In April 2021 I took over one country as MD for a Venture Capitalist & Company Builder, 2 years after the country site was kicked off but has failed to deliver consistent results. While Germany went into full lockdown on March 25th, I took over a team of 9 FTEs and a cohort of 50 founders remotely. Now 14 months later, we are 10 employees and four advisors and none of the former employees is still working with our company. These are a few learnings and reflections for managing turn-around cases & restructuring teams.
Understand what you are here for. Congrats, you embarked on this journey! Get clarity on why and what you want to achieve. In the next months you will tell yourself and hundreds of other people what you want to achieve and why you believe in what we do and what you are willing to give for it, so invest right now a weekend to figure out, what your 10 year vision of this business could be, what you can build on in your past to get there, what you can give your new team, society and by what values and principles you want to drive your 6 month, 12 month, 24 month goal. And be ready to adjust and get into the zone.
Listen to your gut feeling. Normally you feel that something does not work out before you exactly know what it is. It is your gut feeling that just combines tons of factors based on your previous experience and gives you a massive hint to explore into that direction. Consider it your very own unsupervised machine learning system
Listen to it, look at it, explore it and….
… Drive hard people's decisions fast.
Once you start circling a specific challenge or problem, make a decision fast. Do not wait or try arguments against driving this decision - act on it. There will be counter arguments coming from the HR team who try to protect the company from lawsuits, you personally will be scared to lose support or simply ‘hour power’ in the team but that does not play a role. Be fair, but drive that decision, do not delay it by a day. It will eat your energy and drive and it will drag down the team performance.
Hard decisions -> Easy life / Easy decisions -> Hard life
Find support
Being the leader of a country organization in a global company is lonely, being the person who has to turn around this is even lonelier as you have to defend yourself against the former status quo, navigate older relationships, fight with external perception and you have to find a way to navigate the ship towards a brighter future. This is not a cruise around the Maldives, this is sailing on the continental shelf before France. Find yourself somebody you can trust and you can work with and reflect upon - I recommend this person to be an external coach or somebody from the leadership team who can be your ally and help you reflect while having a strong motivation to make this work. Do not look for support in your team or with friends, they will not understand what you are facing.
Most of the Churn is wanted.
In small organisations that are driven by people who work creatively together in an ambiguous environment, decisions are for the business what gasoline is for a car (or hopefully soon a hydrogen cell). Decisions are driven by people and the fastest and potentially one of the most efficient ways to drive change is by driving change in who is making them. Colleagues and people will leave you, especially people who joined before or with you, as they are not aligned with the new direction or with the new performance standard. They will find lots of arguments and there will be lots of discussion and irritations between the old team and the new team but the faster people leave or you let them go once it is clear, this is not for them - the better!
You will certainly hold on some colleagues as you are a human being and not a robot and that is why finding support elsewhere is so important! Do not forget, that this is a professional relationship and you can accommodate any private relationship always after the person has left the team.
Do not lower your standard!
If you were hired for a Change Process or Turn Around case, there was an issue before! Do not be the frog who get cooked while being in the pot without recognizing it as the temperature only increases gradually. Having a higher performance standard will cause massive friction between you and the existing team and will not make you the most beloved person in the company (its not what you are here for!) but as as soon as you start lowering it you are losing a magic ingredient of who you are and what you are made of, why you are here for and most importantly you are waving your ...
… Authentic leadership: Stick to it!
Don’t be a tyrant, don’t be flags in the wind but understand about yourself who you are, what you want to achieve, what your standards are and communicate them and stick to them. If you are flexible on your core values, people will recognize this and lose respect. What is your purpose, what are your values and principles, lead by example, lead with heart.
Do not take it personally!
This is a very difficult exercise and almost all leaders and managers who work with heart and high performance standards on things they believe in or they love, do take things personally from time to time, despite what they will tell you, they do not. But just don’t.
Any conflict is an opportunity to learn about yourself and to get closer to your goal and if you get hurt by an employee, by a peer, partner, client, manager, journalist - just start exploring where this come from but do not build a grudge.
Do not optimize for what a role can be but what a role is.
This is important for yourself and for your employees. As we said, this is a turn-around case, a change case so we simply do not know what a role will look like in a few months from now. This should be clear to you and to your management team, so hire people who have the ability and skills and drive to design and create vs. having the silent or sometimes loud expectations how this will or should look like for them. Otherwise they will constantly be complaining and be not fine, won't deliver on their goals and find excuses and this will kill the vibe of the team, the performance and the results.
All of the above applies to you as well. Do not kill your vibe - once you take the job, finish it. Don’t let other people decide if the glass is half full or half empty, look at the glass, take it as what it is and then fill it up. That's the difference between chaff and wheat.
Build your team
And now, let's come to the most exciting part of this turn around case: Build your team!
You have decided to join this company for a reason and you left lots of opportunities on the table as in other jobs, sabbaticals maybe also starting your own company, so what was it?
Remember all the headlines above and then hire - principles first - people into your team who are willing to design with you the next chapter of this organisation and drive new records without compromises. That is really the best part of driving such a process as you will see how a headcount change can transform the whole team and a department and suddenly you hit numbers, enjoy work, thrive on success, work creatively and constructively and potentially even need less resources to do so.