So much of the work that we are responsible for involves asking other people to do things, or provide necessary information. And of course, it requires others asking us to do things or provide information as well.

In the past, these requests would have been made verbally, by memo, or in more recent times, via email. I distinctly remember as a kid visiting my dad’s office and playing with his carbon memo pad, where he wrote memos that were distributed to his team.

But over the last couple of years, as new collaboration systems like MS Teams have come online, work can be delegated or requested in so many more ways. Someone might ask us to do something in a meeting, on a phone call, via email, via text, or through a post on a Teams channel.

We need to think carefully about the best way to communicate work requests or delegations. We all have our own preferences, and my preference for receiving actions is an email into my Inbox. And that is because email is a direct communication method. My Inbox is a space that I control well, and I trust that things will not slip through the cracks if they arrive there.

The challenge with requesting actions using tools like MS Teams is that Teams is an indirect communication method. You are posting something in a collaboration space and rely on the right people looking at the post in a timely way and trusting that they will spot the action and take ownership of it. The risk is that we are all busy, and we may not review the post, or spot that there is an action.

At least with an email, it is being sent directly to my Inbox, and so long as I manage my email well, it should not get missed. The email can also be turned into a timed action in my calendar or task list very easily, making sure it does not get forgotten.

So, let us all get on board and use Teams for the things it is good at – the sharing of contextual information related to the projects, processes, and problems we are collaborating on. But let us also discuss how we will delegate work and request information in a way that makes it easy for the recipient to receive and action it.

Here are a few strategies you and your team could adopt to ensure the effective transfer of work and information:

• Agree to always delegate work verbally or via email
• If both parties are using Tasks in Outlook, consider assigning a task to them
• If the work is related to a Teams Channel post, use the Share to Outlook option in each post’s menu (this creates an email with a link to the post)
• @mention the person involved so that the post appears in their chat view in Teams
• Link an MS Planner plan to your Teams channel and assign a task through Planner (this will also generate an email to the recipient)

When you nail how actions are communicated across your team, it is always win/win. The win for them is that it is clear when there is an action that they need to manage. The win for you is that your work is more likely to be actioned in a timely way.

It is definitely worth the effort to get this right.

In a recent online presentation, one participant challenged me on the need to separate their filing system from their Inbox. You see, their preference was to just leave every email they received in their Inbox, and they just worked from that. They felt fine about having many thousands of emails in their Inbox, and strongly believed this strategy was simple, efficient and caused them no problems or stress. When I came along and suggested that the most effective workers try to get their Inbox to zero at least once per week, he just could not see the point.

Faced with this I could have talked about the research that suggests that overfull Inboxes lead to heightened stress levels. Or I could have laid out the reasons why I believe that keeping your Inbox clear gives you more clarity and focus. But I felt that these arguments would have set us up for a battle of opposing philosophies that would not have served him or the group.

So, I asked him a few simple questions. I said ‘I get that your preference is to leave everything in your Inbox, and that suits your workstyle. But does it suit those around you? Do you become the person that regularly has to be chased for responses because the original email got lost in the clutter of your Inbox? Do you let things slip through the cracks because it is hard to see the outstanding actions in the piles of emails in your Inbox?’

I do not know whether these questions changed his mind or his behaviour, but I know that they made him stop and think. I know that they cut through his focus on what was good for him and got him thinking about what was good for the team around him.

You see, we all have preferences for how we work. And we will tell ourselves stories about how these workstyles are good for us. But we don’t always stop to think about the impact of our behaviours on others. How our preferences can become other people’s problems.

When I work with teams on creating more productive cultures, I talk about the mindset that we should adopt to always try to work in a way that is productive for ourselves and the group at the same time. This is what I call Game Theory Productivity (Hat tip to Dr John Nash, made Hollywood famous in A Beautiful Mind with Russell Crowe). It is all about win-win.

So, have a think about your preferences and habits. Do they work for you? Do they work for the people around you? Or do your preferences become problems?

I know you are busy, but I want you to take a moment and do a quick exercise for me.

Have a look at your schedule for the coming week. Then look at your task list for the week.

Which of these planned activities, whether a meeting, task or communication, will have the greatest impact? If you had to cancel everything else, which is the one you would keep because it created the greatest value? Once you get clear about what activity will be most impactful, ask yourself why. What is it about that activity that creates so much value?

Finally, ask yourself what additional activities you could or should schedule for the coming week that would be just as impactful.

I reckon we get caught up with a lot of important and urgent work that is a good use of our time, but we don’t actively drive the work that has the most impact quite as much as we should. By taking a moment each week to do this simple exercise, it could double the impact in your role.

