TV Lessons in Management
I confess. I watch too much TV. My excuses? Well, I guess I could blame it on my generation. As a baby boomer, I was raised with TV, the first generation in the United States that was. Probably a bigger reason is that by late evening I am too tired to do anything else and an absorbing story takes me out of the stresses of the day and helps me unwind.
So, this has been a good TV week. Most shows have their season finales, with great stories and cliff-hanger endings. One of my favorites is NCIS. The usual draw for fans in a police drama’s finale is leaking the fact that a series regular will die. We all tune in to find out who.
The NCIS finale was a great action story, with plenty of suspense, rule breaking, insights into various characters, and an exciting gun battle. For those of you awaiting a rerun, I will skip the “who died” part and move on to why I am talking about TV on a business blog.
At the tail end of the show, there is a new director of NCIS. He hands out envelopes to each of the main characters, and tells them their new assignments, all in different places. In short, he is breaking up the team. There the episode ends. The cliff-hanger, right? We have to wait for fall to find out the outcomes. Which of our favorite characters is returning? (In addition to who died, of course.)
I was struck by the management lesson. If a new manager is stepping into the lead, what should be done with the team reporting to him/her? My take is, barring unusual circumstances, not what this guy did. I would spend some time with that team to assess their strengths, both individually and as a group. An effective team will equal more than the sum of its parts. It will accomplish greater things because of the synergies resulting from a team familiar with its members and all of their strengths.
Even more telling, to me, is that an effective team has enough of a track record to establish high levels of trust. This is particularly important in a dangerous profession, such as law enforcement. You just don’t break up an effective team without a better reason than I saw here. It’s a criminal waste.
Why did the new director do this? I think it was a power play, pure and simple. And I think it may blow up in the guy’s face. But I will have to wait until fall to find out.
Darn!