Faster Together

Accelerating Your Team's Productivity

Laura Stack

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781523094479
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Leadership

Faster Together
Accelerating Your Team's Productivity There are more roadblocks to productivity today than ever before. Everyone who works must deal with countless emails, constant communication, cascading deadlines, and seemingly endless meetings. These can be managed efficiently, or they can be a huge time suck. When you're surrounded by slow-moving coworkers, you're stuck in a traffic jam of sorts. What makes the difference isn't individuals working harder or faster or smarter but "teaming well." You have at your disposal what Stack calls "the most powerful productivity machine in existence" your team. Individual productivity is just the beginning of business profitability; the real winner is team productivity. A good team can accomplish more, and more quickly, than any one Lone Ranger. Yes, there are always stars—in sports, Peyton Manning, Mia Hamm, and Stephen Curry come to mind—but they couldn't do their jobs without the rest of the team doing theirs. Bestselling author Laura Stack's FAST model mobilizes teams to be the most effective they can be, while keeping each other's best interests at heart. Using her original model, teams learn to work together Fairly, accept Accountability, apply Systems Thinking, and maximize available Technology. An interactive assessment helps you evaluate your team's current speed and rate of acceleration. By the end of this book, you'll truly understand the abilities of your team. Team members will ask themselves, "How can I help my team go faster together?" You work to save everyone else time, and they work to save you time. For your business to win, everyone must contribute. As Stack puts it, "Team up; don't slow down!"So, rev your team's engines, and you'll soon be roaring down the track together!

FAIRNESS

Building Relationships
Handling Conflict
Improving Cohesiveness

ACCELERATOR #1

Building Relationships

Relationships at work are defined by the way in which two or more people or organizations regard and behave toward each other.

The overarching mindset here is that everyone gets along. That doesn’t mean you all must be best friends and go to happy hour together after work. But you should be polite to and respectful of everyone with whom you have a daily working relationship.

By policing yourself, treating others well, maintaining positive approaches toward getting work done, jumping in to help others, and even taking charge when things go wrong or your manager is unavailable, you can strengthen your relationships with others on your team.

Let’s take a closer look at four potential Speed Bumps associated with relationship-building on your team.

THE SAME STANDARDS AREN’T APPLIED TO EVERYONE

Have you ever attended a meeting as a guest, but couldn’t tell who the leader was, because multiple people asked their team members tough questions? I’ve attended a handful of meetings as a consultant where if I hadn’t already known the leader, I wouldn’t have been able to guess who was in charge. Why? Because those meetings were attended by high-performing teams where relationships were so tight, everyone felt comfortable speaking up. They all expected the best of their team members and weren’t afraid to call others on the carpet when they failed to produce. These teams were self-policing.

Self-policing teams are an effective way to both strengthen relationships and ensure that everyone is treated fairly and with the same standards—thereby flattening this damaging Speed Bump.

Some leaders see self-policing as a challenge to their authority, or a situation just begging for team members to tear each other down; here’s where the potential for this Speed Bump rises from the asphalt. When a team uses self-policing properly, however, it supports high performance and efficiency. Everyone saves time, since everyone is authorized to speak up.

For the team to be able to police itself and strengthen its relationships, the leader should step aside to some extent. This comes from a position of both strength and trust, based on knowledge of the abilities, strengths, and weaknesses of the team members. The goal is to strengthen the team from within without the leader interfering (unless something gets out of hand) and letting the team sort out what needs fixing as they, too, have learned to trust each other based on knowledge of their coworkers and their track records. If the leader truly wants balanced fairness, he or she should not be immune to this process. A leader may act as “first among equals,” but in the best workplace teams, the team leader is still accountable to the team for not following through.

This does raise some interesting new issues, however. Things can become difficult when the leader of the group is treated as a team member. How do members confront their manager or supervisor when that person has a conflict with another member? This is especially hard if the team members report to the manager and it’s not a project team. Many work cultures or companies don’t practice this or even support the concept. One that does is the online shoe retailer Zappos, which is often cited for the unusual but effective work processes of the CEO, Tony Hsieh.

