Watching the Olympics is a lovely distraction at the moment, and as always, I am amazed about how passionate I become about sports that I have never even watched before. As long as there is an Aussie competing, I am all in!
It is amazing to watch some of the team events, and to see extremely talented individuals compete. Of course, the teams that tend to win gold are not just a bunch of talented individuals. They also work together as a highly effective group. That leads me to believe that effectiveness in the team sporting context is individual performance and group performance combined.
The same is true when it comes to productivity in your workplace. It is not enough to have individuals that are personally productive. You also need them to be group productive.
If one person in a team attends our Smart Work personal productivity training, that makes that individual more productive. If the whole team attends Smart Work, then the whole team works more productively at the personal level.
This is a great start, but the challenge can be that even though they are managing their own work effectively, they can be causing productivity friction for each other whenever they send emails, have meetings, collaborate or make urgent requests. For a team to reach high levels of sustained productivity, they also need to become group productive. They need to ensure that they work in a way that does not compromise the productivity of others.
This is what we focus on when we run our Smart Teams programs. We help teams to work together in a way that supports productivity, and ideally, creates a more productive culture within the team. When you have every team member working more productively at the personal and the group level, you create massive productivity gains that can be sustained over time.
Is your team both personally and group productive?