My moment of impact this week is writing this newsletter, and in doing so supporting a really inspiring charity – Hands Across the Water. I caught up with Scott Stein, one of the directors of the Hands Group last week and heard about the amazing work that they do to support orphaned children in Thailand. See the link below to their Future of Leadership events being run around Australia from July to September. I aim to be there. I hope you can be too. I know it will be impactful.

Future of Leadership Conference

With the pandemic challenges over the past 12 months some industries are going really well, whilst others are struggling – including many charities that need our support.

Rather than asking for a hand out, the charity Hands Across the Water takes a different approach. For the past 8 years they have run the 1 Day Future of Leadership Event across Australia and New Zealand. Hands was started after the Boxing Day Tsunami by a friend of mine, Peter Baines, and now supports over 350 Thai children across 7 locations in Thailand. They also operate in a different way to most charities with a separate entity running corporate events that brings in revenue to offset the administration of the charity.

To help raise funds for Hands Across the Water, every speaker donates their time (and their travel costs!) to this incredible charity that works hard to provide for Thai children and their communities. The growing list of Future of Leadership Conference speakers includes Matt Church, Erika Bagshaw, Paul Watkins, Katrina Webb, Justin Jones, Dave Penglase plus a growing list of exciting and informative speakers. The 1 Day Future of Leadership event is being held in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Canberra, Newcastle, Adelaide, Perth, Auckland & Wellington in July & August.

So you can be inspired by some of the top leadership experts in the country – and support a unique charity that needs a bit of help transitioning out of the pandemic.

As a reader of my articles you are able to receive a 15% discount when you book by using the code: SCOTT15. Just head to the website and select your city, put in the promo code and you are in!

If you are a people leader, how do you show up to training with your team?

At Adapt, we only run in-house training – that is, we run the training for groups within your organisation rather than running public workshops that individuals can book into. Some of this in-house training is with individuals from different teams across an organisation, but much of it is with intact teams and their leaders and managers.

I firmly believe that in this scenario, the role the people leader plays in the training is directly related to the success of the training for the team. Over many years I have seen time and time again how the leader can support the success of the training or contribute to its failure to create sustained changes for the team.

Here are some different ways a leader could show up in the training, and the impact that each has on the outcome:

The undermining leader – In this situation the leader attends the training with the team, but for whatever reason, they actively undermine the concepts and strategies that are being explored. They resist changing their existing behaviours, and sometimes cynically criticise the ideas. This can be challenging for any facilitator, but also challenging for the team, who might be keen to learn new things, but are less likely to adopt them in the face of the leader’s beliefs.

The absent leader – In this scenario, the leader approves the training, but is too busy to actually participate themselves. Of course, some training is not aimed at the leader, so there should not be an expectation that they attend every training program with their team. But if the training is relevant to the whole team including the leader, not attending sends a message. It is also a missed opportunity for the leader to stand side by side with their team in creating the change.

The disengaged leader – Here the leader does attend the training but does not fully engage with the learning. They come and go, taking calls and attending other meetings, and when in the session, they may be on their laptop doing emails. This also sends a message to the team that they do not value the training themselves, and unfortunately often people follow a leader’s actions.

The participating leader – A participating leaders attends the training with their team, and actively engages in the learning. They see themselves as one of the team, and show great leadership in their participation, yet still may hold back on leading the training fully. They participate but have not partnered with the trainer to achieve the best outcome from the training.

The partnering leader – in this scenario, the leader not only attends and engages in the training, but they also do certain things before, during and after the training to ensure that the lessons have the best chance to truly change behaviours and even team culture. They partner with the facilitator to deliver a great outcome. Before the training, they might take the time to engage the team by setting the context and discussing with them what they hope the team will achieve by undertaking the training. During the training they introduce the session, again to set the context and direction. They also actively and positivity participate, and they work with the facilitator to ensure the lessons have relevance to the team. They ask useful questions and draw links between the learning and real-life issues being faced by the team. After the training they lead by example, and coach the team through their implementation.

When I reflect on the many times I have run productivity training, the engagements that have been most successful, and most pleasurable to run, are the ones where a leader partnered with me to deliver amazing outcomes for their team.

If you are a people leader, think about what you could do to maximise learning for your team. Simply allocating and approving budget is not enough. Get involved. Be strategic. Lead from the front. Maximise every hour your team spends in the training and make sure they have every chance to successfully implement the desired changes.

