How Constraints & Coffee Filters Make the Best Teams

I couldn't look my boss in the eye. I hung my head, at a loss for words.

"I just ... I don't get why this is so hard."

Well, at least I could admit that much.

I was a second-year teacher with a classroom of eager students. But my lessons were flopping and I could see that my class and I were falling behind where we should have been in our curriculum.

I had no idea how to get us back on track.

My boss was the Special Education Director for our school and I was lucky to have her as a mentor. She was extremely kind but, thankfully, she also never sugarcoated good medicine.

"Look, the most important rule I know of when it comes to good teaching is to make your implicit expectations explicit. Each time we assume what a student should already know, we provide them with a little less education than they deserve. Can you see how all those little assumptions add up and cause you to have to stop and start all over again?"

"Look, the most important rule I know of when it comes to good teaching is to make your implicit expectations explicit."

Ouch. Talk about a wake-up call.

Make the implicit explicit.

That day I learned the most valuable rule of my career. It would also turn out to be the hardest for me to follow.

As a first and second-year teacher, I constantly struggled to provide the clarity and structure my students needed.

Students often had more questions about my instructions than the assignment itself. (Yikes!)

But, over time, and with the mentorship of many more skillful colleagues, I began to develop a practice of planning lessons with clear expectations built into every step of the lesson into every aspect of my classroom operations.

By springtime of my third year, my classroom was humming thanks to the advice of my teaching mentors.

I barely had to provide any explicit instructions at all because as soon as my students entered our classroom they knew what was expected of them that day and how they could make progress toward their big goals.

Students knew how I would greet them. They knew where to sit, how to ask questions, how to earn rewards and recognition, how to close out assignments, and how to start new ones.

They knew the standards for working on group assignments, where to get information, which technology to use, and how to troubleshoot it.

Most importantly, they knew what success looked like.

Clarity: The Ultimate Transferable Skill

What I learned over the course of that third year as a classroom teacher has helped me manage million-dollar teams and projects ever since.

What is the best way to make the implicit explicit?

I learned that my classroom and my project teams needed to be clear on our constraints (what we would not be able to do) as we were about our goals.

In the last decade that I've spent managing teams, I have found that when teams are clear on their constraints they are far more likely to achieve their goals.

Here's why.

Think of a coffee pot.

Yes, I want you to think of the work of managing a team as if you were brewing a pot of coffee.

The coffee grounds represent the raw resources you will use to produce your product or service: your materials, your equipment, your personnel, and your collective skills.

How tasty your product or service is equivalent to its usefulness or value.

Now, imagine for a moment that the water that passes through the grounds represents your team's efforts, i.e. your workflow.

Any experienced coffee maker knows that it is the purity of the water which determines the flavor of your brew.

The more impurities your water has the less tasty your finished product will be, no matter how fresh or expensive your beans are.

When you place constraints on your team, what you are doing is placing a series of filters in your workflow to remove impurities, like distractions, multitasking, and mixed messages.

These filters, which determine what does not go into your project, determine just how tasty the project will be when it is finished.

These filters not only helped me design a first-of-its-kind special education classroom but they have also helped me design projects worth millions of dollars for nonprofits and social enterprises across the U.S. and Canada.

Why?

Because clear constraints help clear out the junk that typically enters people's heads during the course of a project, which, in turn, clouds their judgment.

My "Go-To" Filters

These are my four go-to filters for setting constraints and clear expectations:

1. Every institution needs a clear mission and every project needs a clear rationale for why the project is valuable and aligned with your institution's mission.

The more detailed you can be in describing your singular reason for being and the more precise you can be on who it is that you serve (and why) the more clear your goals will become.

Keep in mind that while your rationale might include a business case, an effective rationale won't only include a business case.

Sure, you might be offered more grant money by creating a new program, but why is your organization the best team for this job? Is the program related to your mission? Will making this change benefit your existing stakeholders? If not, you might want to skip it.

2. Every project team needs a detailed and crystal clear Definition of Done which also describes the work that will NOT be done.

The more clearly you can define what "done" actually looks like with your team, the more likely you are to be able to:

(a) Produce the outcome that your stakeholders and customers expect from you.

(b) Keep your team's workload sustainable.

Why? Because being clear about what "done" looks like will force you and your team to not only clarify what will be included in the final product but also what will not be included.

You can't uncook a well-done steak. Teams are often damaged by managers who push them to include just one, two, or three more features or ideas. Those features tend to have diminished value compared to all of the features that came before them and sometimes they can be counterproductive, making the overall project less valuable.

The more explicit you can be about the work that will go into producing your outcome and the more agreement you can get with your team on the amount of work you can do, the less likely you will be to overcomplicate your product or service.

3. Identify the bottleneck that needs to be improved. Dedicate your resources there.

Projects and organizations will only grow to the extent of their greatest bottleneck.

Every team has one thing that is most responsible for causing the majority of delays or problems. This is your bottleneck. If you solve this bottleneck, the rest of your work will flow easier.

Oftentimes, solving a bottleneck in one area of the project requires you and your team to do less in other areas of the project until the bottleneck is resolved.

Concentrate on identifying and solving the bottleneck by using visual flow charts of your work, like Kanban boards.

4. Find your next bottleneck.

Once you solve your first bottleneck, feel free to celebrate but don't become complacent. A new bottleneck will emerge from your victory ...

and that's a good thing!

Each bottleneck provides you with another opportunity to clarify what is important to your team and the best methods you can use to produce reliable results in the future.

---

?If you found this article to be helpful, would you please leave a comment, like, or share it with a colleague? I want to be sure the content I share is helpful, so your input means the world to me.?

Want more expectation-setting tips?

You are invited to learn more about how setting clear expectations and using constraints helps you avoid the kiss of death for managers:

?? micromanaging behavior ??

I'll be sending those tips out in my weekly newsletter tomorrow.

Join hundreds of subscribers from around the world who get quick tips every Monday on how to build better workplace cultures.