Use These Three Questions To Improve Any Team

It’s a challenging life being a consultant, solve big problems but not so big that it annoys the hierarchy, get to know the front line teams but don’t go native, have two calendars, two sets of e-mail, fight daily to get onto the client wifi, and workout how to update your lunch card so that you can get fed.

To deal with these, first world problems, I’ve collected a team of advisers.?

If your first assumption was that we all go Gleneagles on a Tuesday morning for a weekly strategy session, then I like your thinking.?Whilst these people do exist, they’re all friends except (for Eli Goldratt, who I only met once), they live in my head. I ask them difficult questions to which they always have the answers, for example Arnold Schwarzenegger (met him once, we’re pals) and I regularly discuss why after only 10g of Carbs I seem to gain a kilo, he just laughs.?

The team consists of...

Ed Lamont (Author of Getting Things Done for Teams), speciality - personal productivity.

Jim Mather (former government minister), speciality - ethics, famously quoted as saying, ‘don’t ever do anything you don’t want to see on the front page of the Glasgow Herald Stuart.’?As a Scotsman reader I felt this gave me little wiggle room, Jim said it didn’t.

Professor Nick Rich (Phd), Speciality - the Toyota Production System and work design.

Nigel Waring ex Toyota Consultant - specialty, ‘what would a Toyota consultant do in this situation’ (and also motorbikes and cars).

Eli Goldratt, now sadly passed away, speciality projects.

Over the years we’ve consulted lots in my head, think zoom meeting where you can join easily, on subjects like:

• Why is it that only a few leaders see project delivery as a strategic advantage?
• There are four pillars of strategic advantage, speed, reliability, a clear offer, and low effort, why are there often so many organisational initiatives, rather than focus on those four?
• Why are leaders so far removed from the work?
• Why do leaders still see productivity as an input rather than an output, and as such create dysfunctional teams focused on activity not results?
• Why don’t people focus on being kinder?
• Why did I get rid of my Smart car, I loved that car?

But of all the questions that I’ve asked with them, there are three they asked me, that stopped me in my tracks - hopefully they’re also helpful for you too.

A few years ago I was ‘trying to help’ deliver a large project.?The scope was clear but try as we might we couldn’t get a plan to which everyone would agree.?Every time we revisited the plan there would be new ideas on the order of the work, or who should do the work, or even if it was the right work, and if it should be done at all.?

I called a few of the team (it needed an actual call).?

First killer question:

Where you and the team clear on the rules you said you’d use for planning (replace planning with working, operations, strategy etc), rules below:

1. Leader starts the session by laying out the scope.
2. Everyone uses language that describes what outcomes (as artefacts) will be produced.? For example “we’ll see a web page with three radio buttons that allows the customer to navigate to the next part of their journey.’
3. There are reps in the room from the teams that will do the work.
4. Once we have the big outcomes we sequence them, looking for hard dependencies and parallel activities.
5. Each chunk of work is its own release of value, 15-30 days roughly.
6. We accept that the further out we go the worse the estimates get.
7. We roughly estimate each chunk in time.

Both Nick and Nigel would regularly share how Toyota teams will obsess over clarity of work methods, so that when failure occurs, as they know it will, they can try a different iteration.?

Nick once told me a story where he was studying a problem with a Toyota team in Japan, he asked how long they’d been working on the issue. Thirty years was the reply.

My answer was 'yes, I was clear on the rules of planning, but the team weren’t.' There was such a necessity to get going that we didn’t agree on the problem we were trying to solve, nor did the team even understand the failure in their old ways of working.

Learning point, before you start to execute any work with any team, write out, discuss and agree how you'll work. Then, if you do have to make changes to ways of working, at least you'll have a basis for what to change.

Killer Question 2:

Did you and the team follow the rules?

You know that emoji with the scrunched-up face, yes that one - ?? – that was my reply. ‘No of-course we didn’t follow the rules’ I replied, we were busy, the leaders needed a plan, I couldn’t get everyone in the room. We were tight for time.?I just assumed we’d be ok.?

As I said, It’s difficult at times this consulting thing, ‘don’t rock the boat’, ‘get a result’.? Like most of us, I’ve had jobs where the result was not as I planned. Always, always always, It’s down to this; you spend weeks of analysis understanding what to change, you have a solid case for ‘what to change to’ and then the new rules aren’t followed.

Ed, tell’s me with regularity the most difficult part of the incredible ‘Getting Things Done’ system is just getting people to follow it.

Sometimes the consequences of not following the new rules can be heart breaking. Years ago, I was working to help a big blue chip reduce the time to pay their health claims.?A lady called in to the team, in tears she said, ‘I have two months to live, I want to take my grandchildren on holiday before I die, can you please pay my claim fast.’?

Calmly the adviser replied ‘I’m sorry madam but we’ve just received your claim and there’s a five day service level agreement before we’re obliged to look at it'.?

‘Five days is a long time when the length of your life is being measured in weeks’ she replied.

Following the SLA was the old rule, now the NEW one. Clearly I failed to communicate or upskill the adviser or whatever I should have done to help him get it right.

Implementing new ways of working requires:

1. Time in the work, studying the work from a different perspective. This helps people understand what work design they’re moving from and to, i.e. looking at the old way to understand why it doesn’t work.
2. It requires leaders to deeply understand the same, they must know the principles of good and bad work design.
3. It requires endless sessions to build skills, templates, checklists and they must be iterated over and over again.?

Learning point - If we don’t know the rules for how to work and they’re not followed how can we possibly hope for a different result?

Note: The lady’s claim was paid quickly, thanks to great leadership in this case, and, for me, it changed my whole approach to implementing new ways of working.?

And the final question... it's not just the most difficult not just to answer, but to even hear.?

Killer Question 3:

Why did you allow the team to NOT follow the rules?

Nigel will regularly share stories of leaders having problems with their people at Toyota.

The team leader and the team member will troop up to HR to discuss their gripe, the first question to the team member is always ‘are you adhering to the ways of working in the team?’ And the next one to the leader is always ‘why are you allowing your team member to not follow the rules'.? Note this means doing everything in your power, helping, coaching and providing the right skills your team member to get it right.

And let me also be clear, again, on what this doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean micro managing or the team losing autonomy. It means invoving the team in designing their work, giving them good work to do (related to purpose), measures which show them how the whole process is performing. And them being challenged to their maximum.

But it also shouldn’t mean doing what we fancy, how we fancy doing it, when we fancy doing it. Should it? Because if teams are doing that then either they’re not clear on the rules or the rules are wrong, which means that they need to be changed.? So change them.

So, leaders should turn up regularly in the work / projects to ask:

• What are you working on?
• Tell me how you planned that?
• What rules do you use for executing work?
• What are you measured on?
• Why are those good measures??

And if the team member doesn’t know the answers, then what’s the job of the leader? Help them get it right.?You want better culture? Get your work design right, and help people to follow the rules you’ve co-created with them.

Being a leader is also difficult, but if you co-create the ways of working with the team, help them to follow them, and then help them get it right then your life will get easier.?

And if you don’t have a team of advisers and you want help to implement new ways of working to deliver your next project then you can get me at...

My email: [email protected]

..or get access to my calendar to book a chat here: https://calendly.com/stuart-corrigan/consult

..or simply drop me a dm or a comment on this post and we can chat!

#projectmanagement #consultants #transformations #projects #teams #projectdelivery ?