The man who revolutionized our thinking on individual productivity has now turned his attention to teams. David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system underlies most of the approaches these days to be more effective at work, urging us to capture ideas on lists, calculate our next actions on tasks and projects and hold weekly reviews to plan more deliberately. But most people don’t work alone; they collaborate on teams. And that’s where things can come undone.
To prevent that from happening, he suggests your teams need to commit to five principles:
- Clarity: A healthy and effective team agrees on its purpose, direction, standards, processes, the context and roles – who does what and what success looks like. Team members know – and accept – how much the team is already trying to do and understand there are limits to what an individual or team can take on without drowning in a sea of overwhelm. “Clarity can only be achieved if the team doesn’t hide things from one another,” Mr. Allen warns in Team: Getting Things Done with Others, co-written with Edward Lamont, who founded two of the biggest franchises distributing the GTD system.
- Sufficient trust: This is not the all-encompassing trust we might expect in families, but a more practical willingness to commit to common goals and to trust there is enough mutual interest in achieving those goals together. We should be able to rely on one another to make best efforts to do what we have committed to doing in the voyage together. The foundation of this trust is making and keeping promises. They note that trust is both an input and an output: You need to invest some trust in the team and its members, and that might lead others to trust you.
- Open communication: In too many teams, information is withheld – or shared in gossip and other forums that have no power to address the issues. The team doesn’t need to communicate openly about everything, but there must be clear support and positive feedback for disclosures of any sort, from any source, that might affect team productivity. “Though it’s great to like people you work with, you don’t have to like them to work well together – you just need clear agreements,” Messrs. Allen and Lamont stress.
- Learning: Teams must be willing to review, reflect and learn from what they are doing; otherwise, they are condemned to repeat their mistakes. Learning obviously is also critical to innovation and responding to evolving demands of customers. “Trace any of the major industrial or corporate disasters back to the source, and usually you’ll find a team that had stopped being open to the potential of learning,” they observe.
- Diversity: Even when teams were composed heavily of people from the same schools and socio-economic background, Messrs. Allen and Lamont argue there was diversity of thought, approach, skills and other factors. We now understand how diversity can be further expanded and teams can benefit greatly. Space must be allowed for this diversity to be nurtured and become robust, which won’t happen if everyone is always fighting fires.
They also see as helpful: Fluid leadership, which doesn’t always have to come from the hierarchical head of the group; rigorous prioritization (notably the ability to say no); an ownership culture, so everyone feels responsible for what the team must accomplish as well as their own goals; and the ability to have fun performing together.
They highlight what individuals must bring to teams. This includes a degree of self-mastery and an ability to make, track and deliver on agreements the individual commits to, renegotiating those agreements with a minimum of disruption to the team when problems arise. Team members should show up when they agree to, occasionally generate ideas and have some minimal ability to add energy and motivate themselves through difficult patches. “Ideally, they bring enough courage to be honest but civil in tough conversations, and willingness to keep their ego in check in service of the team purpose,” the duo write.
Sounds obvious. But the writers suggest a problem is we take these attributes for granted, not listing them in job descriptions, when “the carnival of non-fulfillment on most teams demonstrates that is an unwise contribution.”
Team members also need to be truly present in conversations and listen without interrupting to the ideas of others. They can navigate the line between appreciating what is useful in the ideas they are hearing and giving constructive feedback in order to build on them.
In turn, the team owes something to those who join it (or are named to it, perhaps against their will by bosses). It must develop clear roles, structures, standards and processes that help individuals know what is expected from them, how they are doing in delivering on team goals and how to collaborate effectively with others on the team. In essence, this is about the team clarifying how it wants the individuals to work together.
None of this is startling. But there is little in Mr. Allen’s Getting Things Done program that is earth-shattering either. It’s the nitty-gritty: Practical, common-sense practices that requires discipline and dedication to make a reality. It’s the same with this prescription for teams.
Cannonballs
- Message for the federal government and other organizations: New research shows that return-to-office mandates at several leading tech companies resulted in the disproportionate departure of senior employees. The belief is more-senior workers had a greater preference for remote working and attractive job options at rival organizations with less strict in-office working policies.
- Consultant David Burkus says when interpreting employee engagement data, the tendency is to look at the lowest scores to the various survey questions and work at improving on those aspects of work. But it would be smarter to focus on various teams and how they are faring – it’s unlikely to be equal – and deal with those most significantly underperforming.
- Recruiting specialist John Sullivan says you can stop painful new-hire turnover by identifying types of candidates most likely to stay and most likely to leave. Being referred by a top employee is the best predictor of staying. Being a boomerang rehire – somebody who left the organization and now wants to come back – is also a powerful stay factor, contrary to what you might expect. It’s also a major stay factor where a candidate attempts to follow a recent colleague into your organization and you can assume a candidate with a history of long tenure jobs won’t be an early quitter. If the person has an easy commute that is also a major stay factor.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.