Assess your team
If the company had been content with keeping its current vision, Sheptor wouldn’t have needed to evaluate the people around him as much as he did because the status quo would have sufficed.
But, that wasn’t the case.
Sheptor needed a team that was open to change, so he had to take an assessment of who was capable of thinking in new ways.
“We needed to change because the industry was going through radical change,” he says. “Individuals in the executive and middle-management team that weren’t prepared to give up their attachment to the status quo for the opportunity for some different way of working together were an impediment and obstacle,” he says. “They needed to make a personal decision about whether they were going to be happy in this new organization.”
Since Sheptor had been COO for 11 months prior to becoming president and CEO, he was already shaping the vision and thinking about an executive team that could help him drive change.
“I had some level of assessment made about all of the team members because, as the chief operating officer, not every executive of the company reported to me, but I had some opinions already from my interactions with the entire executive team,” he says. “In that first three months after becoming CEO, I was able to see how the executives were responding to my leadership, my vision for the company and our collective plan for how that vision should be executed. It wasn’t really a three-month assessment exercise; it was truly a 14-month (exercise).”
One of the initiatives that Sheptor put into place after becoming CEO was a social event with his executive team. Since they all have busy agendas, once a month they would go to dinner, happy hour or a sporting event as a way of spending time together.
“People feel very safe in their areas of expertise,” he says. “When you are not in your comfort zone, you really demonstrate your individual confidence. You demonstrate your willingness to try new things, and you show how well you interact with others when you are experiencing a new event. Those are all critical observations when you are talking about changes for the future.”
Don’t let your personal drive to create a vision get in the way of spending quality time with people that are going to make the organization successful by executing that vision.
“Every new job has more demands on your time to do things than you have available,” he says. “What can easily be squeezed out of your schedule is quality time with individuals, both your team as a group as well as with them one on one.”
Aside from spending time with people outside of work, you should also look at employees’ past annual reviews.
“You can take a look at the last couple of annual reviews and see what they have been rewarded for doing and what they have not done well,” he says. “So, you’re in that sense looking through the eyes of others. Perhaps it is at a different time in the organization in terms of what was being rewarded, but at least you can get a sense for what activities these individuals were very good at and what they weren’t good at.”
Sheptor also gives his executive team members assignments for tasks they have never done before to see how they perform. He wants to see how well they deal with change and how creative they are in generating solutions on areas where they’ve not worked before.
For example, Sheptor could give his chief financial officer the responsibility of doing an accident investigation in one of the refineries to see how they perform as a leader outside of their area of expertise.
Sheptor also declared early on in his tenure as CEO that all officers would make four customer visits a year because one of the key strategic platforms for the company is to be a customer-centric organization.
“You can’t be customer-centric if your officers are not in front of customers,” he says.
“I’ve been watching who are the early adopters to that request, and who are cautious participants and who are resisters. That will weigh into my second regeneration of the leadership team.”
Much like you have to make changes initially because of resistance to the new vision, you may need to renew the team as you move forward with the vision.
“At the end of the day, when you arrive at your finish line, whatever that vision is or that strategic plan is, you’re likely going to arrive there with a very different team than you started with,” he says.
