Improving team performance. Team productivity

This article is the result of my experience, my fails, and wins.

When I got the Team Lead position, I started looking for the meaning of success. I decided that my success is the project’s success, and my productivity is my team’s productivity. So I focused on team performance.

If you read my previous article, you know about my work on the productivity of my team members. As a result of my work, their personal productivity improved, but the teamwork result left much to be desired. Lots of delayed issues, long TTM, endless conflicts — those are the downsides of the situation when everyone pursues their own goals. Lucky for me, the search for a solution to this problem led me to some valuable books which I strongly recommend:

• “Organizational Behavior” by S.P. Robbins and T.A. Judge.
• “Culture Map” by E. Meyer.
• “The Goal” by E. M. Goldratt and J. Cox.

Here is what I learned.

Team performance is not the sum of team members’ performance

From time to time we should decrease the performance of some members. It sounds illogical, but it works. Build your scheme for creating value; try not to overload bottlenecks with unimportant tasks. So it means “no bottleneck” parts will not perform at their best, but the whole process will work better.

We should permanently work on improving the quality of interpersonal communication

Miscommunication results not only in time loss. It also leads to demotivation and conflicts. And that ruins all your work on team productivity. To avoid that, you have to assist your team members in negotiations, coach them to understand the meanings and emotions included in the words. It might be harder than you expect, so it’s better not to underestimate that.

Diversity is good

We should find employees not only of different sexes and nationalities but of different backgrounds as well. If you work together long enough, you remain in the same context all that time, and sooner or later you start looking at the problems from the same perspective. I made this mistake several years ago, and now I try to find new blood for the team from time to time. This tip is really helpful, but it’s hard to start working with someone new. At that point, you need to coach yourself because your brain will try to bring you back to the comfort zone.

I hope these tips will help you reconsider your work and your attitude to your team.