For High Performing Teams, Stop Assigning People to Multiple Teams

Trying to do more with less, organizations take their best people and assign them to multiple teams. This backfires and undermines high performing teams.

In an effort to do more with less, most organizations take their best people and assign them to multiple projects. This approach rarely leads to high performing teams and actually results in less work getting done.

And it isn’t just their best people, everyone seems to be assigned to multiple teams at the same time. They do this with everybody. All the initiatives are high-priority so everyone has two or more high priorities at the same time. Some people even have as many as 5 projects.

With this approach, each person has multiple teams they are working on and multiple “number one priorities”. This practice results in organizations getting less done, it reduces organizational agility and it undermines high performing teams. Let’s dig into each of these claims to see why they are true.

Assigning People to Multiple Projects is Counter-Productive

Ironically, the main reason that managers assign people to multiple teams and projects is to get…