Manage your Workforce by Identifying Runners and Players
by Lois Melbourne
Written by President and COO of Aquire, Tom McKeown
Athletics can be great training for youths, as they mature into adulthood by providing vital lessons in discipline and hard work. But, there are different types of sports that require different types of coaching and involvement. There are individual sports such as track and wrestling, where the participant need only be concerned with maximum achievement in his or her own event and that result is grouped into a total score. On the other hand there are team sports such as football and basketball where participants play different roles in order to achieve one common result. The same can be said for departments within companies, consider sales and marketing.
Sales is an individual sport, where you give someone a territory and a quota and say go bring in as much as you can. Although there is definitely back-up support required here, the individual need not sacrifice any key measurement for the good of the team and their contribution is easily measurable. Marketing, however, is definitely a team sport with various people having different roles, where often one person completes their part of a project and then passes off to another for the next phase. Thus the effectiveness of this group is judged by the quality of the end product.
As you grow your company and workforce, how do you evaluate when to add contributors and managers to these different types of groups? The place to start is with visualized hierarchies and drill down analytics, like those offered by Aquire. If you conditionally format the sales boxes in your organization chart with a certain color for 100% plus quota attainment and another for under achievement, you can navigate quickly to individual levels and get an indication as to whether you need to add or replace people. In contrast by identifying responsibilities and group completion metrics in a department view, one might gain insight as to whether the creation of a new position in the marketing chain might accelerate project completion or improve quality. Finally, by modeling all such proposed changes to the workforce and seeing span of control metrics you can decide whether additional management is justified in either department.
Different teams require different coaches, but knowing how to lead starts with knowing what you have. Getting the best workforce management tools is why the most successful companies are just that.
Tom McKeown
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