If you are the incoming M.D. you will have put together a 100-day plan outlining your priorities, milestones and targets. A pound to a penny, high up on that list of priorities will be an assessment of the strength of your senior team. These people are going to be key to the company’s performance and your success in role. Are they the right people? Are they going to help you build your vision for the business and add value to your plans, delivering your agenda with pace and energy or do they risk acting as a break, or worse, working against you? You need to be objective in your judgement and strike the right balance between acting too slowly and acting with undue haste based upon incomplete information.

Given the lead times involved in making new appointments on the open market you need to put ticks and crosses against names by 60 days into that 100-day plan. By that point you should have all the information to hand on which to base your decisions. And remember, the clock is ticking.

Here is my step-by-step practical guide, based upon personal experience, to help you navigate through this critical process and arrive at well informed, balanced decisions on the make-up of your team sheet.

Before you join the business
No matter how strong your due diligence was before accepting the job offer it is highly unlikely that all the people-related challenges will have been shared with you before you are on the payroll. After all, the interview process is a two-way courtship; your new employer did not want to put you off. That said, there are steps you can take and answers to be sought before signing on the line. Here are some of them.

1. Talk to the recruiting agent
If you are a C-suite appointment, your new employer may well have used a head-hunter to find you. Don’t forget that a good head-hunter is an astute and insightful psychologist by another name. At this level you can expect that they have taken the time to develop an in-depth understanding of their client. They will understand the people dynamics in the business and will have made their own  observations of the characters, personalities, relationships and even politics involved. Obviously, the head-hunter works for the client, not you. Nevertheless, they have a vested interest in the success of the appointee and, as the relationship between the two of you develops during the course of the recruitment process, they should be willing and able to act as a sounding board for your own thoughts and observations without betraying any confidences.

2. Follow the money
   Power sits with shareholders so map out the shareholdings. If you are joining a family business, your freedom to hire and fire based upon objective commercial considerations alone may be restricted. Blood is almost always thicker than water so you need to be realistic about your prospects of being able to off-load the principal shareholder’s first-born child if you think they are the weak link in your executive team.
   That said, you should ask your Chair to be clear about the scope of your remit to take personnel decisions. At the same time, ensure that old reporting lines are removed. Your role will be challenging enough without a key member of your team believing that their reporting line is to the Chair rather than yourself. Ambiguity will come back to bite you.
   If you are dealing with PE shareholders, you will not have to wait long to find out where they see weaknesses in the Board. In my experience they will have told you before they have even asked if you take sugar.
3. Marks out of ten
   To avoid getting a waffly non-committal response when asking your future Chair about the strength of your Exec team, I tend to favour these questions; “If you were to score the performance of the Board against your ideal of a high-performing team, how would you mark them out of 10?”, and, “Thinking about the individuals on the Exec team, what score would you give the best performer and the worst performer?.” And, “How many of the Exec team would you rank at less than 7 out of 10?”
4. Frustrated ambitions
   Ask whether there have been any internal applications for your role. If there have, you need to work out quickly whether they are going to be inside or outside the tent. We will return to internal applicants in a later point.
5. Conduct your field work
   You should expect your would-be employer to be able to share the Exec team’s job descriptions and the organisational structure with you, and you will have thought carefully about the mix of skills/qualifications and experience you will need to have around you. Whilst you cannot expect your prospective boss to infringe GDPR by providing you with Exec team C.Vs, you can do some research yourself. Start with Google, Linkedin, and social channels to find out more about those you will be working with. Given the information you have gathered, compare each of the individuals against your profile requirements for the roles you need them to perform.
6. Meet the people
   It is entirely reasonable that you have the opportunity of meeting your future team as part of the recruitment process, so ask for it. Ideally arrange to meet them one-to-one for 30 minutes each. This is also your opportunity to ask questions which help you fill in the gaps in your knowledge as to whether their skills/qualifications and experience match your required profiles.

You will be able to learn a lot by asking a few judiciously chosen questions and observing body language. Remember the individual who has been passed over for your role? Ask them to share their thoughts now that they have had time to reflect. What is their understanding of why their application was unsuccessful? Is it consistent with what you have been told? On the positive side, their answer may recognise a knowledge gap from which you could build a development plan together and keep a star performer on-side, or they may be seething with thinly veiled resentment, in which case, you have been warned.

After you are appointed
You have taken up the appointment and joined the business. You now have two months to validate your initial observations, fill in the gaps and check your assumptions before moving to the point of decision.

7. Full disclosure
   Now that you have taken the King’s shilling, you may well find that your new employer is willing to share their opinions of the executive team members candidly. This is useful but it may also present you with a tricky situation. It would not be the first time that an employer wanted to use their new hire to do their dirty work for them. They may encourage you to act quickly to make changes to your team. Resist the temptation to shoot from the hip. It is entirely reasonable that you ask for two months in which to arrive at your own independent opinions.
8. Priest and Confessor
   A Board level HR specialist is worth their weight in gold. If you have ‘a keeper’ they’ll have been observing the Exec team closely and be a great source of insight. They will be a sounding board for your thinking and, in my experience, once they have satisfied themselves that that you treat colleagues with respect, the more willing they will be to explore possibilities and work with you to build solutions. All within the context of the confidentiality of the confessional.
9. Interrogate the Business Plan
   You can learn a lot about the strength of individual Exec members by asking them to take you through their functional element of the annual business plan. I like to do this within the first 30 days. How robust is the thinking, how detailed and rigorous the planning and how effective the execution against the KPIs? Is there a three-year plan? Is the groundwork being done on which years 2 and 3 will be built, or are they entirely focussed on “Events, dear boy. Events.”
10. Weekly 1:1’s
    These are one of your best indicators of performance. Whilst someone may be able to blag their way through their explanation of a business plan, they will not be able to keep it up over the course of the eight 1:1 meetings you will hold with them during your first two months in the business.
11. Team meetings
    Your first couple of meetings between you and your executive team are a good opportunity for you to observe team dynamics. Are there high levels of mutual challenge, honesty and respect? Does everyone have a voice? How strong are the contributions of individuals?
12. Leadership and vision
    You are joining a business to drive change of some form. That starts with working closely with your Executive to co-author a shared view of the future business you want to build together. Working on the future is an opportunity to establish shared aspirations and ambitions. A shared understanding of your common objectives is mission critical for both team and business and the process of forging those shared aspirations is a very good indicator as to where the energy sits within the team. Who is engaging and to what degree? Resistance to participate or grudging compliance should be the start point of probing one-on-one conversations in private.
13. Team trumps Diva.
    In the game of Business Top Trumps, the team is more important than the individual, everytime. If you have a high performing diva do not allow yourself to agonise endlessly about whether you can afford to lose them and how far you should accommodate their behaviour for the sake of the business. Managing a diva is physically and emotionally exhausting and it is energy you can ill afford to waste. A diva is self-destructive and has a destructive effect upon both the wider team and your authority. In practice, the disastrous consequences you have lost sleep over rarely materialise when you part company with them.
14. Aretha is right
    You are now 60 days into your 100 day plan and you have made your decisions about the composition of your senior team. If changes are necessary, now is the time to act. Key is that you act with integrity and respect for the individual. Your objective is to make the changes cleanly and quickly and to facilitate dignified exits for those leaving the business.