A note from the Author:

I began writing this post as COVID-19 forced our portfolio companies - and just about everyone I know - to work 100% remote. To help leaders respond, I wanted to share some of the techniques that ParkerGale uses with our CEOs to help build team cohesion, clarify working styles, and make better collective decisions. The tool in this article - a “leadership scouting report” - draws on my experiences as both an organizational consultant and as a lacrosse player.

I'm proud to have played at the game’s highest levels, but I was never a standout on any team - college or pro. Only one Division 1 program recruited me, and I was lucky to play a single season in Major League Lacrosse, but only after making my team's final roster spot via a media-day open tryout. To compete and keep up, I needed to deeply understand my opponent before the game ever began. Without a detailed scouting report on the other team, lacrosse becomes a guessing game - one that I was more likely to lose than win.

Business leaders need a different kind of scouting report: Not focused on the competition, but on themselves and those who work for them. This article teaches you how to create one and how to use it with your team.

I hope you enjoy it.

-Paul

 The Case for the Scouting Report

A few days before every home game, my Bucknell lacrosse teammates and I huddled in our locker room. There, coaches passed out the scouting report for that weekend’s opponent. Hours of film study and planning had been poured into that report. It detailed the habits and tendencies of opposing players and coaches. We were expected to study, memorize, and apply it.

The scouting report was divided into two sections. The first summarized our strategy. In big, bold letters, it read: KEYS TO THE GAME. Our coaches summed up ours in just a few bullet points:

• Win the ground ball battle

• Hold them to less than six goals

• Avoid stupid penalties

• Get up and down the field

The keys were simple, clarifying, actionable, and easy to recall during tense games. My time as a leadership and organizational consultant, first at Bain & Co. and now on the Portfolio Operations team at ParkerGale Capital, has cemented my belief that the best strategies are simple. The ability to quickly reinforce “what matters most” (in a game or on the job) can be the difference between success and failure. Lengthy or complex strategies are more difficult to describe and share. Our coaches recognized this. Their short and punchy points were easy to recall and quickly refocused us when we fell behind.

The second page, PERSONNEL, was equally valuable. It summarized the need-to-know information on opposing players: What was their style? What moves did they use? What were they great at? What did they struggle with? Without this knowledge, lacrosse becomes a guessing game. With it, I could build a proactive game plan that played off my opponents’ strengths and weaknesses and - as someone who was never the biggest, strongest, or fastest on any team - tip the odds in my favor.

When I understood the other players on the field, my best performances followed.

Beyond the Field: Scouting Reports and the Business Leader

Abandon, for a moment, the purely competitive framing of Scouting Reports and sport. Instead, think about the document’s purpose. It answers:

• “What do I need to do?” (Strategy)

• “Who am I playing with?” (Team)

Most leaders take their cues from investors, boards, and customers. They spend all their time on strategy and overlook teamwork. These leaders care about their people; however, they underestimate the performance of in-sync teams and, more often, lack a structure to set norms for how to communicate and partner.

This is unfortunate.

Because a team that takes the time to share their tendencies, preferences, working styles, and triggers will usually outperform one that doesn’t.

There are three reasons for this.

Benefit/Reason 1: Increase speed and performance

When most of us join a new team, we introduce ourselves and share a bit of our backgrounds. Then, we dispense with the pleasantries and get to work. Sure, we get to know each other better over time. And if we pay attention, we eventually discern each other’s preferences, strengths, and blind spots more clearly. But building this understanding through trial-and-error takes a long time.

The Scouting Report provides a framework for teams to summarize, clarify, and share “who they are” in a way that helps them organize their work.

Learning who’s playing – and developing the trust that comes with this knowledge – differentiates high-performing teams. Amy Edmondson, author and Harvard Business School Professor, shares in her book Teaming:

“…great teams consist of individuals who have learned to trust one another. Over time, they have discovered each other’s strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to play as a coordinated whole.”

An effective scouting report helps a team quickly summarize who they are, build trust earlier, and “play as one” – moving fast, hesitating less, and anticipating one another’s reactions, habits, and needs before interpersonal issues threaten their decision-making and performance.

Benefit/Reason 2: Avoid uncertainty with clear boundaries

Most of us spend the majority of our working days a) figuring out how to solve a problem, and b) soliciting feedback from others once we have a solution. Decision-based uncertainty is hard enough to deal with. But crafting the approach for, and anticipating the reply from, a boss – a fickle, occasionally ornery, often unpredictable – person, can feel downright perilous. We are human, after all. There’s ego, fear, insecurities, wounds, and brain chemistry to contend with. This uncertainty and second-guessing surfaces as stress. Consider the following study, covered in this article by Inc. Magazine - the article reads: “In 2016, a group of London researchers explored how people react to being told they will either ‘definitely’ or ‘probably’ receive a painful electric shock. They discovered a paradox: Volunteers who knew they would definitely receive a shock felt calmer and were measurably less agitated than those who were told they only had a 50% chance of getting the electric shock.”