But Hsieh’s ideas may not resonate with your leadership. If that’s the case, then when you implement this process, either set some specific ground rules for such situations (I’ll talk about ground rules in more detail in Speed Bump #7), or simply realize there will be some situations where this egalitarian setup can’t work. Another instance where self-policing might not work well is with a virtual team, where everyone works at a distance from the central hub and can’t necessarily get to know each other or use peer pressure to force change. You can still get the process rolling, but realize it will have to be looser than in a team that works together in one location.

One positive aspect of self-policing is that when the team controls itself, the leader doesn’t have to oversee his or her people as tightly. The leader’s time is freed up to handle other crucial matters—like finding more and better work for the team, coaching team members, liaising with senior leadership, and completing high-value tasks only the leader can perform.

As a result, team members ask each other about deliverables, rather than depending on the manager to do so. They establish in-team standards for high performance, refusing to let others shirk their duties or be lazy. This sort of team also tends to guard against complacency. Through meetings, they regularly check up on each other to ensure everyone meets the standards. Team standards must be consistent with organizational guidelines and HR procedures, naturally.

If one of your team members isn’t pulling his weight, that’s not fair to the others, and a strong self-policing relationship will allow you to feel like you can say something. If you’re seeing performance issues, talk with that person, communicate your expectations, and wait to receive the results without constant reminders. That said, performance requires good communication, so that everyone knows what good performance looks like and how it’s measured.

Remember that performance breeds autonomy, though this may vary according to leadership, the company, and other factors. If you do a good job, people are less likely to nag you. The better you work and meet your deadlines, the less people must bug you, freeing up everyone’s time to focus on high-value tasks. Everyone is producing fairly and treated fairly.

In most cases, a person who isn’t doing their job properly will attempt to improve when you approach them in a respectful and positive manner, rather than growling at and intimidating him or her. But still—when multiple people grumble at you because you’ve failed to do your job properly, aren’t you more likely to improve immediately, as opposed to when only one person comes down on you—even if they hold the purse strings or could fire you? Those who don’t care what others think tend to get weeded out early on in this process. A bit of peer pressure can go a long way, because you don’t want to let others down.

One way to encourage this self-policing is for the leader to hold the whole team accountable to its collective responsibilities. An outside observer often can’t tell who did what or who’s responsible for a specific task or result. The team, however, has a better idea of both. When they apply focus, influence, and consequences appropriately, people don’t have to “pick up the slack” for those not pulling their weight, and work tends to get divided more fairly.

Sometimes the embarrassment of others holding them accountable causes people to improve their performance, if they care at all about how others perceive them. Peer pressure can achieve what no company policy, leader, or initiative ever could—it may inspire members to do their best for the benefit of their team, because they don’t want to let others down. When unproductive team members become invested in the team’s success, rather than just their own, they become more fully engaged, and more willing to invest discretionary time in ways that help everyone.

This results in a kind of behavioral contract—whether openly acknowledged or not—where team members willingly and fairly support each other. This powerful performance driver can spark a synergy that pushes team performance ever higher. It doesn’t always work, but it’s always worth trying—because when it does work, it produces quality performance like an artesian spring produces water: steadily, consistently, and cleanly.

NEGATIVE PEOPLE

Do you have a team member who says “no” to your ideas before he or she has given them a decent listen? For whatever reason, some individuals always say “no” before they can see clear to even considering something new. These “no people” are more annoying and useless, at least in the short term, than “yes people”—and that’s really saying something. I call them “autonegatives.” These people love to criticize and tear down ideas before they’ve given them any real thought.

Autonegatives are everywhere in life. Some may be masquerading as your friends or family. Sometimes you run into them in stores, as clerks (though a smart manager doesn’t leave them in place for long). At work, information hoarders tend to be autonegatives, some because they like the tiny thrill of power it gives them. Others misinterpret their directives or job descriptions. Some are simply lazy and have taken the “just say no” approach a little too far.

