should be" tasks at the kickoff, I kept poking my team members at each staff call and one-on-one whenever I heard that something under their control was taking a while. Those would be "easy wins" if they could be automated, because the team had the power to change them instantly. In addition, I listened for issues with internal customers and suppliers where we might improve communication and relationships. In a few cases I recommended to specific team members that they set up frequent conversations with their problem customers to mitigate the issues.

We made several tweaks to the process, including improved reporting, using shortage tools to identify key suppliers, and training / providing feedback on the new quote-tracking tool. Between the additional training time for the new team members and removing a few time-intensive tasks, the team was able to get into shape sufficiently that it could be re-merged as planned.

Conclusion

In addition to the teams that I've managed in a matrix environment (no direct reporting but they support me) and managed directly, senior management has assigned me other teams temporarily to coach and help them remove waste from their day. Management must remember that some extra capacity in the organization is always helpful: one team might be drowning at the moment, so having someone who can step in and help for a few months prevents a host of issues later. The various people on "my" temporary teams would still reach out to me when asking advice about how to address a problem customer or how to use a tool in an unusual position, and I was always happy to help. Handing off a task or team often means that I'm pulled in to consult every once in a while.

Ever managed a team for the purposes of turnaround? Or had a "substitute" manager? How did it go? Let me know via email at blog@saprobst.com or in the comments below!