If you’ve read my first book, Smart Work, I hope you are better for it, working in a way that is personally productive. But even in teams where everyone has had personal productivity training and has committed to working as productively as possible, there can still be a productivity drain. This is because personal productivity is not the same as team productivity.
Personal productivity focuses on the individual, and in terms of the Smart Work system, looks at how you organise your Actions, manage your Inputs and connect to your Outcomes. This is what gets both YOU and ME working individually productively. Team productivity is about the gap between two workers. It focuses on what happens when we come together with other people to cooperate, whether that be in a meeting, on a project or through a communication channel like email.
Whenever we interact with others there is a chance that we will drag their productivity down or they will drag our productivity down, or both. This productivity drain is what I call ‘friction’. It slows us down, gets in the way and causes us frustration.
How much more productive could you and your team be if we minimised the friction, and instead created ‘flow’ when we worked together? Over the next few newsletters I will be sharing some concepts from my upcoming book, Smart Teams. I reckon this is an exciting follow-on to Smart Work, and can take your team to the next level of productivity – Superproductive.
In the meantime, observe what is happening in your team. How are you creating friction for each other? What are the everyday frustrations that impact on your ability to get stuff done? What poor behaviours have become so prevalent that you just accept them as ‘this is just the way it is’? These are all solvable issues for a committed and focused ‘Smart’ team.