It’s a common refrain during aviation training: aviate, navigate, communicate. Flight instructors drill this mantra into pilots because it gives an instant prioritization of the things they should be working on at a given moment during flight. The enemy of safety is pilot overload and distraction, and this mantra provides a quick way to get back on track when a pilot’s attention has wandered.
This same principle applies equally to teams within our businesses – especially those teams that are doing the hard cross-functional work of new growth. This principle is magnified in growth work because many times those working on these teams are called to wear many hats on other teams – and switch frequently from role to role.
The research is very clear, however (see links here and here). It shows that as the quantity of changing focus in our day rises, the switching costs – that is the time it takes us to switch from task to task – can take up to 40 percent of our day. For example, if we were using a typical eight hour day, that would be 3.2 hours of switching time and only a little over four hours of productive time. This gets multiplied even more when we are working in “deep thinking” creative activities that make us reach back to recall the cognitive context. An interruption for someone who has spent hours building their thought framework can push them back a half day or more.
We as leaders need to do the hard work of helping our people climb to the top of their priority pyramids. In particular, as team leaders guiding cross-functional initiatives which demand a high degree of creativity, we need to work very hard with our team members to provide clear simple guidance to get re-oriented. In doing that, we will increase the odds of execution success and avoid a great deal of wasted time, resources and budget.
How to Diagnose
If you are noticing that a team is showing signs of losing traction, like missing a key milestone or having meetings that don’t create value, it’s time to step back and do some diagnosis. One of the first things I suggest is to go around the table and take a poll of what additional active project demand is on each of the participants outside of their work on this project. This is easily done by making a table on the whiteboard with member names on the left and projects across the top. It is not uncommon to find people working to support six or more “key” projects. This fine slicing of the team members’ attention builds in overhead at that 40 percent level that pushes back the schedule on all their endeavors.
How to Help
- Make the context really clear and repeat it often. Just as in the aviation analogy above, help your team by having a very clear recentering device – a good start is why we are here, what specifics we are going to accomplish, and the delivery timeline. It is great practice to touch base on these at the start of every session.
- Standardize whenever possible. Surgery is one of the most demanding cross-functional teams: it’s high stakes, time-bound and very technical. In this environment, medical teams go to great lengths to standardize as much as possible – familiar team members, treatment protocols that are agreed upon in advance, standard benchmarks of progress, and so on. You can do the same for your high-value subject matter experts: do the pre-work, share the uniques with them specifically and allow them to make their contribution (and move on).
- Put key tasks into groupings. There is a reason co-location is like magic for cross-functional teams. When everyone can see everyone, and the desired outcome is clear and specific, team members help one another in real time (some call this communication by osmosis). By stepping out of their “swim lanes” to ask a question, or to provide support or a resource, the overall project is accelerated.
- Use tools that are context-rich. Wiki-based tools like SLACK and its competitors allow the whole team to see the relevant portion of the whole project. Contrast this with email that only shows up in our inboxes out of context and requires us to shift our thinking, dig out context documents and which can have us taking actions on fuzzy recollections.
Finally, and very significantly, it’s important to have the right growth leader capacity assigned to the right task. There are four unique capacities that are needed for a successful growth effort:
- Architect: Sees the future clearly and communicates in a compelling way with great visualizations
- Champion: Secures “air cover” and develops great relationships with the senior team
- Catalyst: The prime mover who is able to get it done, go through walls and tackle challenges
- Anchor: Deep relationships and respect allow credibility when risks need to be taken
The absence of one of these capacities on the team will result in lost time, money and resources. For more on the Complete Growth Leader Capacities, how to identify them and how they play together, click here and here.
If you’d like to talk more about growth leadership and team structure, please reach out at 847-651-1014 or use this link to set up a short call.
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