When Your Team is a Daily Success
In the past 2 years, I’ve learned that accountable teams are more proactive and make better choices when needed. The members of these kinds of teams are quick learners, they are ready for action and they become very flexible when things change all of a sudden.
But… How do you create an accountable team? I say by exposing them.
A friend of mine is having this very issue with his teams (he is currently managing 3 teams with an average of 3 members each). He can’t meet the delivery dates to deliver the requested product to the customer (he works in the software industry) and it seems that they don’t even care. Their estimations differ so much from reality, my friend has to be over their shoulder all the time and in the end no one is happy with their work. And his current solution? Sit down with everyone and decide which tasks each member will do during the next 2 or 3 weeks…
So, I told him my experience. In my company, there is a culture of “Accountable Teams”. Each team is autonomous and responsible for delivering the final product to the customer. And it’s really interesting how we managed to generate these teams, just by exposing them to each other, without forcing them to do anything. Our teams are like communities and no one wants to be known as the lazy guy, especially in such a small community.
The Team Exposure
This is a list of a few things that helped us to create great accountable teams only by exposing them to, well… everyone? (FYI, I also work in the software industry).
- Exposure by email. In my company we use distribution lists for every project. We usually don’t send emails to our boss or to a colleague directly, we have a list where all subscribers receive everyone’s email. So, every team member sends emails to the rest of the team. This greatly helps to improve the team awareness of what is going on about the project. And sometimes, when you ask a question in the list, you receive an answer from the most unexpected member of the team.
- Exposure by daily meetings. Every day, we talk about the previous day’s tasks, if we are blocked or not with something and our plan for the current day. This shouldn’t take longer than 15 minutes. In Agile methods, this is called a Stand-up meeting. In these meetings, each person is responsible for choosing their commitments for the day. No one is forced to choose a task; we first debate and decide.
- Exposure by commitments. After the daily meeting, we send an email with the summary of each team member’s commitments. This should be 3 or 4 items per member. Everyone in the list knows what everyone will be working on during the day.
- Exposure by the progress report. Let’s say Joe completes a task. As we work in software, it’s easy for us to capture a screenshot of our completed work. Joe writes an email explaining how he completed the work and he attaches the screenshot as an evidence of that work. He sends the email to the distribution list and now everyone in the team knows that Joe completed that task and how it looks. Joe completed a commitment… Joe is doing his job… Everyone knows that Joe is completing a small task but he achieved one of his daily commitments. Well… What about me? I didn’t send an email the whole day! I should stop writing this crazy stuff and get back to work! Basically, everything we do must be sent to the list. If there are no emails to the list that means that you didn’t work at all.
- Exposure by end of day. Before going home, with all the progress report emails sent to the list, one designated guy gathers all the emails and writes a big daily recap of all the work done. No names included, a short summary at the beginning, a detailed section with the descriptions and screenshots (as evidence) for all the work done during the day. This is a big email. No one is mentioned in the email (everything is written usingwe) but everyone is exposed. We all contributed to this large email, to the list of commitments the team made at the very beginning of the day. Was I part of the team’s success for this day? Did I miss it? Oh, I forgot to mention that this summary email is sent to the customer so they know what we did during the day (Yes, just a single email every day). We’ll talk about this some other day ☺.
Don’t break the chain! Keep repeating this cycle. Every day, Joe will set his commitments, report his work in progress and be part of the team’s dailysuccess. At the next stand-up meeting, he’ll tell the rest of the team what he did yesterday, if he is blocked and his new commitments for the day. The lazy members of the team will have 2 choices: Start working or quit. We had both types in our company. In the end, our teams are very autonomous because they choose our commitments, and they decide the day’s success. They send emails to the list, we don’t force others to “work on X assignment” nor do we order them to stop reading Facebook. They are grown-ups! Sometimes they’ll just feel guilty and start asking for help in order to get things done in time.
Yes, the cultural barrier is larger than these paragraphs. Our company built these kinds of teams over a number of years. But, when a new employee joins the company he goes through a 3-week training program, where hegrasps the basics of being exposed and how an Accountable team (at the end of the day) is tremendously successful.
I’ll talk more about teams and sustainable rhythm in my next post.
Verlic Redclaw writes about team building and motivation, and he also shares info about design, software, and freelancing. You can follow him on Twitter here.
Verlic Redclaw 