Sometimes, the only way to distinguish an autonegative from someone genuinely trying to help is to work with them over time. Helpful people won’t always say “no” first. Autonegatives usually will. Another way of identifying an autonegative is that they’re simply negative or unpleasant about everything. They do themselves no favors by acting this way, especially if their team members and leader fall into the can-do type. Eventually, their behavior may lead to their dismissal, a relatively painless process in the current “at-will” workplace—at least for the organization.

Yes, it’s important to bring up an idea’s problems or shortcomings; perhaps you tried something before and found it didn’t work. Then again, something that didn’t work a few years ago might today, if technology has caught up with it or the environment has changed.

How can you tell if your team members perceive you as an autonegative? One way is to ask. Otherwise, see how they respond to you. Do they bother to ask your permission on anything? Do they tell you flat out that you’re too negative? Do you repeatedly come into unconstructive conflict with others?

Let me give you an illustration. I live in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, about thirty minutes south of Denver. Ten minutes further south is an open space area called Daniels Park. A dirt road, which was a stagecoach line in 1865, winds along there. You can walk along the ruts, visit the two log cabins that are still there, and envision the stagecoach passing by. A set of placards along the line give you a mini history lesson. I was surprised to discover how stagecoach fares were charged. There were actually three classes of service: first class, second class, and third class. It seems strange that there could be different classes of service, since a stagecoach was basically a big box, with no shocks and no separate compartments. But frequently on a journey, the road would get rough, rocky, or muddy. The horses would have a difficult time going uphill in some conditions. When the road was rough, the distinctions between classes of service became crystal clear. The first-class passengers got to stay inside the stagecoach. The second-class passengers had to get out and walk to alleviate the strain on the horses. But the third-class passengers had to get out and push.

In a productive team, the first-class team members have a third-class attitude. They’re the ones who get out and push when the going gets tough. They don’t sit back, say negative things, watch everyone else struggle, laugh at them, and tell them exactly why it can’t be done. They personally take action and jump in to help.

The business road can be rocky, and you can encounter obstacles on your journey, but when the going gets tough, the tough get going. So how can you help your team go faster? Get out of the stagecoach and push. Don’t be the autonegative who always moans and groans about how terrible everything is, while everyone else is straining to get to the top of the hill.

Stop and think before you say “no” next time. If the word “no” seems to pop out automatically, listen carefully. If a team member’s request or idea deserves criticism or refusal, wait until they’re done. Then explain why—and offer a solution. But if you know no reason why something won’t work, hold your tongue. Otherwise, you’ll just damage the relationships you’re trying to build with your team.

POOR TEAM MORALE

Wouldn’t it be nice if someone on the team held the title of Morale Leader? Few things are more depressing than working in an environment where the pessimism just grinds you down. I suspect most of us have experienced this, and many still do; otherwise, the percentage of engaged workers² would be higher. But does unhappiness arise from the job itself, or do the workers bring it with them? If you see work as a penance you must perform to pay the bills, it might be the latter.

Even if you aren’t in your dream job, remember: with few exceptions, you choose where you work. You can also choose to be happy or not. If you can’t find any other reason to be positive, then decide to rise above it anyway and thrive rather than wither on the vine. How? Appoint yourself the Team Morale Leader (TML). A great way to make life happier for yourself is to make life happier for others. Happiness is infectious! Happiness improves team relationships! If that’s not a good reason to take on the TML badge, nothing is.

Happy Happy, Joy Joy

A great way to boost your own attitude is to decide to love your work. This may not be easy, so make a deliberate effort to find things you can get enthusiastic about. Focus on the things that profit you and your team the most: smooth workflow, hitting deadlines, and your critical day-to-day operational activities. Learn to love the ordinary, and be grateful every day for this job you’re privileged to have.

You know where you see a great example of this? Disney. Our family loves Disney. I think we’ve been to Disneyworld and Disneyland around fifteen times. It’s not inexpensive, but we keep going back (the last time our kids were twenty, seventeen, and fifteen) because we have so much fun and create happy memories. All the “cast members” there have one goal: make customers happy. It’s magic, but it’s not rocket science. For example, if we’re on board one of the trains, and we pass some employees mowing the lawn, they wave. And we wave back. This is not an accident. They know p...