Team Turnarounds

A Playbook for Transforming Underperforming Teams

Joe Frontiera, Daniel Leidl

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118239087
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Leadership

How any manager can turn a struggling team into business champs

In today's uncertain economic environment, teams are asked to do more with less. With resources stretched thin, turning around a struggling team has never been harder, and managers must work to identify and maximize whatever potential strengths a team already has. As sports fans already know, behind every great underdog story is a leader who roots out the competitive advantage that will propel the team to victory. In Team Turnarounds, Joe Frontiera and Dan Leidl share how this fine art of the turnaround really works, from how to inspire the team to the actual tools for change.

Through interviews with team managers and turnaround masters in the NFL, MLB, and the NCAA, as well as managers at top global firms who have successfully reversed their fortunes, they show the six steps every team takes to make a 180 in their performance.

• Presents a six-step model for turnarounds in any organization, based on the authors' extensive research with owners and general managers of sport franchises in the MLB, NFL, and NBA
• Features first-hand accounts of sport turnarounds, from the legendary worst-to-first story of Bill Polian and the Indianapolis Colts to Jeffrey Lurie's efforts to transform the Philadelphia Eagles

• Offers behind-the-scenes accounts of effective turnarounds at major organizations like Dominos Pizza, Juniper Networks, iContact, and the Broadway play, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

No matter how bad the circumstances, how awful the performance, or how far shares have plummeted, Team Turnarounds shows how any organization can make the climb back up to the top.

1

Stage I: Leading Past Losing

Organizations in stage I are at the bottom. For those who are guiding organizations at this early stage, the diagnosis is obvious. Your team is failing as you consistently and unequivocally lose games, customers, profits, and credibility. And losing can become a comfortable norm that team members cling to, accepting poor performance because winning simply isn’t seen as possible.

To the outside world, such organizations appear to be hopeless case studies of bad decision making, poor management, and weak execution. Internally, the destructive dynamics are crippling. Resources are scarce, attitudes and teamwork are abysmal, the willingness to accept failure is often trumped by convenient rationalizations and denial, and roles and responsibilities are both unclear and mismatched.

Although organizations in stage I are largely defined by all they do wrong, they are full of promise. As you guide your group through this early stage, there has to be a distinct and narrow focus on understanding the team’s losing ways. Observation and reflection are the keys to moving forward, and you are charged with asking questions, discerning the truth, and accepting the answers. Working to understand why the team is losing is the goal, and exploration and examination are critical.

Stage I is an investigation into why your organization is performing poorly. It’s a time for neither judgment nor decisive action, but it’s critical that a foundation for growth be laid. Throughout this stage, you are building a clear case for why changes need to occur and for what those changes should be. You should be prepared to gather evidence regarding where your organization is missing the mark, and regarding what a winning organization does differently. You also need to identify just how team members can be shifted into roles that best suit their skills.

Although making the case for needed change may seem like a straightforward endeavor, don’t lose sight of the cur­rent state of the team. An organization in stage I has been beaten and battered, and the hope of an optimistic and honest leader is critical. Ultimately, the leader of a failing organization not only has to understand why the team con­tinues to fall flat but also must be able to revitalize the dejected team by creating a light at the end of the tunnel, and pointing to where the group can go. To do this, it’s necessary to study and define success. By studying industry success stories, drawing on the more personal and individual successes, and talking with people who have led high-achieving teams, you can better identify what the group should be striving for.

To help you better understand stage I, we will explore the experiences of three leaders who walked into failing teams with the goal of identifying what was going wrong. Jeffrey Lurie purchased the Philadelphia Eagles in 1994 for a record sum, only to spend the better part of his early years as owner trying to uncover the problems that kept the franchise from winning. Similarly, Frank Esposito brought years of experience in the motorcycle trailer industry to Kendon Industries, not only determined to uncover where the small company was failing but also committed to communicating the truth to the desperate team. And David Helfer moved halfway around the world to study how the Europe, Middle East, and Africa territory of Juniper Networks could operate more efficiently and effectively, focusing much of his energy on identifying the roles and responsibilities best suited to particular team members. All three of these teams were struggling, underperforming groups with far more potential than their achievements indicated. Their turnarounds began with patient and curious leaders who were determined to uncover what was wrong while instilling the belief that things would eventually become right.

