Chapter 6 – Why Getting on the Same Page Breeds a False Sense of Productivity

We’ve made some mistakes in business – who hasn’t? – but we really learned a lot from this one.

So it’s worth sharing.

Toward the end of a meeting at Onyx Software several years ago, we got our team of senior executives to commit to certain far-reaching goals. We also agreed that our targets for the next 12 months had to be measurable and clear to everyone. One of the key benchmarks we discussed was new users. And when we talked about this metric, there was consensus around the table that we could – and should – get 10,000 new users on the Onyx system over the course of the following four quarters.

We left the conference room feeling pumped up. Everyone on the team was on the same page; everyone had a shared vision and similar expectations. It seemed like the meeting was productive.

But it wasn’t as productive as we thought.

Why?

Some fundamental details, many of which we assumed were known by all, were not. We didn’t walk people in the meeting down a clear enough path to success.

The error of our ways soon became obvious. And over the next few weeks we realized that everyone had heard something different in the conference room.

When we spoke to a key marketing executive, for example, she was full of energetic ideas about how we could "launch innovative grassroots campaigns to quickly develop relationships at thousands of companies for lead flow." In her mind, the goal was to get 10 new users spread throughout 1,000 new customer companies.

And when we bumped into a sales executive, he told us that his team was “well on its way to identifying the top 10 accounts that would produce the 1,000 users each to reach the goal of 10,000 new users."

The marketing and sales executives were absolutely shooting for the same goal. But how can a company be productive when one key team member is thinking grassroots – thousands of companies with a handful of users at each – and another leader is thinking 10 accounts with 1,000 users a pop? That just doesn’t compute. And, besides, our articulated and agreed upon vision was somewhere in between and called for focusing on the mid-market.

One of the key take-away lessons here – and it’s a lesson we’ve learned in the wake of this episode – is that even if you agree on the right business objectives in a meeting, the participants who leave the room or the call won’t necessarily come to the same decision or conclusion on the tactics or milestones needed to achieve these goals. To use that old cliché, “the devil is in the details.”

To guard against this post-meeting unraveling, we’ve become huge advocates of checking in and making sure everybody is tracking and mapping forward to goals and objectives.

It’s really interesting, because we’ve found that people actually like to check in on where things stand; maybe it’s because they feel more productive that way; maybe it’s because they feel reassured. Regardless, the best way to make progress, from our perspective at least, is to make constantly available to each other the information on where things stand – and then spend time looking ahead – always pointing to goals and objectives and how to reach them effectively. On its own, just reciting and rehashing past accomplishments and milestones isn’t very productive – even if it is comforting to some people.

Let’s see how this plays out.

In a classic sales call, for example, you hear reps telling their managers things like: "I got blocked by the CIO, but I’m being sponsored into a meeting by the Director of IT. I’m hoping that will happen next week. In another deal, I’ve got something set up with the CIO for the week after next."

Okay, great. Thanks for the update. But how are you going to make sure that upcoming meeting is successful? What are you doing to prepare? Are you being productive in that preparation? What have you accomplished to date and what’s your plan to attack the remainder of your objectives? In other words, are you looking forward – or are you looking back?

Our bottom line is that these kinds of calls are mostly for the managers’ benefit, so they have peace of mind, feel like they’re in control, and can let others know they have their fingers on the pulse.

But isn’t that managerial self-indulgence rather than team productivity?

Here’s another example of self-absorbed leadership to consider: A development team sits around discussing where each member is in the various stages of product creation. The team leader spends too little time, if any at all, asking how the developers could be getting things done more quickly or more productively. And yet the leader comes away from the meeting feeling good because he knows where everyone on his team is.

Is this really productive, and do the team members feel the deep sense of accomplishment that comes from achieving things that move them toward stated and agreed-upon objectives?

We think the answer is no.

