Chapter 3
Changing team behaviours
So, what would be the benefit for our team if we operated according to this set of qualities at work? We all know we should do the right thing, but when we are busy and under pressure it can be difficult. Your team will need to understand a clear benefit before they put the effort into adopting these qualities. But once they are on board, how will they change behaviours in a consistent way?
Figure 3.1 (overleaf ) shows how the four qualities of a smart team combine to deliver powerfully productive outcomes.
Figure 3.1: smart team outcomes
When we are purposeful and mindful, we create incredible focus, as we work on high-impact activities, and manage both our internal attention and the external awareness of those around us. This is of great benefit in a modern workplace that is so often driven by distraction and interruption.
When we are mindful and punctual we ensure that we treat our colleagues with respect. We are aware of how our behaviours affect their productivity, and we do them the courtesy of turning up and delivering on time. This in turn builds respect with our colleagues.
Punctuality and reliability ensure we build trust with our co-workers and clients. They know they can depend on us. They don't have to spend additional time or energy chasing us or stressing that we won't deliver what they need in a timely way.
Finally, when we are reliable and purposeful, we create impact. We go beyond day-to-day busyness to deliver work that makes a difference. This not only motivates us, but also makes our team look and feel good. When we work with these qualities front and centre in our mind, we create the outcomes of focus, respect, trust and impact.
This is a simple but powerful combination and, once embedded in your team, will remove a lot of the friction that can drain your productivity when you work together. These will help you to do the right thing, whatever the situation, as Ben Roberts-Smith and his team demonstrated.
The four smart team qualities provide a broad framework for the team to think about how they should behave. But we need to get more specific if we really want to create a lasting change to the culture of our team. Keeping these four qualities in mind, we need to combat the productivity issues we see in our workplace every day by agreeing how we will work together and interact to maximise productivity.
We need to bring these qualities and outcomes to life so they become a part of the DNA of our whole team.
Get specific to change behaviours
Agreeing to embrace a set of qualities that will drive productivity is a great starting point for your team. But stopping here creates two problems.
Firstly, these qualities provide guidance, but they do not necessarily change behaviours in a busy workplace. Secondly, the general nature of these qualities makes accountability problematic. It is hard to tell if Kathy is more or less purposeful this month compared to last month.
Trying to create a cultural change in your team simply by sharing a set of qualities is unlikely to lead to success. How do you imagine your team would respond in this situation? They might nod along in agreement, saying what a good idea that was … and then what? Telling your team how they should work is not enough.
To create real change, we need to go from the general to the specific. We need to develop a set of specific productivity principles that will provide clear guidance on how we work together in real situations, such as in meetings and on projects.
And we need to do this with our team, not to our team.
These productivity principles, if championed by leadership and embraced by the team, shape the culture of the team. They are not meant to be the ten commandments, and they should not be just another poster on the wall. They should live and breathe in every meeting, every interaction, every delegation, every project and every email.
We will also need to hold each other to account. These behaviours are unlikely to remain in place for any length of time if management and leadership have to ‘police' the productivity principles. They don't have time for that, and frankly it should not be necessary.
In a high-performing team, we hold ourselves as much as each other to account.
Over the past 16 years I have had the pleasure of raising a fine young son. Like any teenager, Finn creates challenges for me from time to time, but for the most part he has been a joy to parent. One of the realisations his mum and I had early on was that we could not control what he did or how he acted all the time.
As he got older he went from being with us most of the time in very controlled and supervised situations, to going out with his mates at the weekend, unsupervised and in situations we had no control over.
As hard as this transition was for us, we knew we could not keep him wrapped in cotton wool. We let him go, but we trusted that we had raised him well and he would for the most part make good decisions in every situation. We had instilled in him a strong set of values and qualities, and we trusted that these would guide his decision making and actions. Fingers crossed!
In a work context, we also cannot micromanage how our team work every moment of the day. We can set expectations, but then we should leave people to get on with the job and trust that they will make good decisions, and behave in an appropriate and productive way.