OBSERVE AND LEARN

Organizations that are losing know it. The profits aren’t there, customers are absent, quality is cheap, and the brand isn’t trusted. Yet acknowledging failure is painful and difficult, even though all the facts may suggest that the team is underperforming. Starting the turnaround process begins with recognizing and highlighting the group’s losses and shortcomings, but it requires the skill of a patient and determined leader. For an organization to begin the turnaround process, the leader has to observe the team, learn where the failures lie, and then expose those failures. One team that knows this process all too well is the Philadelphia Eagles. It took the help of Jeffrey Lurie, a Hollywood producer with a Ph.D. in social policy, to get the orga­nization to see what was wrong before it could turn itself around.

Teams in the National Football League don’t come up for sale often, and so prospective buyers are in the unenviable position of taking whatever they can get. In 1994, when Lurie decided to buy the Philadelphia Eagles for $185 million—the highest price ever paid for a sports franchise up to that point—he knew that the team had underperformed over the previous decade. The team was coming off a 1994 season in which it had logged 7 wins and 9 losses, and over the previous twelve seasons (1982–1993) the team had accumulated a record that barely topped .500, at 100 wins and 98 losses. In the same twelve years, the Eagles advanced to the playoffs only four times, winning only one playoff game out of the five it played.

Given the team’s on-field performance, Lurie knew he was buying a franchise that was accustomed to mediocrity. What he didn’t know was that the organizational problems extended far beyond actual wins and losses. Not only did Lurie spend a record amount of cash on the ailing Eagles, he also bought the team sight unseen. Once he saw what he had bought, the extent of the franchise’s issues quickly became apparent.

“I’ll always remember the day I actually bought the team, the facilities, sight unseen,” Lurie says, “I mean, I knew about Veterans Stadium, but I really didn’t know about the working conditions of the employees. It was startling and depressing, the first few months, to be in an environment where there are no windows.”

To Lurie’s credit, he didn’t freak out or let the depression overwhelm him. He moved forward, exploring and cataloging what wasn’t working and what might have to change, and eventually studying the ways of winning franchises in an effort to understand more successful organizations.

One of the primary concerns for Lurie was the facilities. The Eagles operated and played out of Veterans Stadium, a Philadelphia landmark that had slowly decayed into a relic of the good old days. The stadium had its appeal as a “time portal” capable of whisking fans back to its 1971 grand opening, but it had serious flaws as a professional sports arena and operations home for an NFL franchise. For Eagles employees other than the players, the Vet had become an awful place to work. The dingy lighting, the basement-level work area, the broken elevator, the rumors and fears of rats, and the windowless offices were depressing morale busters. For the players and the coaching staff, the cramped quarters made it nearly impossible to interact, and there wasn’t a single room in the facility where the entire team could meet to discuss strategy or where team members could just get to know one another. And for the fans, watching a game at the stadium was disruptive and uncomfortable. According to Lurie, “The sight lines for fans, which are the first thing I always kind of look at when I go into a stadium, were so distant! It was one of those multipurpose stadiums that was poor for football and poor for baseball.” Suffice it to say, employees didn’t enjoy their time working inside the stadium, and the fans weren’t excited about watching games from the stands. Lurie took note, continued cataloging the Vet’s limitations, and waited.

As real as the issues at Veterans Stadium were, the problems with the organization were far more complicated than poor sight lines and a few rats. But the stadium was an easy target. It couldn’t get offended, argue, or react to the criticism, and its failures were shared by everyone. Nevertheless, as Lurie continued to explore what was keeping the Eagles from succeeding, he started to look past bricks and mortar and deeper into the dynamics of the actual team. What Lurie began to find was not unexpected, but it was unsettling.

Championship teams often share a distinct collection of characteristics. Losing teams do, too. Patrick Lencioni, a leadership expert, defines the five characteristics of a poorly performing team as absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. Lencioni suggests that each of these characteristics works to deteriorate the effectiveness of the team, promoting dysfunction and ultimately failure. For example, if two individuals don’t trust one another, they will be “incapable of engaging in a debate of ideas,” and this shortcoming will inevitably compromise the quality of the ideas developed.¹

The Eagles seemed to model Lencioni’s five dysfunctions. Communication was poor, and trust was nonexistent. Healthy conflict didn’t take place, and team members lacked com­mitment to each other, to the fans, and to the organization. There was little accountability, and the team’s win-loss record was evidence enough that the franchise may not have been placing much attention on results. But what Lurie noted was the attitude of the office staff. He observed the staff and concluded that there “wasn’t a lot of excitement or enthusiasm.” Staff members just came to work, did their thing, and went home. They weren’t bringing passion to their jobs, and Lurie noticed.

