The Greatest Threat to Productivity Today

— by Tom McGehee

There are always challenges to developing productivity teams. Individual egos, agendas, capabilities all combined with unclear roles or changing priorities, will impact on how well a team works together. But, today teamwork faces a threat that is as negatively impactful as it is subtle.

The greatest threat to team productivity is that we are losing our ability to have conversations.

All of us are developing strong patterns of non-conversation in our personal worlds, and we can’t help but bring them into our professional world. This greatly impacts a team’s basic ability to have objective, honest and open dialogue about the effort they are undertaking.

Here are four examples of personal patterns that negatively impacts our ability to have productive conversations within our work teams:

1. Technological isolation: What is the one thing all personal technology has in common? It isolates the user. Today I can do almost any interactive function without having to interact with anyone. I can order my food on-line and have it delivered. I don’t even have to speak to a person at the drive through. Or, I can pick up a weeks worth of groceries without leaving my car, and never have to say a thing to anyone.

Just one example of this is today’s Starbucks -

Starbucks was like the “Cheers of coffee” – where the barista knew your name. Now, if you enter a Starbucks to order a cup of coffee, you are the third priority, first, comes the drive through, second the on-line orders, and when all that is filled, they turn to you. The person who actually is standing in front of them and will speak to them face to face about what you wanted in your coffee. One of my sons was a barista at a Starbucks and he delighted in speaking with his customers and doing what he could to help them have a better day while he prepared their coffee for them. Now, they just fill faceless orders with names written on cups waiting for a person to rush silently through the door, grab their cup and disappear. If the buyer has to speak it is seen as an inconvenience, not a relationship.

It’s not that we don’t know how to have a conversation, we just don’t want to.

2. Scream - A social media branding expert once told me, “if you want to be heard above all the noise you have to scream.”

So, we do - both literally and digitally. Look at any headline. A word like difficult has been replaced with impossible, anger with hatred, problem with crisis, and stop with kill. This pattern has two devastating impacts on our ability to interact. 

First, is the emotion that these screaming words convey. They are being used so much that they numb us to real issues that require extreme response. Screaming has become so commonplace it creates just the opposite of its intended purpose.

Secondly, screaming radically increases the disrespect of one another. Negative adjectives hurt, they cause us to become defensive; they divide; and cause deep invisible wounds. Wounds that a person may not show, but ones that directly impact his or her team performance. Exceptional performance relies heavily on relationships. Do I trust my teammates? Can I be open about the difficulties I am having? Will anyone listen if I point out issues, or suggest new ideas? Screaming at one another can cause irreparable harm to a team’s ability to perform at the highest level.

Having respectful conversations now require effort and intentionally. 

3. Everything is a Zero-sum game - More and more we see things as either/or. Marketing plays on this as much as it can: iPhone or Android, Fox versus CNBC, my team versus yours, me versus you. The marketplace is competitive, which extends into the workplace. Teams have always had to deal with the balance of individual careers and those of teammates. This is not about that. This is about living with a bounded set mentality, instead of a centered set one. A centered set says there are a few core things that I believe, that define me, or that I hold as sacred. As long as I can hold to my core, I can work with anyone on anything. With my core intact, I am adaptable, flexible, and can work together in any number of ways. However, if I live with a bundled set mentality its “my way or the highway.” Not only do I have difficulty working with someone whom I feel is outside my set, I will take measures to negatively impact that person's performance - often to the detriment of the entire team. I don’t just disagree with someone outside my set, I feel they are wrong.

This may sound extreme, but more and more personal interactions take on this tone. More and more it’s acceptable to draw up sides on almost every issue. When this type of thinking permeates our personal lives, it can't help but jump into our professional ones.

Just because I work with you doesn’t mean I have to talk to you.

4. The Christmas card syndrome - Christmas cards and Facebook have one thing in common. The image people project is often perfect. Our life this year has been amazing - all my kids are honor students, I’m making so much money that I don’t know how to spend it all, and my marriage, well you could write a book on just how amazing it is. More and more, we feel the need to continually project that all is good, even when it's not. In fact, in our personal worlds the worst things are, the more we pretend they aren’t.

Living this lie has a lot of individual consequences, just look at the increasing suicide rate in America. Bringing this attitude into a team can result with big negative impacts, including problems that are not solved at their source. Hidden, they are allowed to grow until discovered (Often creating a great deal of rework or effort to repair). If they had been discussed right up front, they could have been easily fixed or even avoided. I’m not talking here about someone doing something illegal or wrong. Every effort runs into difficulties. But, today, our first impulse is not to address them, but to hide them.

I think we need to be open about our difficulties. You go first.

Today more and more companies talk about the importance of collaboration; how teams need to work together to achieve more. At the essence of collaboration is the ability to problem solve, seize opportunities, innovate, and adapt. All of these require a high level of interaction and alignment. They key to that is the ability to have open, honest, productive conversations about the work we are doing. Conversations that are continually being hindered by attackers like these in our personal lives.

The answer is that everyone must realize that it now takes intent and effort to have productive conversations. Companies spend lots of money on project management training, implementing collaboration software, and developing processes like SCRUM and LEAN. But, unless an organization begins to tackle some of these underlying impacts, their productivity will continue to be limited.

A few things you can begin to do to help increase conversations in your workplace include:

• Create space in your schedule for conversations. For example, for a typical one hour meeting, I suggest ten minutes of knowledge presentation, thirty-five minutes for conversation to ensure understanding, fifteen minutes on decision-making and next steps.

• Seek to include different perspectives in your meetings.

• Have meeting participants write down answers before they share them. This ensures everyone is heard and that what is said is original thought, not influenced by any preceding comments.

• Divide even a small team (say eight people) into pairs or two groups of four to process any work. This increases engagement and aids in identifying patterns and emerging ideas.

• Attend or hold a Faster Together Workshop (unabashed sale pitch). This one-day workshop is focused on helping individuals and organizations create better conversations to increase collaboration and productivity.

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[ Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash ]