What does a healthy team primed for scaling look like?

Posted on March 05, 2021 by Mitch Schwartz, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.

For a nicely formatted version of this post, check out pragmaflow.com/map-coaching

You’re a passionate leader, you took on the role because you wanted to create something better than where you’ve worked. Better product, better delivery, and a happier work environment.

You’re growing, and so inevitably, the cracks are starting to show.
You’re concerned about:

your lack of visibility into the work happening

the team’s growing victim mentality

negative impacts on your quality of delivery

While you want to grow, the idea of revving the engine faster gives you a pit in your stomach. It’s no longer possible for you to hold everything together.

How can you jump to the next level?

How can you craft a company that can direct itself, so you aren’t trapped at the center of it?

You’re seeing that the skills that brought you to where you are now are not the same skills you will need to keep going.

You’re searching for answers:

How can you fly higher without pieces coming off?

How can you build a great company without burning out your team and yourself?

How can you assure that you are building a truly amazing work environment?

How can you avoid the mistakes your past employers made?

How can you create the freedom you’ve been after without removing one of the foundational pillars?

How can you make sure your team is happy and prosperous, well aligned with the company, and performing?

How can you trust others with the keys when all of the risk is on you?

You know that simplicity is the answer. So how do things keep ending up complicated?
The answer is almost always that you’re doing too many things.

Great news right? All you need to do is less.

The problem is that we find it hard to know which tasks to prune. Even when we do, somehow, they seem to grow back.

Another piece of great news is that even though sometimes things feel like they’re going the 50% the wrong way, we only need a 2% adjustment to put them on track.

That’s why we’ve distilled a simple, 3-part framework to keep you on track:

MAP

Mindset

Alignment

Process

If you nail these 3 areas, everything will take care of itself.

Mindset is king. The success of everything thing you do is a multiple of your mindset: planning, building, communicating, marketing, hiring, so on.

Alignment is a result of the correct mindset, communication approach, and team culture. It is supported by processes and systems.

Process is critical, it’s also an area where leaders make costly mistakes. Coming from the wrong mindset, and without alignment, processes miss the mark and teams end up spinning circles rather than moving forward.

How do these dynamics play out in a real-world company?
Here’s an example I’ve seen and lived far too many times:

A leader or manager coming from the wrong mindset sets out to solve the problem. They create a process that solves their problems and hands it to the team.

Now they have 2 new problems: change management and compliance. Coming from an ineffective mindset, this leader has made a classic error:

Handing down process is painful. It engages resistance and turns the team into rebel/victims. It destroys their mindset and throws everyone out of alignment.

This happens because the act of handing down process is inherently oppressive.

I know, that’s a heavy word; I don’t use it lightly.

How? handing down process says: “I don’t trust you to decide the best way to do your work, I know better than you.” …subtly, of course.

Let’s recap: this leader has handed down a process. Their team has become a group of rebel / victims. The leader now spends their time change managing and compliance tracking (controlling) their team and everyone spends their energy on this silly drama.

However good that process was, it sure isn’t making things better. At the end of the day, neither leader nor employee feels good, it’s a real lose-lose.

Every one of these types of decisions creates a tug of war. Slowly, and unintentionally, the work atmosphere really suffers.

The leader wonders why it’s so hard to find good help.

Let’s switch tracks: What does this look like when approached from an effective mindset?

The effective leader joins his team’s retrospective.

The first question comes up: “What’s going well?”

The team and leader celebrate recent victories, appreciating what has been accomplished.

Next, “What could be going better?”

During their turn, the leader says:

“I’m concerned about our quality of service. Usually, our client reviews average around 8.5/10 but this quarter we are trending closer to 7.5. I’m trying to get a view of what might be affecting things but I find I don’t have great visibility into the work being done.”

The team acknowledges the drop and gives their perspective on what seems to be the cause. The leader asks a few follow up questions.

The next topic is discussed and sometime shortly thereafter the closing retrospective question is asked:

“What will we do differently?”

The team decides to add two items to their next sprint:

create visibility in their client work that will give the leader the ability to support and guide the team more proactively

improve the quality of their service by investigating the root cause deeper, then communicating and addressing the issues that are identified.

A win-win
The leader is:

being heard, and will have their problems fixed.

is doing much less work than if they had taken it upon themselves to diagnose the problem and create a new process.

showing trust and generating goodwill.

The team:

feels trusted. When problems occur, they are treated with trust and respect. The leader does not act above them but treats them all as partners.

gets to dictate their own working process, a key ingredient in autonomy.

Because they feel trusted, respected, and autonomous, this team does not fall into victim / rebel patterns. Because the team is aligned, energy is spent on what is most important: the client, the team, and the mission.

At the end of the day, both the leader and the team feel an energized sense of pride. The new process doesn’t need policing or managing, just a little bit of communication and a quick guide to refer to.

The retrospective is one of many possible tools, the real keys are:

the correct mindset,

a focus on team alignment, and

leveraging the two above items to create easily adopted, effective processes.

Simple but challenging.

How do we get there?
(Tl;DR – Slow and steady wins the race)

There are rarely quick fixes, especially when it comes to rebuilding trust and learning new ways to interact.

What we’ve found to be most effective is to start with weekly or bi-weekly retrospectives.

In this way rather than attempting to tackle all of the issues in one shot, we can focus our limited energy on what is most present and most impactful.

Most teams we work with see meaningful results within 4 -8 sessions. More challenging teams have taken as many as 12.

In all cases, the desire to adjust mindset and push outside of your comfort zone is a must.

Testimonials
“Our sessions have become a time for reflection where we can focus on what’s really important.

They ask the right questions that connect us with our inner drivers and the obstacles that would keep us from delivering the impact we aim to achieve through our work.

It’s a pragmatic approach that starts from within, which is where the true power of productivity comes from.”

- Thomas, Deloitte Central Europe, Transformational Leadership Team

“The difference in my office is night and day. I was skeptical at first, concerned that bring up issues would create chaos.

Our focus has shifted from blaming each other and playing victim to working as a team to move forward together and solve our highest leverage problems, rather than scattering our focus.”

- Karim, Babalegal, Director & Notary

Who are we?
At Pragmaflow, we come with a combined 30+ years of experience in:

- Team leadership

- Project management

- Product development

- System & process development

- Agile Mindset

- Design thinking

…(this list actually goes on for a while)

We’ve been the project workers trying to keep the bosses happy while keeping connected with our work passion.

We’ve been (and we still are) the leaders ever-striving to create healthy, happy, and productive work environments for our team members.

‘Productivity’ and ‘output’ are complex beasts
Changes we make can have all sorts of unexpected 2nd, 3rd, & nth… order consequences.

We’ve been on the journey for decades, and we’ve discovered the simplicity that comes from conquering the complex.

We are not consultants, we are not coaches, we are sherpas.

It’s your Journey. We’re just guides. We’ve traveled the trail ahead and we can get you through it.

What does the MAP for your team’s simplest and most effective journey look like?