Six Steps to Real Collaboration and Value: We work together or we fail together
Building a professional team, not just a group of individuals
Authenticity, Depth. The ability to not just “get things done”, but to get them done together. When people are working together to create something they care about, they don’t want it to end. What if “work” was always like this? What if every project was done by a real team? I think that’s the very definition of practical.
This image is from our working session today for our Visual Management (LAVM) class. In this call, where one person in attendance had already graduated, and three others were working on their final assignments (4.1), the consensus was that none of them wanted the course to end.
In these workshops, we usually do Lean Coffees. They create the topics. We talk about them. You can see what they are talking about working together, what happens after the class, and implementing some difficult-to-grasp things they have studied.
Authentic. Deep. Practical. Collaborative.
Why? Why are these people so focused? And why we normally not so focused?
Humans Create Horrible Strong Teams
This is important because most of the time we build our management systems focused on the tasks and not how the tasks get done. We focus on the planned work and not what we do when things go sideways. We focus on our “team” and not on who we need to actually work with. We give people roles and metrics to hold them accountable for specific actions and not information and options so they can be responsible for unexpected actions.
I’m going to list what we did in LAVM to build collaborative teams made of people from around the world who never met each other. I am doing this so you can consider this.
Is your current team set up to succeed or fail together?
Most teams ignore these 5 necessities for collaborative success:
Collaborative Expectations - The course built a system and an expectation to collaborate. The individuals come together, they build an expectation (together) of how they will work, how they will upskill each other, how they will discuss / argue, how they will build, and how they will create visualizations to show each other these things are happening.
Understanding Complexity - Each of the teams understands that complexity is part of work…all human endeavor involves some risk, some variation, some unexpected surprises. As life becomes more hectic, complexity rises with it. The team created their own “standard work for unstandard situations.” In short… how do you deal with weird?
Your Team is Made of Real People - In our last cohort no member had an easy year personally or professionally. Their regular meetings, their Obeya (visual control center), and their drive to make the team successful coupled with the team’s very practical understanding that empathy is an intrinsic part of a healthy and inventive team. In the face of difficult personal situations, the team members drew together, worked together, and helped team members cope with what life had given them. Be real together, or be phony alone.
No Team is an Island - These cohorts have formed, stormed, normed, and realized that the only way to perform is not to isolate. Team members attended several of our open lean coffees, talked to other cohorts independently, even brought in and taught each other stuff that wasn’t in the class. In your office other teams might be thought of as “dependencies,” but they are actually collaborations waiting to happen. Every dependency is a bottleneck (destroys value) every collaboration is an opportunity (grows value).
Structure with Freedom - The class itself, like any project, has goals, objectives, and an initial structure. It has assignments and lectures. There are scheduled calls and focused time for teams to work together. Without structure there is no form and without form there is no progress. But the course also has significant freedom. Over the years of teaching this thing,
and I have watched teams respond to the same assignment is massively different ways. In each case, we had to put our expectations aside and appreciate what they did and why…and in turn we grew as well. Your projects require flexibility, not to do a certain amount of tasks in a certain time, but to process the work.Process the work, don’t do the task: Oh, a bonus number six… Process the work as a team, or do the tasks on your own. In the first, you learn, you deal with complexity, you grow, you deliver the customer unexpected value. In the second, you do a certain number of tasks quickly as described by someone else and deliver the customer unexpected and inexplicable product.
Our teams routinely fail because we aren’t teams. We are just people rapidly trying to get someone’s guess as value done quickly. The more we panic, the more we look like it is taken seriously. But that’s clearly not working for any of us.
Creating a humane system will have your team members be more like LAVM students: wanting to stay, to deliver value, and to help each of their team members become even better versions of themselves.
“Even when I’m done with the work, I don’t expect to actually leave the program.” ~ Graham