Leading your team through change

This post originally appeared on Medium.com

A principle-based guide for developing workflows that handle change.

Change disrupts. It challenges everyone involved, and inevitably comes to every organization. Leading a team of people through change requires making decisions that have a lasting impact. I often think about how to anticipate long term consequences of these choices. What seems a good idea at the time can create more work for a team down the road. These are some lessons I’ve learned when building teams and managing them through growth and change.

I like to use guiding principles to help make decisions. This idea came from Krav Maga Yashir Boston instructor Gershon. He frequently refers to a principle-based self-defense system, rather than a technique-based one. If someone attacks me with a knife, I don’t want to delay reacting by thinking, wait, is he using his right hand or left hand? Which disarming technique should I use? He reinforces simple ideas again and again. Get behind the weapon. Give my opponent more problems to deal with. Find the first workable solution, not the best solution.

Here is one of the principles I use to design workflows for my team. My goal is to keep their work clear, efficient and with the fewest unintended consequences possible.

Unify Workflows

Part of leading my team is defining the scope of their work and directing how they execute it. For any group that works from a queue, I try to unify their workflow. Give them one place to go for their next item of work. This works for customer support teams, inside sales, content marketers, or anyone who works from a list or queue.

For Content Marketing

I love using a combined calendar to direct my marketing team. Whether we are creating evergreen content, or time-based campaigns, a calendar ensures we have a good flow of content being published. When every one can see the efforts and tasks of the other people on their team, it helps with communication. Ideas can cross-pollinate. I like it when my teams talk to each other.
My blog authors can look at one calendar and see their upcoming assigned articles. Having the clear view into their workflow allows them to start research and make sure they’re on track to publish by the deadline. Social media managers need to work in real time as well as planning in advance. Other marketers working on landing pages and other lead generation activities schedule their work on the same calendar. A content offer doesn’t work if the content isn’t completed yet. Instead of everyone working off their own separate spreadsheets, I get the whole team using one view.

So how does this help marketers deal with change? If my team is behind on leads or submissions for a goal, we need to react. This may mean adding new targeted articles, syndicating existing content, or scheduling additional emails or social media posts. With all of these various channels visible on one calendar, every member of the team works toward the same goal. My job as their leader is to make sure they understand their priorities and know what is expected of them each day. The place to find that information needs to be clear and consistent.

For Customer Support

It’s important to answer our customers’ questions wherever they may come from. Yes, people will reach out through the normal channels we set up, but these days we hear from customers on every flavor of social media. All these requests and complaints need handling.

Leading my team requires managing their workflow and motivating them to execute it. Getting their buy-in is easier when the workflow is clear and easily understood. When employees have to check several places for their next task, they can lose focus. I set a goal of having one queue for them to work from. Combine multiple channels into one queue and they don’t have to choose what their next task is. When a rep is checking email, twitter, voicemail and facebook for their next case, they can start cherry picking which one they want to solve. Eliminate the choice, and cases will get solved in the order I determine. Line ‘em up, knock ‘em down.

Creating one clear queue is not always an easy task for a leader. Two common approaches are time based, and priority based. A time-based queue is easiest to understand and configure. First in, first answered. The goal here is to make sure that older tickets are not lost and do not go unanswered for too long.

Setting up a priority-based queue is more complicated. With great complexity comes great customization. I prefer this style because I can set up triggers, automatically fired rules, based on criteria I determine. These rules modify the priority number assigned to a case. A lower priority number means the case is more important and should be answered next. New tickets begin with a base priority number. Triggers then modify that number based on our business needs. Cases from important customers get their number lowered to be handled faster. As a ticket ages, the priority number can get lowered each day, kicking them up the queue to be answered sooner. Depending on your ticketing system, you can create triggers that scan for keywords in a case description and increase or decrease the priority accordingly.

In a priority-based queue, align the priority number with your SLAs (Service Level Agreements.) I like the priority number to reach zero as the ticket reaches the limit of the SLA. Tickets not responded to within our time limits go into negative priority numbers. This gives me a simple view into whether or not my team is meeting their goals.

For Inside Sales

This works when leading an inside sales team too. Many teams work leads sourced from marketing as well as their own generated leads. You must unify their working lead queue. They should enter their own leads into the same queue and work the hottest leads first. Once those leads are handled, move on to the next lead in the queue. This helps with tracking and quantifying their work.

Lead scoring systems abound these days. I like the ones that integrate real-time triggers, indicating recent activity. Lead scoring equates to ticket priority from the previous examples. Create triggers based on various sales signals. Common sales signals include viewing pricing pages, opening and clicking on emails, filling out forms and downloading e-books. Reacting to recent activity and contacting someone when they are looking for a solution raises the probability of closing the sale. Yes, it’s borderline creepy, but that’s the reality of life online these days. I like to set up these triggers with some time decay in the priority level, to ensure that the most recent activity is kept at the top. Again, bring all these factors into play in one queue. Identify patterns from best-fit customers and adjust the priority triggers accordingly. This on-going analysis drives better performance for a team

Change someone’s routine and they lose the comfort of repetition. People like to settle into a pattern at work. I develop systems with levers I can pull to make changes behind the curtain. This is how I can make needed adjustments without disrupting my team’s daily routine. Work is complicated enough. A unified workflow helps fight that entropy.

Leading a team through change requires making tough decisions. These principles helped me make choices that impact my teams. Building in the ability to make adjustments without major disruptions keeps my team on track and keeps life a little easier for everyone.

Need help fixing your team's workflow? I can help