An ecosystem at its core is nothing more than a community where the members are interacting with each other in a pre-defined and purposeful manner. Each member of the community plays a specific role, which if executed successfully, will benefit the community as a whole. The community is often governed by specific rules of engagement or defined parameters. If you drastically upset one of the members of the community or change the rules, then some sort of evolution will take place. Sometimes this evolution is for the better and improves the community’s overall function and effectiveness. Sometimes this evolution renders the community ineffective, or worse, entirely extinct.
For example, in a forest community if you remove the trees from the forest, you have altered the ecosystem. Certain members of the community may be able to adapt to the new surroundings while others may not and will simply die out or leave. Any member of the community that is dependent on those that die out or leave will also be forced to evolve or perish. In this way the ecosystem will evolve or die.
All employees of a business operate within an ecosystem as well. This ecosystem is made up of members who play certain roles. When all members of the community play their roles in a well-coordinated way the business will thrive and grow. The corporate ecosystem is governed by a core strategy, a culture and organizational structure. It can be impacted by fluctuations in corporate culture, competitive pressures or changes in leadership and technology. Understanding this ecosystem and all of the forces that control and govern it is critically important to the success of an operational area.
For example, just like removing the trees from the forest, if you remove a component of the ecosystem that certain staff is dependent on then they must find a way to adapt or leave the company. In the corporate sense, adaptation is more often than not dictated by management’s desire to either redeploy resources or monetize savings as a result of a change to the ecosystem.
The operational ecosystem is generally made up of three primary components, including: people, processes and technology. It is critically important that you understand who all the people are and the roles that they play, that you know what processes govern the people’s behavior and what technologies, if any, support those processes. Those are your primary concerns, and they tend to be very tangible.
Your secondary concerns, those which are less tangible, will be things like: budget constraints, the political environment, where the business is within its life cycle, what competitive pressures are causing the most challenges, who the real thought-leaders in the firm are and what the current corporate priority or focus is. This information can help you set an appropriate scope for your operation and make sure that your objectives are well aligned with the overall corporate goals.
Lastly, you will need to measure the health of the community membership whether they report to your area or not. Within your area, understanding the depth of knowledge and the overall capabilities of your team will help you determine how fast you can move. There is no point in driving your team to accomplish something that they are not capable of achieving. Managers who do this will be responsible for the inevitable failed outcome in its entirety. You will have to determine if you can get the team to be where you need them to be, or else you will have to replace them or supplement them with other skill-based employees.
This is easy in some instances and not so easy in others. If you inherit a team that possesses a significant amount of hard to acquire domain knowledge, then you will be better off trying to train them up in skills that you feel you also require. The alternative approach of trying to turn over your knowledgeable staff will be costly in terms of lost knowledge, situational awareness and corporate memory. Alternatively, if budgets allow it, you can supplement your team with skill players to help you with execution. Combining skill staff with domain experts is often the most powerful and productive mix of employees. Your last resort approach should be turning over the staff in its entirety. Even though that approach can be tempting for a manager who wants to bring in his or her own team, it will likely result in the loss of valuable domain expertise and will almost always result in the remaining staff pulling back into their shells, making your job much more difficult.
You will most often see inexperienced managers taking this last approach. Typically, their first reaction is to hire a new management team. This is like bringing your teddy bear with you to work. If a manager has been successful elsewhere with a team, they will often try to bring their team with them. While this can be valuable if you are supplementing a broader team, it can also be over-done. Moreover, this will often serve to insulate the manager from the actual work going on in his or her area of responsibility. That tends to be defensive behavior and is rarely constructive. Teams will react better to a senior manager who rolls up his or her sleeves and digs in with the troops to solve a problem.
Non-team members are an important consideration as well. If you learn that a team that you are dependent on for input is weak or lacks discipline, then you will have to take specific actions to shore things up, including the creation of an operating level agreement (OLA) between teams.
Understanding the ecosystem and the forces that govern it will help you understand how to connect with the stakeholders, employees and systems that make up the community’s membership. This knowledge will very often contain the information that you need to help you avoid pitfalls and overcome challenges that will impact your ability to execute well.
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