Introducing the TaskBurger: Essential Communication for High-Performance Teams

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I've led a lot of teams over the years and almost all of them have needed a system that I've started to call "The TaskBurger."

When people are starting out in their careers, they tend to think of work in terms of tasks to be done.

Something needs done, you do it and then it's done.

Great, right?

Nope. That's actually terrible. Here's why.

Let's say you work at a marketing agency and your team is finishing up a website project. Someone found a problem with the contact form, so they asked you to fix it.

So, you go in, you troubleshoot it, you find the glitch, you fix it, done.

But you don't tell anyone:

• You don't update the status of the bug report.
• You don't tell the project manager it's been fixed.
• You don't tell the QA team they can retest it now.

You just pat yourself on the back and move on to your next task.

In that scenario, you're actually creating a whole lot more work for your team:

• Bug reports aren't being updated, so nobody can trust the tracking system.
• The project manager doesn't know what's going on, so they have to stop what they're doing and follow up with you.
• The QA team doesn't know they can retest it, so they can't sign off on it, so now the launch is delayed past the deadline.
• And now the account manager has to call the client to apologize and explain why their project is late.

So even though it feels like you got work done, you actually created more problems than you solved.

The task is the meat of the burger. It's the most important part. Even vegans put simulated meat on their burgers because it's just that important. The task itself is the most important thing that has to happen. No argument there.

But I want to be CLEAR about this: If I walk into a burger place and they put a hot burger patty in my hand, they have not done their jobs.

That's the most important part of a burger, but it's not a burger and it's not what I paid for. A burger is a beef patty, but it's also a bun and lettuce and tomato and onions and pickles and ketchup and mustard.

So in a company, the unit of work to be performed isn't the task. It's not just the burger patty. It's the whole task burger.

And here's what goes into a task burger. There are five things:

First, you CAPTURE IT. If something needs to be done, you record that in a centralized tracking system. A co worker comes over and tells you about something that needs to happen, or the CEO mentions something on the Zoom call, or you get an email about a problem from a client. All that stuff can't live in those places. You put it into a centralized tracking system.

Step two, you CALL IT. You assign the task to yourself and you tell the team that you're working on it. This prevents people from tripping over each other when they wind up working on the same task because neither of them knew the other was working on it.

Step three, you actually COMPLETE IT.

Step four, CHECK IT. Double check your own work it was done properly. You probably should have a process where other people also double check your work. But they shouldn't find anything.

And step five, CLOSE IT. Update the centralized tracking system and notify the team that the work has been completed so they can follow up with whatever next steps need to happen.

Five simple steps. Easy to remember, easy to do, makes everything amazing.

It only takes a few moments to do these things, but it saves a colossal amount of work for your team in the long run. THIS is how high functioning teams operate.