If you are looking to grow productivity within your team, these ideas can help.
Choose one or more ideas that you can add to your present efforts:
- Frequently communicate the purpose of the team and how it contributes to the success of the whole organization and other teams.
- Communicate the role of each person you lead; the results they are required to create.
- Bring people together to discuss and understand the overall role of the team and the roles of each member on it.
- Quickly review and realign roles when people and conditions change; when people leave, new people are added, or your goals/OKRs/KPIs change. Do not delay.
- Lead a mindset of continuous mutual support to improve overall team performance.
- Ask for what you want at the appropriate level of detail.
- Add milestones to your plans to drive incremental reporting of progress in more complex assignments.
- Assign Accountability: (Apple uses a concept called “directly responsible individual” (DRI) to describe the lead person in any project or area of accountability. Every deliverable at Apple, large or small, is assigned to someone who is directly accountable for it.)
- Ask for confirmation of agreements in the other person’s words, written or verbal, when you are dealing with complex, new, or critical situations or with people who have failed to deliver what they agreed to in the past.
- Set clear realistic expectations: know the real capacity of each team member and your whole team.
- Base your expectations on the historical performance of each person you assign work to.
- Record and track the commitments people make to you and check those commitments daily.
- Know the strengths and limitations of each person you lead. Don’t expect every person to be the same.
- Support consistent and steady improvements that people can make as a result of new experiences, their own learning, or improved processes and resources.
- Periodically, ask each person how they can expand their individual capacity through specific learning, new experiences, and additional tools or systems of support.
- Ask what people need from you to achieve increased productivity.
- Ask each team member to put a plan in place for their own development.
- Regularly meet with each person to specifically discuss their progress and challenges.
- When onboarding new team members encourage them to track the time and effort it requires for them to complete their assignments.
- Teach new team members to gauge their capacity while you do the same. Don’t assume they know how to do this.
- Help new people put a learning plan in place similar to those of your other team members.
- Identify, with your team, the biggest constraint to high performance at the present time and collaborate to remove it. Then repeat the process over again and again.
- Do the same with each individual.
- Provide ongoing real-time feedback so that team members can learn and accelerate quickly.
- Lead people to lead themselves. As much as possible, in your interactions with team members, stop telling and ask open-ended questions, building on people’s answers to tap into their thinking.
- Lead by example. If you cannot deliver support or what you promised, renegotiate in advance.
- As often as possible, lead people, to review their successes as well as their failures in a timely way. After-action reviews are a critical tool for increasing productivity and learning.
- Hold people accountable in a timely way by leading them to self-evaluate.
- When people create problems due to a failure to perform as agreed, hold them accountable first before you try to solve the problem. Otherwise, you may never hold them accountable.
- Be willing to sacrifice some short-term performance by investing in some of these ideas for longer-term gains.
This was shared with permission from ChoiceWorks, Inc.
Photo by cottonbro studio via Pexels.
Competency