In his book The Amazon Way, John Rossman outlines 14 principles that Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, and his leadership team bring to life every day in the running of the company. Rossman suggests that the leadership team's unwavering championing of these principles is one of the reasons that Amazon is such a raging success.
With a bit of work, your team will hold each other to account, and will raise one another's expectations. If practised consistently, they will form ‘the way we work around here'. New starters will notice a different way of operating when they join the team. Other teams will notice and may begin to copy and mirror your behaviours.
What is a productivity principle?
Each of the four productivity qualities defines an aspect of your approach to work. In combination, they guide how you organise yourself, how you collaborate with others and what you expect from others. But they are general in nature. They don't specify what you should do in tomorrow's meeting to ensure you and the team are maximising productivity.
Productivity principles are tangible examples of a quality in action. They are clearly defined and specific to a situation. It is generally easy to tell whether or not the principle has been followed.
Taking punctuality as an example, there are lots of principles that could hang off this quality. Thinking about punctuality in relation to meetings, we could agree to work in the following way:
- Turn up on time.
- Finish meetings on time.
- Deliver on meeting actions in a timely way.
- Use an agenda to manage time in a meeting.
If we were communicating a lot by email, and wanted to ensure we were working in a mindful way, we might apply the following concepts:
- Reduce email noise for the team.
- Copy or CC with purpose.
- Switch to a direct conversation if necessary.
- Make it easy for the reader.
The key to a useful productivity principle is that it is related to both a quality and a situation. The four qualities model provides a framework to ensure we are smart team players and is a useful structure to help us generate a set of behaviours to guide our work.
Generating principles for your team
Here I could simply list a set of principles to share with your team, but I won't — for two reasons. Every workplace is different, and every team is different. The productivity challenges that I face in my business are different from the ones your team faces each day.
There is no one-size-fits-all list of productivity principles.
While the productivity principles I could offer would all make sense to you, some would be more relevant to your team and the issues you face daily. You will not implement them if they are not that relevant.
You also need to consider ownership. If you just take on my list of behaviours, you and your team will not own them — you will be borrowing them from me. And in my experience we tend to look after things we own better than we do things we have borrowed.
If we create principles in consultation with our team, and set the expectation that they are encouraged by all of us rather than enforced by the boss, we build greater ownership and buy-in.
Principles in action
Qualities: Purposeful, Mindful, Punctual, Reliable
You will find this ‘Principles in action' feature distributed at relevant points throughout the book. This feature is designed to illustrate how the principles show up in real life. It can be used by you and your team as a thought starter when generating your own set of productivity principles.
So I believe you will be better served by defining a list of agreements that address the specific productivity issues that show up regularly in your work environment.
Less is more in this situation. Too many principles will confuse everyone and be hard to implement. A few principles well executed are better than many barely executed at all.
I suggest brainstorming a list of eight to twelve productive behaviours that are most relevant for your team, then put a plan in place to bring them to life in all your interactions over the coming months. Further on, I will outline a process to facilitate the generation of your smart team's principles list.
These principles need to be discussed, demonstrated, managed, monitored and lived by everyone in the team for months before they will create the cultural change the team needs.
Flipping problems into principles
So how do we develop a set of agreements that are relevant to our environment, our work and our team? A good starting point is to identify the poor productivity behaviours currently causing friction in your team, and to flip them into productivity principles.
Imagine we are being copied in on too many emails, and this problem is causing a high level of email noise in our inboxes. We ‘flip' the problem into a principle by asking, ‘What team behaviour would reduce this or stop it from happening?'
The result could be the principle ‘CC with purpose'. This means that when sending an email we think hard about who really needs to know. We also think about our reasons for copying someone into the email. Does it serve them or us, or neither?
This principle draws on two of the productivity qualities. We are communicating with purpose, and we are being mindful of our colleagues' productivity.
Table 3.1 (overleaf ) offers some more examples of problems we might flip into principles.