Technology could definitely help here. We believe teams should always know where things stand and be able to update this information in real-time; armed with this data, participants can then transform their status meetings and make sure they focus on next steps and how to productively attack issues, rather than playing to a manager’s command-and-control anxiety.

If we turn our attention to reporting now, you’ll see that we’re dealing with the same negative and unproductive dynamic: companies are using Business Intelligence software, which is much less expensive than it used to be, but in the process they’re spending lots of time engrossed in data and only get halfway to their objectives and goals. In a nutshell, they’re amassing metrics and information about where the business stands and then running slews of reports. Just having all the numbers and information makes them feel more in touch, more on top of things – and, yes, more productive.

But it’s the same productivity delusion we encountered above. The data are not helping teams make forward-moving business decisions. People send these reports out and use them as the basis for status update meetings, which focus on what happened – not what needs to be done. It’s even more difficult to draw conclusions about how to proceed to the next level because the tactics and milestones are usually unavailable during these reporting meetings.

We think this is wasteful.

You can see what we mean in this hypothetical example. Let’s say we’re in a quarterly sales reporting meeting and tactics and milestones have already been set. The magic number for this quarter is $1.4 million in recognized revenue. Someone comes to the table and says, "My report shows we only have $1 million in revenue booked so far this quarter and there are just eight selling days left before we close.” Well, why did that happen? Which tactics were missed? Which worked and, of those that worked, how can we accelerate them and try to double down over the next eight days? Since there typically isn't visibility into those specifics, time is wasted going over why there is only $1 million in revenue booked. So, what you’re seeing in the end is essentially just a more sophisticated – but equally empty – update.

Unfortunately, this trend shows no sign of abating. Companies now have access to reporting across even larger sets of data, but they haven't hired people who are skilled in analyzing the data. So the value becomes the report – not what they do with the information in the report. The sad truth, as we’ve seen above, is that people are counting on data analysis for answers as opposed to asking the right questions prior to looking for the data in the first place. Once again, this holds teams back – rather than propelling them forward toward goals and objectives.

It would be an interesting exercise to crunch the numbers and calculate how much companies actually lose in hard dollars and opportunities each year because their teams simply can’t move ahead in an effective or productive manner together.

After a team gets on the same page, it then becomes each individual’s responsibility to prioritize his or her workload. As we learned earlier, people tend to travel down their own road after leaving a meeting, so it’s important that they somehow head for the same destination on the same information highway.

This situation often leads us into a conversation about the waterfall and the gun. When you have a waterfall, everyone agrees at the top level and the assumption is that everything will cascade down from there. The reality is like a gun. If your aim is a tiny bit off, you’ll miss the target by a significant margin.

In the opening anecdote, we saw how far off the mark the sales and marketing executives were after dispersing from the conference room. We assumed that everyone was thinking the way we were – focusing on the mid-market. But we were wrong . And if these kinds of misfires are left unchecked over time they can have a mighty expensive impact on a company. The moral of the story is that it’s as much about the path as it is about the objective.

Technology can help keep teams on the right path as they work to achieve their objectives. The key for these collaborative solutions is that they must focus on step-by-step execution, enabling individuals to easily see all the tasks, activities, assignments, milestones and deadlines and where they stand in real-time. If this tracked information – owner, status and next steps – is linked to forward-leaning business goals, productivity will almost certainly be enhanced and companies will start to gain altitude in a hurry.

And speaking of flying, it’s really interesting because most airplanes navigate from beacon to beacon while they’re up in the air. The pilot checks in with one beacon, then the next, then the next – and so on, until the landing strip is in view. As a passenger, you feel great because you ultimately arrive at your destination. But what if you could fly more efficiently? What if you could have gotten down on the ground safely and much faster because there was airborne technology in the cockpit that gave the pilots more real-time status information and allowed them to focus on the optimal flight pattern as much as the end point of the trip?

We think you’d take that flight. We know we would, too. And that’s the kind of technology-enabled productivity we believe companies around the world are looking for as they try to soar in the ultra-competitive global economy today.