Chapter 7 – Doing Less Isn’t More

Most of the time, clichés are just that – clichés. But sometimes they speak volumes. Take “There is no I in Team,” for example – how true! The corollary of this in our world is that there’s a vast ocean of difference between individual productivity and team productivity.

Unfortunately, this distinction has been blurred and missed by the so-called Productivity Industry, that mass of writers, gurus and consultants who are overly focused on personal – rather than company – performance. In fact, many of these so-called experts are espousing strategies that actually get in the way of team productivity. And since teams are complicated group organisms, this is quite understandable.

The bottom-line from our perspective is that executives and entrepreneurs who read personal productivity books and newsletters, or attend these self-help conferences, need to know that this kind of educational tool probably won’t enhance constructive and efficient collaboration in the office.

We can see this if we examine David Allen's Get Things Done book. Get Things Done was written with the individual in mind. It wasn’t developed for teams seeking to be more productive. And it certainly wasn’t devised for managers striving to achieve top- and bottom-line business results.

Allen’s “defer and delegate” technique offers a striking case in point. If we, as individuals, are able to defer and delegate everything on our plates, we might go home at night feeling caught up and great. But what have we really accomplished or done for our teams?

For example, we may delegate or defer to our head of marketing on something of key importance. But if we, as executives, have no visibility into what our marketing chief is already working on, we could really clog up his productivity for the week. He might, for instance, put important items on hold – items for which he may have already lined resources up – in order to provide “all hands on deck” for our request. And if our request isn't balanced against his current set of priorities, there’s no way that’s going to create a more productive environment.

The personal productivity movement is also rallying around an extreme concept – “The Four-Hour Workweek.” Now, we're not saying that the workweek can’t be reduced from 20 hours, or 40 hours, or even 60 hours, down to a blink-of-an-eye; but to get even close to this, you would have to attain such an impeccable level of operational excellence and information / knowledge transparency. And we’re defining knowledge as awareness of what has happened as well as what needs to happen – and why.

In the current era of technology and business process, this should be possible. We should be able to automate to this level. But let's be honest. We haven't.

Outsourcing and delegation, for example, serve their purpose for executing discrete tasks. And the “fire and forget” model works well for basic requests like asking someone to copy and bind 10 copies of a proposal, but with most work it isn’t a productive approach.

Why?

Because most work is dynamic. It has dependencies, multiple people involved, and can span days if not weeks. New information is learned, analyzed and incorporated into the execution process. Context and knowledge are required to correctly react to change. What chance does outsourcing have in these situations? In the absence of required knowledge, the do-er becomes quickly blocked and is forced to interrupt the owner at every turn. That’s a real productivity drain. So, it’s not labor cost or supply that serves as the natural gate to achieving productivity perfection – it’s the lack of information to make the right call. And the right technology that makes the right information available in real-time can help here – whether we’re talking about outsourced offshore consultants or virtual assistant companies.

We have strong opinions, but we’re not in competition with the personal productivity movement. Reduced to basics, our view is that team productivity is a huge driver of private-sector success. And, to that end, we’d like to propose a new concept – the “Anti Four-Hour Workweek,” if you will.

The new concept is really a new metric – NTP, or Net Team Productivity. Rather than gauging an individual's ability to process and make progress, NTP is a measure that reflects the collective effectiveness of multiple people. This, not personal productivity, should be the ultimate measure of teams.

Personal productivity and effectiveness should still play a role in performance reviews and assessing job performance, however; but to solely manage in this way may cause a team leader to miss the team's objective. Individuals should think about productivity by asking themselves two essential questions that really provide the necessary overall framework here: What is the net productivity of the overall team? And what is my personal gross productivity?

Another new concept we’d like to introduce is the IPT, or Individual Productivity Tax. Nobody likes taxes, and it follows that nobody likes working with people who generate productivity taxes in the office. So let’s zero in on Jane, for example, to show how the IPT would work. Jane loves calling meetings; sometimes her team is actually dragged into check point meetings three times a week. This robs us of 6 percent of our effective time for the week. Add another 3 percent for the miscellaneous non-core items Jane asks us to do in those meetings and – there it is – she’s levied a whopping 9 percent productivity tax on us. That hurts! But it helps show how team productivity can be damaged by certain individuals. The ultimate end goal should be to help people become productivity-tax efficient.

Obviously, technology can play a role in this process by enabling people on teams to be more independent – and, thus, more productive. If a company invests in digital tools that let team members see objectives, tactics and supporting documents in real-time for work in progress, the individuals don’t have to constantly meet or check in with their manager for guidance or approval. This is much more efficient and keeps the focus where it belongs – on the work and on meeting business objectives. It also could result in an Individual Productivity Tax refund!

The uneasy relationship between individual and team productivity is certainly complicated. And anyone who has ever worked in an office or an organization knows that. Despite this complexity, however, most of today’s productivity experts focus on the individual’s performance and assume that if you can make each person more productive, the group as a whole will somehow follow.

We think that’s way wrong and, to be honest, a flawed and unproductive approach. Our take is 180 degrees different; we believe that team productivity, which drives top- and bottom-line growth, must be the starting point because the dynamics between individuals who are working together are so intricate. If we can get people in a company to bond collaboratively, constructively and productively, there’s a far greater chance that the business will succeed internally as a harmonious culture and externally as a value creator.

To close this out, let’s return to the dreaded cliché and turn it upside down. What do we see? It’s obvious. “There is no Team in I.”