He explored further, watching the departments and personnel interact, and concluded that there was “clearly a large wall between the football operations and the business operations, or the rest of the operation.” There was no unity and there was no shared purpose. Each camp fought for itself, blaming the other camp for failures and mistakes. If the team was losing, it was the football side’s fault, which led to poor ticket sales and anger on the business side of the organization. If the business side didn’t fill the house, the football operations wondered how any team could perform with a weak crowd. The two sides pointed fingers at each other and wouldn’t cooperate to solve the problems.

As Lurie continued to watch and gather information, he unearthed more and more types of behaviors and interactions that would have been destructive to the success of any team.

“It seemed very contentious,” he says. “It was sort of epitomized by the equipment manager, who had a very negative view of players and was very reluctant to issue socks and hand warmers.”

The equipment manager thought that the players were asking for such items in order to steal them. And this questioning of the players’ requests for warm clothes, in the cold Philadelphia climate, was just one of many ways in which mistrust within the organization manifested. On the surface, the issue of hoarding socks—because of the fear that millionaires were going to steal them—may seem childish. But Lurie came to associate this type of exchange as reflective of a much larger problem. Regardless of who was right, it was indicative of the much more serious issue of pervasive negativity, which couldn’t coexist with winning championships. Essentially, this type of mistrust and selfishness can spread like a virus, infecting one person after another and eventually bringing the whole organization down. Individuals have the potential to be “walking mood inductors.”² As such, they can exert an impact on the emotions, the judgments, and even the behaviors of other individuals and groups. For Lurie, the Eagles were fighting an illness that had permeated the whole organization, and the dysfunctional interactions were symptoms of an unhealthy culture.

“I felt like the biggest challenge, by far,” he says, “was changing the culture to one where you expect to be very good and proud of your franchise, both on the field and in the community.”

Lurie had seen enough. After collecting information about what was wrong, he set out to establish a blueprint for correcting the problems. He wanted to sell the organization on what it could be, on where it could go, and what hard work and focus could lead to, but first he had to paint a picture of what success was. He knew that between 1981 and 1994 the San Francisco 49ers had been among the most dominant teams in the NFL. Out of a sixteen-game season, the franchise had won ten or more games every year but one (the 1982 season had been shortened to nine games because of a strike). The 49ers had missed the playoffs only once, and they had reeled in five Super Bowl championships. As a new owner, Lurie was intrigued. He wanted to study success, and the 49ers were as successful as any team going. He reached out to San Francisco and asked if he could meet Bill Walsh, the 49ers’ head coach from 1979 through 1988. Walsh, who died in 2007, was largely credited as the architect of the 49ers’ dynasty, and Lurie knew that Walsh would have plenty of insights into what makes a franchise good.

“I spent a lot of time with Bill Walsh and those guys out there because I admired them,” says Lurie. “During the first six months of owning the team, I spent more time with those guys than anyone else, just because I admired what they had done, the culture, the expectation to be very good. I wanted to understand the approach they took to their own players, their employees, and their scouting systems, and I had a feeling that they did want to be the best, and recognized that they were the best.”

Lurie considers talking with the 49ers a critical point in his development as an owner, but it was also a critical point in the Eagles’ eventual turnaround. Not only did Lurie keep tabs on what would have to change within the Eagles franchise, he also went out of house to take a look at what a winning organization does. In so doing, Lurie built a case for what would have to change with the Eagles, why it would have to change, and how it would eventually have to change.

In this early period of turning an organization around, a leader simply has to take stock of what’s wrong. Lurie began by watching quietly and noting deficiencies in the facilities and the team dynamics as well as taking note of concerns with the larger culture. On the ground in Philadelphia, he attempted to understand why the organization was failing, but he also worked to define success by talking with Bill Walsh and the staff of the San Francisco 49ers. Lurie took hold of opposite ends of the performance spectrum, and he grasped the stark differences between the tw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Foreword: Adversity Introduces Us to Ourselves
• Introduction
• 1 Stage I: Leading Past Losing
• 2 Stage II: Committing to Growth
• 3 Stage III: Changing Behaviors
• 4 Stage IV: Embracing Adversity
• 5 Stage V: Achieving Success
• 6 Stage VI: Nurturing a Culture of Excellence
• 7 The Team Turnaround Workbook
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Index