Organizations often ask me to share with them what great teams do to become great. I thought you might like to know this as well. So, I'll be posting one tip each week for the next four weeks. I encourage you to begin practicing the tip right away with your team.
This is tip #1. Great teams take time-outs to assess “how” they are doing "what" they are doing.
With more pressure than ever on teams to continue to improve their performance, there are several key team activities and ways of operating that keep teams on track. Over the next few posts, I will be sharing these processes with you. Let's get started.
It sounds pretty simple but with the speed at which teams must work, and their workloads, it happens rarely. Stopping to assess processes that are being used to accomplish tasks can reveal great gaps in communication, duplication of work and inefficiencies. Great teams schedule check-point meetings every 3 months. During these meetings teams discuss what they are doing well, and what could be improved with how they are working together and how they are doing their work. Teams that engage candidly in this process have never failed to find ways to improve productivity and meet timelines faster while reducing workloads. During one such meeting, one team came up with a process that shaved 3 months off their production schedule.
Stopping momentarily to get a bigger picture of the team’s process allows teams to work smarter and to take the time to improve relationships.