Leading a team? Stack the deck in your favor to optimize collaboration and results!
I needed advice, and I knew just where to get it - the strongest project manager (PM) I had ever worked with.
We first met when he inherited responsibility for a troubled team (of which I was a member). Within days he had everyone focused on the big-picture objective and “pulling in the same direction”. It soon gelled into one of the highest performing teams I’ve ever had the privilege to be part of – his influence seemed almost magical.
A few years later, both of us were on different projects, and I was leading the resolution of a particularly tricky technical issue for a key customer. My team was chock-full of high performing individual contributors, but it was like herding cats! Everyone had their own idea of what was most important and what to do next. So, I stopped by the PM’s office; I was ready to receive the wisdom. How had he gotten all those people to collaborate so effectively, so quickly, all those years ago?
He said, “Y’know, I’ve been doing this for over 30 years, and that’s the only time that ever happened. Normally you just have to slog through it.” I was CRUSHED!
While there are a lot of great leadership techniques and tips out there, it turns out there is no magic bullet that works every time for every situation. You have to apply the best practices with consistency and integrity. You have to build environments of trust and common purpose. You have to measure and check. Doing so will not guarantee success, but it will stack the deck in your favor, maximizing your chances of succeeding.
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Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In
Your team is marching through the tools of your company's chosen problem-solving approach. This is time not spent on growing your business or delivering cost reductions. Yet your customers are suffering, and they're not shy about letting you know it! Why isn't it working?
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Your primary role as a manager is to ensure your team’s success. Internalize this. Make sure your team members know this. Build an environment of trust and collaboration. A direct report of mine would frequently leave me out of the loop as problems escalated, preferring instead to “work harder”. It was clear that he felt uncomfortable delivering bad news to me (his boss) when things were not going according to plan. Let me tell you the rest of the story.
