July 2006

Me and Thee

Our productivity could be considered from two different perspectives: first, our individual ability to produce, and second, our ability to produce within a group. In one way or another we all work as part of a group, or more likely, as part of several groups, perhaps overlapping or perhaps distinct.

While the upgrading of our individual work practices has been a long standing learning focus for many of us, most of us have spent little or no time working on our skills for collaborating and coordinating our actions in order to produce a group result.

What does it take to produce a team or group result? How does that impact us as individuals, and what individual practices do we need to alter in order to have our groups be more productive?

 

Productivity Paradigm:
There are three arenas that become particularly useful when thinking about improving group productivity: collaboration, coordination and communication. We call these "the three Cs" in our Mission Control for Team Productivity workshops. While we could say that we internally use the three Cs when working as an individual, but there is different dynamic that comes to the foreground when considering the three Cs from a group point of view — how do individual work habits either enhance or restrict the productivity of groups?

To make this more apparent, lets look at one example in the arena of communication, using a typical corporate "multi-functional team" of say 12 people. Within the 12 we find that there are three people who prefer (and almost exclusively use) E-mail as their primary means for communicating and sharing information. They are good typists and are used to thinking in writing.

Then there are three "people" people — the kind who pop into your office to chat or grab the phone when they have a question. They tend toward spontaneity. There are three who prefer to do the information sharing and communicating in meetings, and of course, they are always having meetings. Another two are loner-types who don't communicate anything, unless someone goes and digs them out. They like to be left alone "to do their thing." The last one is all over the map, swaying with the breeze, flighty, scattered and seemingly without standards, but bright and full of ideas, so tolerated.

When you look at this scenario from the point of view of the three Cs, you can see some challenges for the group leader in how to effectively manage results and outcomes, given that the three Cs are crucial in making that happen.

The question becomes how do we alter the behaviors of the members of the group in ways that enhance rather than restrict how communication happens, coordination is managed, and collaboration occurs as a natural, rather than forced, dynamic?

 

Remember: We have been communicating, coordinating, and collaborating to produce group outcomes since the human species came into existence. Along the way we have developed both group and individual work habits that restrict what's possible for the group. We'll explore this further in future Productivity newsletters.