The 80/20 of Building Better Teams

You know about the 80/20 principle, right?

It's one of the most popular mental models we have.

It's a mental model about the asymmetry of life.

It says that 20% of your input will deliver 80% of your outputs. In other words, there are a critical few activities that you engage in that are so effective that they are mostly responsible for delivering the results you desire.

It's the holy grail of productivity and focus.

As someone working with teams to improve teamwork, I became interested in the question, "What would the 80/20 of team development be?"

This is an important question to answer for three reasons:

1. Companies waste millions on team development every year without much success.
2. Teams often lack the time to engage in team development and so the more we can narrow the focus of what must be worked on the higher the likelihood of teams actually engaging with the work.
3. The complexity of getting a team on the same page can be quite overwhelming.

What you want is for your team to have a sharp focus around what must be improved and to spend most of the time practicing and rehearsing new behaviors rather than trying to remember team theories and models.

For the sake of brevity, let's move straight to the end.

In my experience the 80/20 of teams can be distilled down to one thing: trust.

And trust is broken down into two areas of focus:

1. Communication
2. Accountability

I believe that if you can improve communication and accountability in a team then you will see a disproportionate return on your money, time, and effort invested.

When you communicate well, you build relationships based on respect, transparency, and care.

When you do what you say you will do, the team knows that they can rely on your skill, competence, and commitment.

To get moving on the 80/20 of teams I suggest that you:

• Make it clear how every action/inaction/conversation either builds or destroys trust in the team.
• Create an environment in which people are comfortable giving feedback, engaging in conflict, and are willing to be called out for not living up to the standards of the team.
• Create clear models and frameworks for how to give feedback and meaningfully disagree.

Now, go build a better team.

Erik//

Ps - I get called in to help teams fix what is breaking or broken. If you want help with your team either check out Modern Breed or email me at [email protected]