The First 90 Days (43 page)

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[4]Building “ambidextrous” organizations that can do both of these well is a challenge. See Michael L. Tushman and Charles O’Reilly III,
Winning Through Innovation: A Practical Guide to Leading Organizational Change and Renewal,
rev. ed. (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002).

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Developing Your Group’s Skills Base

Do your direct reports have the skills and knowledge they need to perform your group’s core processes superbly—and thus to support the strategy you have identified? If not, the entire fragile architecture of your group could fall apart. A skills base comprises these four types of knowledge:

Individual expertise:
Gained through training, education, and experience
Relational knowledge:
An understanding of how to work together to integrate individual knowledge to achieve specified goals

Embedded knowledge:
The core technologies on which your group’s and performance depend, such as customer databases or R&D technologies

Meta-knowledge:
The awareness of where to go to get critical information; for example, through external affiliations such as research institutions and technology partners
Identifying Gaps and Resources

The overarching goal of assessing your group’s capabilities is to identify (1)
critical gaps
between needed and existing skills and knowledge and (2)
underutilized resources
such as partially exploited technologies and squandered expertise. Closing gaps and making better use of underutilized resources can produce enormous gains in performance and productivity.

To identify skills and knowledge gaps, first revisit your strategy and the core processes you identified. Ask yourself what mix of the four types of knowledge is needed to support your group’s core processes. Treat this as a visioning exercise in which you imagine the ideal knowledge mix. Then assess your group’s existing skills, knowledge, and technologies. What gaps do you see? Which of them can be repaired quickly and which will take more time?

To identify underutilized resources, search for individuals or groups in your unit who have performed much better than average. What has enabled them to do so? Do they enjoy resources (technologies, methods, materials, and support from key people) that could be exported to the rest of your unit? Have promising product ideas been sitting on the shelf because of lack of interest or investment? Could existing production resources be adapted to serve new sets of customers?

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Understanding Your Group’s Culture

Culture surrounds and influences the other four elements of organizational architecture, shaping thinking about strategy, structure, systems, and skills. Indeed, the most important business problems you will face in your new situation will likely all have a cultural dimension.

Your organization’s culture consists of the norms and values that shape team members’ behavior, attitudes, and expectations. An organization’s culture cues its people about what to do and not do. Often, as discussed previously, there are fundamental assumptions about how things work that are so embedded and long-standing that people are not even aware of their existence.

Cultural habits and norms have an especially frustrating way of reinforcing the status quo—no matter how much the status quo needs changing! So, it is vital that you diagnose problems in your group’s existing culture and address them early. Only then can the culture fully support the group’s strategy and align smoothly with the other pieces of the group’s architecture— structure, systems, and skills.

To understand your group’s culture, you must peer below the surface-level signals of group culture, such as logos, styles of dress, and ways of communicating or interacting, as well as the social norms, or shared rules that guide behavior. Search for the deepest assumptions group members take for granted. For a new leader who is trying to align the various dimensions of his or her group behind the identified strategy, the most relevant assumptions involve the following: