Working as a team

This is part 4 of the leadership series focussing on how to setup your team and create a culture of working together as one team. You can find part 3 on Coaching here.

To get meaningful and impactful work done over a period of time, you're going to need a team that works efficiently and well with each other. You need to set the right culture and processes, build trust within teammates, foster accountability, and celebrate success among other things. In this article I want to cover the chapter on teamwork from The Manager's handbook, and share my takeaways and some add-ons.

Trust and Agreements ??

Trust is the basis of human relationship and it is of utmost importance for the team to invest in building and maintaining it. Otherwise, the work is very transactional and we grow out of the excitement and fulfillment pretty quick. At work, we all make agreements to get X done by Y time. And it's very important to keep our agreements to maintain trust, otherwise it erodes away, and does pretty quickly! In addition to trust, breaking agreements also cause a lot of inefficiency making others follow up, adjust plans, and it gets costlier the farther we are in our projects.

Enter Impeccable Agreements ??

• Record the agreement (Google docs, Asana, notion, anything!).
• Precisely define the outcome
• Add a due date
• It has a specific owner or DRI. Tasks owned by multiple people are owned by nobody.

More thoughts -

• We should strive to keep our agreements, and if we can't renegotiate as soon as you know you cannot keep it. Don't wait till the due date to renegotiate.
• Be careful to how many things you say "Yes" too. No one likes to many broken agreements or incessant renegotiations.
• The manager/leader should create a culture of respecting agreements and also making sure there is accountability and consequences of breaking agreements.

Running meetings

Managing time is at least as important as managing teams if not more! It's a zero sum game. And boy, do meetings take time! I encourage you to do an audit for you and your org on what is the time split between meetings and focus work time. Meetings are essential for the team to connect, collaborate, brainstorm, get creative, get energized by each other, but at the same time if the meetings and time aren't managed well, they can become the biggest causes of burnout.

Meeting effectiveness and playbook ??

• Meetings should have a clear owner, clear agenda ("Meeting will be successful if -"), assigned note taker (I encourage rotating responsibility), only invite precisely needed people. The owner must put their foot down and make sure meetings don't derail.
• Leave the meeting if you are not adding or receiving value. Meetings are expensive. Assign a dollar value to every 15 mins per person, say $500 (add an unusually high number, and have the unit be 15 min so we don't fall in the trap that every meeting should be 30 mins at least). So a 5 person meeting for 30 mins = mind whopping $5000! I bet you'd wanna spend that wisely.
• Before creating a meeting, ask if a slack thread, Google doc or something to that effect would suffice. Don't be afraid to decline a meeting if it does not add value or request shortening the time.
• Arrive on time! Don't tax the punctual people.

But then why should I have meetings? ??

• We can't read everything. If we tried to, we can't get work done. Meetings are a great way to broadcast important information.
• While async decision making sounds great, some decisions need to be taken quickly and meetings are a genuinely effective way to do that, given meetings are well structured and run.
• Meetings can transfer energy throughout the team (watch out for the negative energy too!).
• Lastly, meetings can force action and being face to face adds more accountability.

Making decisions ??

Building upon the importance of time in meetings, it also follows along in making decisions. When multiple people are involved in making decisions, it gets costly pretty quickly if the home-work to allow effective decision making is not ahead of time.

Write-ups - Whoever wants to discuss an issue and drive decisions must ensure that the issue and has proposed solutions are documented ahead of time.

1. You can do a thorough write up with detailed analysis (Don't forget to build alignment in parallel. You do not want to find that you were way off course after putting all the work)
2. Draft an iteration, share with stakeholders and request for comments. Try to answer those comments ahead of meetings.

While this sounds a little heavy, this will help you save a ton of energy towards the end. This also serves as a great way to document the decision and creating an agreement. Obviously, use your discretion on how complex the issue is.

Type 1 vs Type 2 decisions

Some decisions are irreversible (Type 1). Make them slow and methodically, with great deliberation and consultation. Other decisions are rather reversible/changeable, and should be made quickly by teammates with good background in that area and judgement.

Getting Buy-in

If decisions are harder, getting buy-in with the whole team is even harder! As a leader, you want to make sure the team is aligned with the story, is bought in, is part of the decision making process and their input is being considered. This act will yield amazing collaboration and ownership.

• Depending on the complexity or impact of decision, consider either making the decision and sharing with your team, create a rough draft and ask team for input, or hold brainstorming meetings with the team from scratch.
• No one likes surprises and decisions being made for them. Build early alignment through one-on-ones, staff meetings, standups etc.
• Ask for input, and make sure to provide context if their input does not make it into the final decision. Otherwise you are at risk of receiving authentic input again.
• Again depending on the complexity, ensure to get diverse perspectives on the issue at hand and proposed solutions. It's easy to get consumed by your own view of the issue.

Disagree and commit/Bias towards action

We can never agree on all the things all the time. If we are, either we are working alone or we are just trying to please everyone.

• It's okay to disagree. But it's important to create a culture where disagreements do not lead inaction. Disagreements just mean that I have a different opinion or perspective than yours.
• Disagreements should lead to healthy input gathering, information sharing, context setting and having bias towards action.
• As a leader you want to set the culture and celebrate having disagreements, rather than avoiding them. Disagreements make you think deep, and great things come out of thinking deeply.
• Once a decision is made and the team is aligned, then we should commit on doing it and do it with full passion.