I have been running personal and team productivity training for almost twenty years. Recently, a client asked me to run some training for their team, but they asked me not to call it productivity training, and not to use the term ‘improving productivity’. I was initially perplexed, but after a bit of explorative discussion, I began to see their perspective. They did not want their passionate but very busy workers to feel like management wanted more from them. I realised that their definition of improved productivity was to produce more, and I could see how that might be problematic.

But on reflection, I also realised that my definition of productivity was different.

When I am not working on productivity you will find me in the kitchen cooking. That is my relaxation. There are five basic tastes (they have discovered more, but these are the classic five) that make food enjoyable to us. Bitterness, Sourness, Sweetness, Saltiness and Umami. Great cooks get the balance right between these tastes, and magic happens.

When I think of productivity, it is not simply about producing more. That is one of five indicators of productivity. I reckon the five productivity ‘tastes’ would be:

• Efficiency – Getting things done with the least amount of effort or friction
• Effectiveness – Getting the right things done
• Quantity – Getting more done in the time available
• Quality – Getting things done to the appropriate level of quality
• Balance – Doing the work in a balanced way that supports wellbeing

So, when I run a productivity training session, my focus is helping the participants to develop the right skills and systems to do their best work in the best way for them and their organisation. It should always be a win/win outcome. This is a useful reframe that hopefully communicates to participants and leaders alike that training should always serve the participant, their team and the organisation.

Today I wasted 1,000 minutes of other people’s time! That is 16.66 hours of collective time. Two full working days! I feel bad about this, even though it was out of my control.

I was running a training webinar for a large group of 50 people. We were using Zoom, which is a platform that I use regularly. I have an excellent tech set-up for my webinars, and super-fast internet. But something went wrong, and it let me down. And I let them down. After twenty minutes of my Zoom connection freezing and booting me out of the meeting, we decided to cut our losses and reschedule.

Now I believe that this is just one of those occasions where the world conspires against you and upsets your best made plans. It does not happen often. But as I thought about the twenty minutes of time wasted for each of the 50 participants as they watched me start and stop again, I realised that for the company involved, that adds up to a lot of collective time. 1,000 minutes if you recall.

It got me thinking about how we can so easily waste collective time if we do not manage our meetings effectively. It is a good mindset to have, keeping in mind the fact that twenty minutes of wasted time for each participant adds up to many more minutes of wasted time for the team. And wasted opportunity cost. Think of the work that could have been done instead.

So, if you are ten minutes late for a meeting, remember that it might just be ten minutes for you, but potentially it is forty minutes of group time. If you spend five minutes in a meeting looking for a document that you should have had at your fingertips, that could be twenty minutes of group time. And if you run meetings with no clear purpose, with too many unnecessary participants, or no clear and accountable follow-up actions, you could be wasting hours of time.

Today, I do not think I could have done anything more to avoid the wasted time. But maybe you could avoid wasted group time in your meetings with a little bit more planning and focus.

‘And the award for best picture goes to…La La Land’.

Oops! Many of you will remember the terrible gaffe at the 2017 Academy Awards where Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced the wrong winner for the Best Picture award. It should have been Moonlight, and of course, it was Moonlight when the error was corrected.

Many blamed Warren and Faye for the mistake, but a deeper look at the events that led to the mistake proved that they were not to blame, but instead bad system design was*. Various small decisions and mistakes culminated to deliver the final embarrassment, but one stood out to me as something that probably happens in our business lives everyday and could so easily be avoided.

It turned out that Warren Beatty was given the wrong card as he walked onstage – he was given the card from the previous award for Best Actress, who was the star of La La Land. I believe that they sensed something was wrong, but they read out what was in front of them, which was incorrect. Who could blame them when they were in front of millions of viewers, even if they did suspect an error?

One of the big issues was the typesetting on the card. It looked like this:

The first thing you’ll notice is the biggest word on the card is The Oscars, which is very nice from a branding point of view, but did not add any value in this situation. The name of the actress and the movie were in text that was the same size, making it hard to tell which piece of information had priority. Finally, the critical piece of information, the fact that this was the award for Best Actress, was hidden down the bottom of the card in small font. If Warren and Faye had have seen this more clearly, they may have stopped before they announced the wrong winner.

A simple redesign of the card would have made it much easier for someone under pressure to see there was an obvious mistake.

Now, think about how often you receive emails or communications that don’t organise the key information to make it easy for you, the reader. My friend Paul Jones, who specialises in business writing, always says ‘Make it easy for the reader’.

When you send an email, do you take the time to make sure the communication is clear, that the key information has priority, and that critical information is not hidden below the line in small print? It is so worth taking the time to craft good communications, as they save your colleagues time and effort, and in turn this saves you time and effort as you spend less time mopping up mistakes.