Think about that. When participants knew what to expect, they felt less stress.

Now apply this lesson to your team. Finding out how you, the leader, will react to something requires taking a risk. Employees can’t perform when they are worrying about how you’ll receive an idea, proposal or news of a setback. A leader who makes it clear that team members won’t be punished for speaking up or sharing ideas doesn’t have that problem. Teams with this kind of psychological safety, that is, a belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, can focus on the problem in front of them, not how their boss will react. No wonder teams who create psychological safety consistently outperform those that don’t.

Just as participants in the study felt calmer when they knew the shock was coming, people feel better when we understand the boundaries governing our working relationships. When managers are explicit about what they want and don’t want, they eliminate hesitation and decrease their team’s stress level, freeing up bandwidth so the team can focus on their work.

Benefit/Reason 3: Create trust through shared vulnerability

As co-leader of our Talent practice, I spend most of my time working with our CEOs to build stronger cultures and healthier organizations. When we first assess our portfolio leadership teams, we often find that team “trust” is scarce. In many cases, teammates spend all of their time executing strategy and juggling urgent tasks. Calendars are rarely conducive to pausing and becoming a better leadership team.

To address this, we often start with a “Personal Histories” exercise. Here, teams share simple details about their upbringing: Where they grew up, what their parents did, and how many siblings they have. The exercise feels tame, but it seeds what notable leadership consultant Patrick Lencioni calls “vulnerability-based trust.”

According to Lencioni, vulnerability-based trust emerges when “team members are truly comfortable being exposed to one another [and] begin to act without concern for protecting themselves. As a result, they can focus their energy and attention completely on the job at hand, rather than on being strategically disingenuous or political with one another.”

The Personal Histories exercise exposes teammates and their leader to each other in a new way, but the information they share isn’t necessarily work-related. A well-written Scouting Report goes one step further, sharing vulnerable but practical guidelines for how your team can get the best out of you. It deconstructs and displays a leader’s patterns, tendencies, and preferences to add trust and improve performance. In The Culture Code, Harvard Business School professor Jeff Polzar underscores the benefits of this. “Being vulnerable gets the static out of the way and lets us do the job together, without worrying or hesitating. It lets us work as one unit.”

Writing your own Scouting Report – complete with your strengths, weaknesses, preferences, tendencies, and triggers (good and bad) – increases team output, short-circuits uncertainty, and builds trust. Providing clarity about who we are as managers eliminates the guessing game of working with us. By outlining factors that cause us to work “at our best” and “at our worst”, we acknowledge our fallibility. And through sharing our report with our teams, we model curiosity and encourage others to do the same.

The Scouting Report template I use with our Portfolio leadership teams is alarmingly simple. This is purposeful. The prompts in each box invite straightforward reflection, concise responses and easy delivery. I encourage you to use these prompts ‘as-is’ when crafting your scouting report for the following reasons:

• First, the prompts are open-ended. They allow for multiple interpretations and encourage storytelling. This adds color and context, and it leads to rich discussion.

• Second, they’re balanced. The left-hand side of the page summarizes what you are like “at your best.” The right-hand side describes you “at your worst.” The latter provides an opportunity to own your flaws – a key ingredient in creating vulnerability-based trust. Admitting that you have tics that actually annoy others (gasp!) signals that “none of us are perfect, including me.”

• Third, they’re fast. There are great examples of Scouting Reports (or, as some in the technology world call them, “user guides) out there. My favorites are from Claire Hughes Johnson (COO at Stripe) and Jay Desai (CEO at PatientPing). But these guides are long. When I facilitate this exercise with teams, we frequently finish in under 90 minutes, and everyone leaves with a completed one-page report. An individual can create a draft in as little as 45 minutes.

Now, it’s time to create your own. If you haven’t already, use the button a few scrolls above to download our Scouting Report template. Then follow these steps.

STEP 1: Reflect on your working style

Blank boxes unnerve even competent leaders. To jump-start reflection, start with the following questions. Don’t overthink this; just read, reflect, and start writing. You can tidy your text once you have something to work from.

#1 – The natural strengths I tend to lean on are…

#4 - At work, my
triggers are…

STEP 2: Fill out THE TEMPLATE WITH “WHAT MATTERS MOST”

Reflect on your notes and highlight what’s most important. Yes, “important” is subjective. But this is your Scouting Report. What notes have stories attached to them? What notes rouse an emotional response? Which are the most you? As memories flash, make note of the positive and negative associations. These are cues that a particular communication approach or working style matters to you – and that it’s worth sharing with your team.

