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O P I N I O N
Underperforming teams There’s a lot to evaluate, and measures can be severe, but if fiefdoms form, or if turnover is high, it’s time to take action.
A re you frustrated because some of your teams, groups, or offices are not hitting their financial goals or performing at their highest level? If you have groups that struggle to be profitable, have high turnover, or don’t embrace your firm’s culture, it can be difficult to pinpoint what the issues are and get them on track. Very often an office is opened or a new team assembled in order to accomplish one of the firm’s strategic goals such as entering a new market, geography, or client. Depending on how the group was created – from breaking off from another successful division, to an acquisition, to a key strategic hire – many things can cause a group or remote office to underachieve.
June Jewell
A recent survey of our clients found that the average A/E firm has between two and six teams that are underperforming, and there are many different reasons for this. Options to confronting this problem include replacing team leadership, closing a remote office, or other severe measures. So how do you figure out what the primary problems are? In measuring the performance of our groups or teams, we often look at revenue or profit goals, but it is also important to understand the other key metrics behind the scenes that are causing the group to miss their primary targets. A variety of key metrics, such as win-rate, backlog, and utilization need to be evaluated, in addtion to other intangible factors including: ❚ ❚ Poor leadership
❚ ❚ Ineffective operational and business processes ❚ ❚ Winning enough business to sustain backlog and utilization ❚ ❚ Skills and talents of the team ❚ ❚ Types of projects and clients being pursued ❚ ❚ Failure to embrace the firm’s mission and culture ❚ ❚ Unsatisfactory client satisfaction ❚ ❚ Reporting and group compensation plans It is important to analyze your organizational structure and compensation practices to determine if you are rewarding the type of behavior that will drive profitability. Remote offices or groups are often not incentivized to
See JUNE JEWELL, page 8
THE ZWEIG LETTER April 18, 2016, ISSUE 1148
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