OK, I am off to watch La La Land. Or should I watch Moonlight?

* This piece was inspired by a brilliant podcast by Tim Harford called Cautionary Tales. Well worth a listen.

I learned a good lesson this week. Or rather, I relearned a good lesson, because this is stuff that I teach people. Sometimes, I just forget my own strategies.

A client gently reminded me of a piece of work that I had promised him, but I had procrastinated on. Luckily, he had scheduled a “Due from others” task to remind himself that I was due to get back to him (See this video for an explanation of “Due from others”).

I realised that I had procrastinated because I had made the task much more complex in my head than it actually was. When I had looked at the original request, I had not taken the time to roughly scope out how much work was involved. I had just assumed it would be complex and take at least an hour, so I put it off until later… and put it off…and put it off… until he chased me up.

When I finally did roll up my sleeves and got stuck into it, I realised that it was a ten-minute job, not a one-hour job. And yet I had procrastinated about it for several weeks!

So, lesson relearned. When you commit to a piece of work, take a few minutes to roughly sketch what is involved and how long it will take. Then schedule the work in your calendar or in your task list with greater clarity about how much time you will need. Taking the time upfront to plan the task will save time at the execution stage. It will also reduce procrastination and keep your clients and stakeholders happy.

We can all see how the way we work has changed in so many ways over the last year, and I believe we will never go back to the same way of working again. What the future of work looks like is still unclear, but one of the things I envisage being part of our weekly routine are hybrid meetings, where we have some participants together in a meeting room and others dialing in or linking in through video.

Because of COVID-19 we have moved from attending meetings where all the participants are in the same room, to meetings where all the participants are online. Now, we are moving into a future where a hybrid is most likely. From my experience hybrid meetings can be the most challenging to manage and are going to require us to upskill dramatically to ensure these meetings are productive for all.

Whilst there are many things we need to look at to ensure meeting productivity, I reckon one of the keys to effective hybrid meetings is equality. We need to ensure that everyone has a voice, a role and a productive outcome whether they are onsite or online. The challenge is that often it is so much easier to focus on the people physically in front of us. We have the benefit of being able to look at them and read their body language, therefore we can slip into a pattern where we talk more to them than those online, or we give them more airtime in the meeting.

If you are the meeting organiser, chair or facilitator, you may need to heighten your awareness in the meeting and try extra hard to open the space for the online participants. A good strategy could be to start the meeting by introducing everyone and clarifying their role or reason for being in the meeting. Online participants will be more likely to contribute if they are clear about their expected role.

Another strategy that can help is to adjust your mindset about the people dialing in. I ran a short training session for a team before Christmas where most of the team was in the room with me, but two were dialing in. I noticed that the senior manager in the group was excellent at ensuring that the online participants were engaged and involved. I complimented him on this, and he told me that he always imagined that the online participants were the CEO of his organisation. You see, if the big boss was on the line, everyone would ensure that the CEO was fully engaged and involved. I thought that was such a clever mindset to bring to hybrid meetings.

So, if you are attending a hybrid meeting and are in the room, have a think about what you can do to create equality for everyone in the meeting. If you are one of the people dialing or zooming in, think about what you might need to do to remind everyone that you are there, engaged and keen to contribute.

Myself and my partner Vera went to the movies recently, and as always, had a little laugh at the start of the movie. In the local cinema we go to, a big sign comes up on screen just before the movie starts that says:

Please bring your glasses back to the bar

This always makes us laugh as Vera misinterpreted this instruction when she first arrived in Australia. Vera is from Milan in Italy, where they tend to do movies a bit differently. Unlike modern Australian cinemas, the ones in Italy don’t have bars serving wine or food that you can bring into the movie with you. So, when she arrived here ten years ago, this idea was completely new for her.

When she sat down for her first Australian movie experience, glass of wine in hand, and this sign came up, she felt she needed to do exactly what it said, bring her glass back to the bar. And so, she did this immediately, bringing her half-full wine back to the bar, not wanting to get into trouble with these strange Australian cinema staff. A reasonable interpretation, I would think.

Of course, now she understands that they meant her to bring the glass back at the end of the movie, but they did not specify the expected deadline, so assumptions were made.

Do people in your workplace do the same thing when delegating or requesting work?

If we do not consistently and explicitly communicate the expected deadline, we leave this open to interpretation and assumptions. People may assume the task is more urgent than it really is, and end up reacting immediately to the request, or assume that it is not urgent and end up causing unnecessary delays.

Before you press send on an email requesting an action, review it quickly and make sure that any deadlines have been clearly stated.

Now be quiet, I’m watching the movie!