Lasday: Every Firm Needs A 'Hit Squad'

Every Firm Needs A 'Hit Squad'

By: Lou Lasday

In nearly every strata of Gulf Coast human achievement - the arts, medical, community banking, law, real estate – you can find high-energy, high profit, ego-centric, corporate "ALL STARS" that produce innovative results. Call them what you will: the Development Team, the Futurists, the Brain Trust, the Think Tank or perhaps the A-Team.

Authors Bill Fischen and Andy Boynton, writing in the Harvard Business Review on the topic of performance - based organizations, say that high stake projects need high-profile teams.

Special Forces

If you have ever been involved with such groups, you know they are fundamentally different from the garden-variety teams that most organizations form to pursue more modest and mundane projects.

These special forces that we'll affectionatively refer to as "Hit Squads", comprise the elite "doers" in their particular fields and are specially convened for ambitious projects. Their work styles have a frenetic rhythm. They emanate a high voltage energy. They are utterly unique in the ambition of their goals, the intensity of their plans, the excitement of their conversations and their high-octane spirit of accomplishment.

Despite such potential, most companies deliberately avoid these special forces believing that the risks are too high. Many firms actually consider expert individuals too elitist, temperamental, and difficult to work with. Even the very notion of managing such a group seems unimaginable. So most organizations fall into default mode, opting to set up project teams of people who get along nicely. The results are often mediocrity.

Ho Hum, Ho Hum

Does your Gulf Coast enterprise pick mundane, traditional teams which are typically formed with whoever is available, regardless of talent? Hit Squads, however, consist of star performers who are hand-picked to play specific, key roles. These teams are intense and intimate. They assume that their customers are every bit as smart and sophisticated as they are. So they don't cater to stereotypical "averages". Leaders of Hit Squads put a premium on great collaboration - and they don't encourage creative confrontation to achieve it.

Radical Innovation

Most traditional teams are more concerned with "doing" than with "thinking". The working assumption is that execution is more important than generating breakthrough ideas. Team assignments, therefore, fall to people who seem to get work done. A less conventional approach, however, is more likely to produce exceptional results.

Are you already thinking about your own Gulf Coast enterprise and who you might pick for your next radical, corporate-changing initiative?

You have to know your personalities. Hit Squad players are not shy. They typically want to take on risky ventures. They love daunting challenges and readily accept the risk of exposure and career damage if their projects fail. Accordingly, the individual members give their utmost to assure that radical innovation happens.

It Just Keeps Going

Stars on the Hit Squad energize each other and stimulate ideas with frequent, intense, face-to-face conversations. The usual round of e-mails, phone calls and occasional, quick meetings just isn't the path of this crowd.

When Hit Squads are in action, impassioned dialogue becomes the critical driver of performance, not the work itself. The inescapable physical proximity of team members of your entrepreneurial enterprise ensures that the right messages get to the right people fast. As a result, they operate at a pace that is many times the speed found in normal prospects.

Radical Initiatives

If you're up to the challenge of radical, explosive initiatives for your own Gulf Coast enterprise, remember you must trust and encourage those on your Hit Squad. They need total freedom to bring their best efforts to chart a new course for action. If you are a Gulf Coast Law Firm, do you want to increase the number of corporate clients among the residential and commercial building trade? Tell your Hit Squad! If you're a Commercial Banker do you want to create increased cross selling of products? Tell your Hit Squad! If you're a Realtor, do you require one referral from each sale? Tell your Hit Squad! Give them strict goals and deadlines. Then, get out of the way! Balancing the need for individual attention, and intellectual freedom with time lines of a high stakes project, requires unusual leadership skills on the part of the Gulf Coast executive.

Companies in every industry pursue ambitious projects all the time. But when break-through performance is called for, it's painfully clear that "business as usual" is unacceptable.

If you truly want to stamp out mediocrity, don't hesitate to assemble the very best you can recruit, develop, encourage, advance and trust. Let their egos soar like a gull surveying the warm winds of the Gulf Coast. Encourage intense dialogue and then watch the sparks fly.

Here's your big chance to propel your enterprise. Leap from the ordinary to the extraordinary and with just one dynamite, winning initiative, soar skyward to become legendary!

Lou Lasday, an independent marketing advisor residing on Longboat Key, creates action-oriented Strategic Marketing Initiatives for Gulf Coast emerging companies. A career Direct Response Executive; he has been a general partner of a major national marketing communications firm and Regional President of the American Marketing Association. Mr. Lasday can be reached at [email protected].