One of the biggest threats to the long-term success of a team is losing the faith of the top management before your task is completed. Time, manpower and money are ultimately the three most important resources a company has. If management feels like one or more of these resources are being misappropriated, your task may become less and less crucial to the company. However, if you take steps from the beginning to get management invested in the task and to keep them apprised of the progress, you can buy your team the most volatile of those resources: time.
Have an Executive Sponsor: If it’s possible, getting executive buy-in — and involvement — from day one is perhaps the best way to insure the longevity of your team. Having the name of a member of the top leadership attached to your project will give you access to the resources and the wisdom that the top brass have to offer. If you can’t sell your task and its importance to one of the top management before you pull the team together, maybe it’s worth considering whether you need to work more on the idea.
Regular Meetings with Stakeholders: Whether or not you have an executive sponsor, it’s still a good idea to keep the other execs up on how the company resources are being used and what progress is being made. Even if you don’t have much tangible progress to report, it’s still a good idea to be able to frame your progress in your own terms. If you don’t, leadership may draw their own conclusions.
Roadmap for Deliverables: When your task is unfamiliar, it can be difficult to provide a timetable for completion or to map out the milestones to management. But certainly there are aspects of your task that can be delivered on a schedule, like assembling the team, creating a report laying out the task to stakeholders, training and development of leaders within the team, and providing regular updates on progress, for example. That way, if the roadmap to completion of your task is behind schedule, you’ll have other successes to point to in order to assure the stakeholders that your team is a worthwhile use of resources.
Keep Overhead Low: Any way you can lower the stakes of keeping the team together, working on the task, will help buy time and patience from the leadership, who are beholden to shareholders or investors. The number one concern for investors will be expenditure versus the chances that the task will deliver profit. If you can keep overhead low by making sure the team is staffed properly –meaning neither overstretched nor underchallenged — and using resources efficiently, you will buy the team valuable time to begin delivering on the faith of the stakeholders. If your team is expanding into the double digits, you should begin to question whether you need this many people to complete the task. You needn’t hire a new person every time a new type of expertise is needed. Often team members are eager and able to expand into different roles or to be trained to take on new responsibility. Alternatively, you can farm some work out to people or resources outside the team and save both time and money.