Table 3.1: examples of flipped problems in meetings
Productivity problem |
Productivity principle |
Participants arrive late to meetings. |
Arrive five minutes before meetings. |
Meetings have fuzzy outcomes. |
Communicate the meeting purpose. |
Meetings always finish late. |
Start wrap-up process with ten minutes to go. |
Too many participants are involved. |
List participants and reason for attendance. |
People don't follow through on actions. |
Clarify all actions and dates before wrapping up. |
When creating productivity principles, get as specific as you can. Just flipping ‘Meetings finish late' into ‘Finish meetings on time' may have limited success. But agreeing to start the meeting wrap-up with ten minutes to go ensures meetings finish on time, with all the end-of-meeting housekeeping done before you leave.
Being specific makes the principle very easy to execute, and makes it easy to see when it has not been followed.
Facilitating team agreements
I have found the following process helps teams to generate a set of productivity principles that they all agree to work by. It is a great exercise for your annual or half-yearly team offsite, but it can also be completed in a couple of hours in a dedicated onsite meeting.
Step 1: Choose the right group.
You first need to bring together the right people to develop the team principles for the wider group. If you have a small team, you may choose to bring everyone together to give them all an opportunity to contribute and take ownership. In a larger team or organisation, you may need to make the process more efficient by choosing a smaller group that represents a reasonable cross-section of the overall team.
Ideally each sub-team and each type of role should be represented. Including senior management as well as support staff, workers as well as team leaders, will help to provide a real picture of what is happening from a productivity perspective in all teams at all levels.
Finally, someone needs to put their hand up to facilitate the process. This probably should not be the boss, but it should be someone who has some facilitation experience. Maybe someone from HR can jump in and help.
Step 2: Set the context.
On flip charts or whiteboards make two lists. One should list the four qualities:
- purposeful
- mindful
- punctual
- reliable.
On the other, list the different ways your team tends to work together regularly. This could include physical meetings, virtual meetings, delegations, projects, emails, instant messaging (IM), phone calls or using collaboration tools, or simply through interrupting each other.
These lists will help to identify the productivity problems because they provide different perspectives. Listing the quality you want to act on and the situation in which the quality might be applied will help you to generate more ideas than if you brainstorm without these contexts.
Step 3: Brainstorm the productivity problems.
Next, brainstorm a complete list of productivity problems that you experience in your workplace regularly. This could be done as a large group, with someone listing the ideas on a flip chart, or in smaller groups that come together once the brainstorming has been done.
I am personally a fan of what is called ‘silent brainstorming'. Here, everyone takes a pad of sticky notes and jots down their ideas, one per note. After ten minutes, everyone places their sticky notes on a whiteboard. If you see that someone has already covered an idea, you put your note on top of theirs.
The value of this type of brainstorming is that it reduces the role of debate in the initial idea generation stage. Quieter people feel less intimidated and are less likely to have their ideas shot down, as so often happens in traditional brainstorming sessions.
The second benefit is that a stack of several notes will suggest a shared idea that is probably worth keeping. But don't discount the outliers with only one sticky note, which could include brilliant ideas that no one else has thought of.
Step 4: Narrow the problem list.
At this stage, you may have identified a lot of problems, although some will have only limited impact on your team. If you create too many principles to operate by, people won't make the necessary changes. A list of eight to twelve is probably enough to guide any team, so you may need to narrow the list down.
A good exercise here is to use what is called the MoSCoW method, developed by Dai Clegg. MoSCoW is an acronym for four prioritisation categories:
-
Must have. These are crucial and must be included.
Should have. These are ‘nice to have' and should be included if possible.
Could have. These too are nice to have, but could be left out without any major difficulties. If you have room you might include a couple.
Would have. These are the least critical, and will probably not make the cut.
If using sticky notes, set up four flip charts to correspond to these four groups, and move the notes onto the appropriate chart. Depending on the volume, the ‘Must haves' and the ‘Should haves' should make the final list. You may need to discuss as a group any others that deserve to make the cut.
You should now have a focused, relevant list of productivity problems to be solved for your team!
Step 5: Flip problems to principles.
Using a whiteboard or flip chart, you can now begin the ‘flipping' process. Draw a vertical line down the centre of the page, and add the column heads ‘Problem' on the left and ‘Principle' on the right.
