I’ve worked on projects where there has been a tenfold difference in the productivity of the teams. Specifically, given a piece of work like “Let’s build a new campaign” or “Let’s redesign the homepage”, I’ve seen the same team size do that in one week or in 10 weeks. What was that difference? Specific processes? Using a standard framework? Project management approach? How do you create a culture of speed?
I don’t think so. From what I’ve seen over the years it’s something quite specific – a culture of trust and honesty – which then indirectly leads to much faster output.
I believe a high trust/honest culture has the following traits:
- (almost) no meetings. The only meetings you should be having are celebratory – celebrating a new release or a deal closing. Why? Firstly, the obvious, almost everybody hates them! Most meetings are run on the HIPPO principle, which almost everyone dislikes. But why does it slow the business down? Because it delays decision making. Too many times I hear the phrase “That sounds like a problem, let’s put it on the agenda for our weekly meeting”. When you do this you’ve immediately slowed the whole project down by a number of days if not weeks. If you’re not at the meeting where thing X is being decided, then maybe you don’t need to be there. Trust your colleagues that the right decisions are being made. Trust that they understand your needs and you don’t need to spend your valuable time “Keeping an eye on things”.
- Move fast and break things. Coincidentally, this week I’ve seen two errors from very well known organisations I suspect because they’re moving fast:
- But crucially, I don’t think they’re moving too fast. I think it’s good that mistakes are being made because it shows a certain approach, that you are trying to get things to your customers as soon as possible. Note this is a strategic decision because there is a very plausible alternative (spend time and effort making everything perfect – the Apple approach). What’s this got to do with trust and honesty? You trust that when others make mistakes it was with the best of intentions. Trying to get things out trying to help customers is not being careless.
- Proactively telling people about your mistakes. It takes some courage at first, but your colleagues will respect you more if you get in front of your mistakes first. Very difficult to do when you first start at a company. but worth the perseverance.
- Sharing your work and results. if you can stand up in front of your colleagues, tell them how well you and your team have done, tell them what you did wrong and share all of the data (the good, the bad and the ugly), and be open to where you still need to do better – then you’re showing maturity as a leader, exactly the sort of thing that a good company will be looking for. Again this speeds everything up because you don’t need the endless one to ones. Everyone sees the same info, everybody knows what’s going on so you obviate the need for lots of half hour “catch-up” meetings killing your diary.
These are all great things, but how do they save you time? They save you and everybody else time because you preempt the endless back and forth debating ideas and suggestions. “Perhaps this person knows what she’s doing, perhaps we should give her idea a shot before we shoot it down!”. That way you can go from idea to trial to implementation in a week rather than going round and round trying to decide something when frankly nobody has the answers.
But really the true advantage in terms of speed is the possibility of getting into a flow therefore getting through a higher volume of work. The book “Deep Work” by Cal Newport has been very influential on me. You need 4 to 8 hour blocks without interruption so that you can really get your head into a problem, to do significant and valuable work. I’d go even further and say the most valuable work I’ve ever done is when I’ve had multiple days free to remove myself from the day to day and create something significant. And that’s something we all want to do.
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