This year, for the first time ever, I’ll be entering my garden into our neighborhood’s deceptively competitive garden walk. Perhaps this is why—as I frantically plot out my next dozen trips to Home Depot—transformation is on my mind.

Maybe transformation is on your mind, too. This week, we’ll hear from Kellogg professor Leigh Thompson on how to press “reset” on team dynamics in need of some transformation. Then we’ll hear the four questions leaders should ask themselves if they want to push through transformative change.

Give your team a “reset”

Even one person not pulling their weight is enough to knock team dynamics seriously out of whack.

In an article with Kellogg Insight, Thompson recommends instituting a team charter to get things back on track. A team charter, she explains, is a one-page document coauthored by the team that answers three questions: What is the team’s purpose? What are everyone’s roles and responsibilities? And what are the ground rules everyone must follow?

Key to the charter’s success is collaboration. “If you get people to buy into something, and they feel like they’ve helped author it, then they’re probably going to support it,” Thompson says.

This across-the-board approach will also help eliminate suspicions that a corrective action is targeting someone specific, which could have a chilling effect. In fact, that’s why it’s not a bad idea to ask your team to work on this document before any new issues arise.

“The team charter should be a proactive statement—not a reactive statement,” Thompson says. “I think a lot of leaders could have a really good meeting now with their teams by saying, ‘Here are some things that I’d like to address before they become a problem. How are we going to deal with vacations? How are we going to deal with people who want to do remote work? Can we all come up with a working plan?’”

It might be awkward for the team to spell out how everyone should behave if it has never sat down together to address how it runs, Thompson says. That’s why, instead of everyone sharing their thoughts out loud, they should write them down anonymously on a cloud-based shared document, like Google Docs. You can then use their responses to write up a draft and have the team suggest edits that shape the final document.

Once your team has agreed on a final charter, you’ll want to create an environment where people feel like they’re being held accountable. This may involve holding short meetings on a regular basis to check in with members of your team: How well have they fulfilled their obligations?

You can read the whole article here.

4 key questions

How often do leaders talk about transformative change, only for their management teams to balk?

“When an organization sets big, overarching goals, the thought among functional managers may very well be, ‘I hope someone else is grabbing onto it, because my department can’t deliver that,’” write Kellogg clinical professor Carter Cast and Pritzker Group Private Capital Head of Operations David Gau in Harvard Business Review. Cast is also an operating partner at Pritzker Group.

But transformation can feel a lot more doable if it is broken into bite-sized chunks. The two suggest leaders take a close look at their books with the help of a framework they call the “aspirational P&L.” It’s a way of scouring your profit-and-loss statement for areas that need to be improved and then setting really specific, clear goals for addressing them.

They point to the actions taken by a new senior leader at a 95-year-old industrial company. Hoping to speed up growth, the leader directed his management team to set ambitious goals around the company’s revenues, margins, and operating expenses.

And then, for each of these three areas, management asked themselves four questions:

• How can we reframe what’s possible?
• How do we translate this into actionable steps?
• Is this a process we can replicate?
  
• What kind of investment is needed to make the change?

“With an aspirational P&L that breaks the goals down into bite-size strategies, everyone is co-invested in making improvements that cumulatively lead to success,” Cast and Gau write.

To read more about the “aspirational P&L,” you can find Cast and Gau’s HBR piece here.