The Managers’ Little Red Wagon
I remember when I was a kid, one of my great delights when i was playing with my friends was we would take turns riding in and pulling each other around in our wagons. The ones with the slates on the sides. We would scream and yell. Sometimes we would tip the things over, much to our delight and skinned knees. Our totally focused energy was incredible. I can still feel it when I conjure up those memories.
Imagine if we could get back to that kind of experience in our work life. It might even be called play life. Now that would be a revolution!
A lot of organizations fall into the “daily grind” doing stuff that is not interesting, or of questionable usefulness and mind-numbing, like — meetings, decision delaying, “decidaphobia,” or action-avoiding.
Dynamic measures of team effectiveness are how well can they keep focussed on how much is decided and committed to in a meeting versus how much work actually gets done. Distraction is not an option for high performance teams.
People loose focus on key actions. The not urgent, not important drowns out the urgent and important and the not urgent, important.
People get too results-oriented without diagnosing the issue properly. Then they are off wasting time and money tilting at wind mills.
End every meeting with clear action items, deadlines and responsibilities, with names attached. Ask each person to VERY BRIEFLY summarize those things. When they are speaking look into the whites of the eyes of each person as they speak. This will help get the non-verbal message that you are serious about accountability.
Measure progress — or lack of it. Celebrate “wins” to keep everyone on the vision.
Keep people aligned and engaged so they “get” importance of their actions and how, what they are doing is contributing to the business moving forward.
Every action, every behaviour, every interaction has financial consequences — either positively or negatively.
Persistently, consistently and clearly monitor how much is committed to versus how much gets completed.
Someone once said, “A brilliantly executed, simple idea is better than any idea executed poorly.”
Do you have the mental discipline to create a team that performs at a high level and is so engaged, aligned and competent that they are like we were when we were kids playing with our little red wagons? Now that would be a fun place to play at work.
