In the prior article, I presented a three-team tier that will provide your business with a strong foundation to perform better and ensure its longevity. I suggested organizing these teams will put your business into a state for optimal strategic and tactical capability. What I did not point out is that this structure applies to all businesses, small or large. When and how becomes the question depending on the growth stage and size of your business. I will now go more in-depth and guide who best fits into each team, with the “who” framed around skillsets and personality.
Toddlers prove that every endeavor starts with a spark of thought – an idea. These young children are most troublesome with their sparks during the age of 2, which is now well known as the “Terrible Two’s” stage of their development. Those reading this who have survived the “terrible two’s” stage of raising a child is nodding their heads in agreement.
After all, that’s why parents run around to secure kitchen cupboards, staircases, and anything that could lead to harm for their children. I recall my eldest thinking it was a good idea to climb an interior wall like Spiderman. Everyone of us, young or old, on a daily basis, gets ideas. As toddlers, we acted on most ideas until, sadly, we learned differently. As adults, we seldom act on or develop our ideas. Yet, development is the action necessary to convert ideas into vision. All those, irrespective of which team tier they fit within and are placed, will have ideas.
Every person in an organization has ideas. However, not everyone is resourced to move these ideas forward. The merit of your organization will be in its ability to honor this fact and formulate a culture with associated processes to boost ideology, capture the ideas, and ensure the right people see them.
The right people sit on the Vision Team because that team should be vested in keeping the company current, leading-edge, and innovative in their industries. The Vision Team can be a size of one, a few, or many, aiming to be nimble. They should be structured to regularly see or hear ideas and review them for themes, synergies, and interrelatedness between their ideas, company fit, and the current vision.
A value-add would be the ability to connect disparate thoughts flowing through the ideology pipeline and correlate them into possible opportunities for the organization. More so, members of the Vision Team should have the desire and aptitude to develop a vision around those ideas having potential for the company. They should also have the authority to integrate new ideas into in-flight roadmaps and recommend re-direction and revisions where, when, and if warranted.
Those that best fit on the team are visionaries themselves. They enjoy trying to make sense of these things. However, they are open to accepting suggestions from others. In fact, they get excited by the exploration, debating, and visioning activities in isolation and collaboratively and light up at sharing the vision and its prospects with others.
Being at the center of the structure and the smaller of the three teams, the Vision team enables flexibility, pivoting, and adjustments. Remember, they dream life into the business and are centered and contained by the other teams, much like a nuclei. Again, they source, disseminate, explore and innovate fit. Then, they consult with the Oversight Team to progress the team’s vision forward.
The focus of the Oversight Team is not about yes or no to what comes from the Vision Team. They know that the Vision Team has assessed the minutia of the vision they present. The focus of the Oversight Team is to determine how that vision can be transformed into a corporate vision having an associated roadmap showing strategic substance and direction that will span a period of time. They listen to the Vision Team’s opportunities and advance their vision structured into realistically manageable chunks. Realistic with funding, time, regulatory, legal, markets, resources, etc. Managed related to pace, timelines, relationships, expenditures, return on investments, public relations, constraints, risks, etc. The Oversight Team is a size of many to ensure viability without compromising sustainable results for the company. That’s how discipline gets invoked into the process.
However, there is a caution with the Oversight Team related to size. While it will be bigger than the Vision Team, it cannot be so heavily laden that its functioning becomes ineffective. Getting to an optimal team size will be a challenge. Overcoming that challenge will be based on how well you mix specialists with those having meaningfully diverse skillsets (a.k.a, generalists). The right mix will optimize the size of the team. Their knowledge and connections are leveraged to support and guide the vision. This team should be structured for accountability, governance, enablement, networking, and reporting.
Those that best fit on the team are enablers. They light up at navigating barriers, influencing change, connecting people, and solidifying the potential of a vision. Their skillsets focus on finance, legal, marketing, business management, coaching, and other expertise to support vision most effectively becoming a reality.
The Vision Team, armed with a strategic plan and roadmap, consults with the Execution Team to turn the strategic objectives into tactical logistics. Such tactics should be executed within the stipulated strategic timeframes because the Oversight Team has defined that timeframe based on diverse implications for the organization. Therefore, moving that timeframe should not be done lightly and should not be done in isolation. The Execution Team is the largest of the three teams. Being at the base level, they form a solid foundation to weather the flexibility and pivots the Vision Team could deliver to the business. The Execution Team and its members aim to get things done with measurable results.
Those that best fit on the team are action-oriented worker bees. “They love the effort associated with defining how and when things occur, and in what way. Logically fitting things together, ironing out details for implementation, and seeing the intended outcomes realized gives these individuals their sense of accomplishment. Their skillsets focus on administration, operations, logistics, project management, process, change execution, production, sales, technical, as well as other areas that mesh with what the business needs to effectively achieve the desired outcomes.
Every tier has its purpose, with strategy and tactics acting as the glue that binds to the other. All teams must be effective separately and when interacting. Additionally, there is symmetry in the interdependencies of one to the other. Vision feeds Oversight; Oversight fuels Vision with strategy. The strategic Vision enables Execution; execution transforms the strategic Vision with tactics, and executes the tactics, measures outcomes, and reports the results. The results inform bottom-up through the tiers, related to such things as adjustments and performance.
Advocates/coaches/mentors like myself fit best on the Oversight and Execution Teams. Having the right teams, the right people, modeled for the right governance, supported by the right processes and culture, goes a long way towards ensuring the acceleration and longevity of a company.