Now take each problem and flip it into a tight, memorable productivity principle. Think about taking on a marketing mindset when trying to change a culture. ‘CC with purpose' is so much more engaging and memorable than ‘We will always think carefully about who needs to be copied in on emails', don't you think?
Step 6: Document and communicate.
Once you have flipped all of the problems, and you have compiled a list of agreements you are happy with, you now need to bring them together in a document ready for distribution. Make it look good, perhaps as a wall poster for meeting rooms, personal workstations or the canteen.
Share it with other teams. This is one way you can begin to influence the teams around you so you can work more productively with them. The more people use this, the more productive you will all be. A rising tide lifts all boats.
Make this a priority for your team
If you do nothing else after reading this book, I urge you to prioritise and invest the time in creating a list of relevant, impactful productivity principles for your team.
And this should not be a one-off exercise. Other productivity issues will crop up from time to time, so you should review this list every six to 12 months, checking that you are still following all the behaviours and whether others may need to be added.
Adopting this list will begin to change behaviours and shape the culture. But it is the exercise of coming together as a group and discussing, debating and agreeing on solutions that ensures a positive shift.
I reckon I am clear about what I know, and about what I don't. I am an expert in many aspects of productivity in the workplace, but I would never claim expertise in cultural change. Yet in this book I argue that to improve productivity you must change the culture of your team! Recognising this deficit, I decided to interview culture expert Stephen Scott Johnson, the author of Emergent, to talk about cultures, movements and the challenges that most organisations face when trying to implement any sort of cultural change. I first asked Stephen why most organisations struggle to create meaningful cultural change. You might be keen to create a change to your team's productivity culture, but find that after much time and effort nothing has really changed. Stephen believes the problem is organisations don't involve their people enough in the change process. ‘They try to do change to people rather than involving people in the change. So change is something that happens from the top down.' This is why I believe it is critical to generate your own set of productivity principles as a team. If you just distribute a list of productivity principles and dictate that this is how the team is going to work from this point forward, nothing will change. You need to involve the team and forge agreements, rather than just mandate rules or protocols. I believe that every leadership team should aim to change the productivity culture of the entire organisation, whatever its size. The cost of poor productivity is too great not to do this. But I am also a realist and suspect that in most cases this cultural shift will need to happen at the team level. Team managers and leaders will need to create a more productive micro-culture within their team. Stephen agrees with this, and indeed is convinced that this is the future of work cultures. But for it to be successful, he suggests, teams need to have a ‘nested purpose'. Organisations, particularly large organisations, are often made up of different business units or different teams, and they all have a different focus and responsibility, yet they're all part of a bigger culture. In organisations you get teams of people that work together but at the same time work alone. So, from a productivity point of view, the sense of purpose needs to be around reducing friction and enabling everyone in the team to work as productively as possible. If you are leading a team that aspires to be superproductive, but your team functions in an environment that is likely to be disruptive or passive, you need to lead the way and shine a light for others. The change in your team culture will inspire other teams that you work with, hopefully prompting a change in their team culture. Stephen refers to this ‘ripple effect' in Emergent. We need to create powerful ripples. Leadership is critical in any culture change initiative. I asked Stephen about the part played by leadership in this. The role of leadership is to enable, and this is what leaders really struggle with. They don't know how to lead these new imperatives. It is really about empathy, and about reflection, and about these soft skills that they're not really trained in. Leaders need to be custodians of the higher purpose of their organisation and to enable their people to actualise this purpose. To contribute, to create deeper meaning with that higher purpose. That doesn't come about by telling people how to live the purpose. To wind up, I asked Stephen for his top three tips on creating a cultural change in a team. The first is to identify the higher purpose — from a smart teams perspective, this could be around creating flow rather than friction. Secondly, he advocates engaging everyone in the change process. To allow them to contribute in a meaningful way to the project, and to create the space to talk about their fears and challenges as well as the positives. This is what he calls the ‘shadow and light'. Finally, he warns against ‘doing' change to people. It is not a one-off thing that happens;rather, it is a series of ongoing projects that are tried and tested, and sometimes fail, but over time they lead towards a new way of working.EXPERT INTERVIEW
Stephen Scott Johnson — on cultural change