Turn these into “headlines”, with short but descriptive supporting context. Remember: someone who reads this needs to be able to stop, start, or change a behavior based on what’s written. Aim for an executive summary; but, include short stories or anecdotes to bring the points to life.

STEP 3: Gather feedback from someone else

You are the central player in this report. But you also have an incomplete, biased, view of your experience. After completing your first draft, share it with two colleagues. Consider this an exercise in building self-awareness. I recommend selecting one person you’ve worked for and one person who has worked for you (not a current employee).

Ask them each three questions:

1. What’s missing?

2. What isn’t clear?

3. What else would you share with someone working with me for the first time?

Listen. Reflect. Add what’s missing. Clarify what’s confusing. And thank your colleagues for the feedback.

STEP 4: Share it with your team

At this point, leaders often turn timid. There’s no right or wrong way to share your Scouting Report – just share it the next chance you have. If you need a lead-in, trying something like this: “Recently, I’ve been reflecting on my personal leadership style. I’d like to share some of my thoughts with you so our team can work better together.”

Then, set a timer for five minutes and talk through it.

Tell the meaningful stories. Highlight the anecdotes. Share the breakthroughs and blunders in your reflections. And don’t worry about being awkward or self-absorbed. We’re terrible judges of how certain gestures are received, anyway. A series of University of Chicago experiments focused on the effects of expressing gratitude found that writing ‘thank-you’ letters put writers in better moods. More importantly, the writers also overestimated the awkwardness of exchanges and underestimated the positive effect on recipients. So, trust me - stop worrying. If you approach this with sincerity and humility, your team will notice. They’ll remember the gesture, not how you sounded.

STEP 5: Ask them to reciprocate

You can’t ask your team to do what you won’t. Lencioni argues in The Advantage, “If the team leader is reluctant to acknowledge his or her mistakes, or fails to admit to a weakness that is evident to everyone else, there is little hope that other members of the team are going to take that step themselves.” While the main benefit of sharing your Scouting Report is clarity for your team, by “going first” you also gain permission to ask your team to complete the exercise.

After you share your report, setup a meeting in the near-future (while the idea is fresh) and ask your team to bring completed drafts of their own scouting reports. Tape them on the wall. Stand up. Set a timer for five minutes. Take turns walking through your scouting reports. Ask each person to end with a simple question: “What did I miss?” You’ll be amazed at how something so simple can unstick personality differences, bring breakthroughs in chemistry, and improve trust.

Final Thoughts

Finding ways to connect and clarify team norms is now more important than ever. We need thoughtful structures to learn “who is on the field with you”, to reveal more of yourself, and to demand clarity and vulnerability from your team. A Scouting Report provides that structure - to safely and succinctly share who you are and, ultimately, to help you and your team cooperate more effectively. After all, creating a cooperative, high-performing team doesn’t happen by accident. As Dan Coyle says in The Culture Code, “Cooperation, as we’ll see, does not simply descend out of the blue. It is a group muscle that is built according to a specific pattern of repeated interaction, and that pattern is always the same: A circle of people are engaged in the risky, occasionally painful, ultimately rewarding process of being vulnerable together.”

FAQs

I don’t have a team - should I STILL do this if no one reports to me?

Yes. Do it anyway. No matter who you collaborate with, you will be better off if you can communicate and understand each other’s working styles. You will also be more self-aware in your next job interview or role if you’ve done the hard work to summarize how you show up at work. The introspection pays off: One of my favorite interview questions is “Tell me about the most important constructive feedback you’ve ever received.” You would be amazed how many senior executives fumble the answer.

I’ve done a [MBTI/Hogan/DISC/360/Etc]… should I include that as part of my Scouting Report?

Sure, but pare down your results to only what really matters. Try to summarize the 3-4 most important takeaways from your assessment. Ask: what learnings are most applicable to those that work with you? What factors If you’re sharing your MBTI type, what misconceptions could someone draw from your results? Don’t assume that others are familiar with the assessment. Draw out the most important insights and supplement them with examples.

I like this stuff. Where can I learn more?

This article was inspired by a few of my favorite books:

• The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni – My go-to book on how to create an aligned leadership team and a healthy organization. We use it with the majority of the leadership teams inside of our portfolio. It’s also my most-gifted book.

• The Culture Code by Dan Coyle – Dan examines the cultures of exceptional organizations and analyzes those common traits that make them great.

• The System: The Glory and Scandal of College Football by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian – Jeff and Armen draw out the vivid lesser-seen stories that make up the fabric of our country’s high-profile college athletics programs, including how the best teams use pre-game scouting to get an edge. Fantastic storytelling.