We talked a few days ago about a 100 days plan for your new team members. This is the plan to get them hooked into the work, the organization, and to you to create better engagement and added productivity. There is an important assumption in all of this. That assumption is that you know what you want out of any new member of your team–that you know what you want from your team in whole. Friends, this is clear blue sky stuff here. Nobody does this consistently that I have come across. More often, we just find a butt to stuff into a chair and then start plopping work on them. Why? Because it takes everything we got to just keep our team (and ourselves) above water. I get it. What if we did it differently, though? What if we spent the time to ink up what we want from our team, how to compose the team, and what success looks like. What if we created roles for our team members to fulfill? What if we created mission specialists instead of general generalists?
With your teams, don’t get out of the way, do this instead
"Get out of the way!" I often hear some version of this sentiment when talking about building a culture to incentivize high performance teams. "You have to find the right people, equip them, and then get out of the way." People who talk about getting out of the way...