Your Team's Productivity is Connected to Your Leadership

How do you focus your team's time on the right activities so that they're working on things that really drive results that work not just for them, but also for the organization as a whole? And how do you do this on a small team without being bureaucratic, overwhelming, micromanaging, or any of those negative things? Seeing as this question is around both people and teams, it felt appropriate to bring in a team of people to help me answer this question. To answer this, I've pulled in the expertise of three members of the IndieOps network, which is the mastermind slash virtual coworking community combo we run here at ProcessDriven and we talk about vetting ideas, the different between the Toyota method and the GM method for prioritizing feedback and ways to make sure you're having buy in throughout your organization for any changes you're looking to make. But I started off with a rather simple question which is how do you make sure an idea you want to do is actually ready for action before you start working on it? So basically you're working on the right thing.

What we leverage is, you know, just a holding period where we just put it as an, an intake, as a status. So that allows us to really whoever it gets assigned to or the lead of the person that the team lead of the person that gets assigned to allows them to kind of evaluate the task. And it doesn't become in our queue until it's past that intake area. So that kind of lines up with the what type of task this would be. But it also allows us to then push back if the directions are unclear from everyone. Because a lot of times when we're, when people are creating tasks, it might just be a note and it makes a lot of sense to them and we find oftentimes that we need to go back. So that's why we've used that intake status or that holding period to let them know that until you fully flesh it out and this is fully understood by the lead or the person that it's assigned to, it's not real. It's not real until it's marked as in our queue. So that's, that's one of the strategies we use for that.

Now naturally the other operators on this call picked up on this cue from Theron and we all had to take it to the opposite extreme because if we start putting a holding pattern in place that has so many benefits is actually something we practice here at ProcessDriven too. I have a whole video on it up here with the ideas list. But the other operators on the call raised an eyebrow and were like, but if you vet ideas too much, could you run the risk of demoralizing people, Making it feel like, oh, our ideas don't matter? Well, let's hear what Michael has to say on that.

The first thing that came to my mind is what big companies do like Toyota, they have suggestion boxes throughout their whole facility, right? And it's not just manufacturing plants. They try that in lots of places. And turns out in most companies nobody really uses the suggestion boxes. It's just not successful. And the reason is because management isn't taking that seriously and really paying attention to it and listening to them. There's a great story about General Motors when they were trying to learn how Toyota was continuing to clean their clock. And so they sent a PP Finance to observe what was happening in one of the very famous plants in California. This name will come to me in a moment. It was the worst performing GM plant. Toyota took it over. Within one year they were outperforming GM by wide margins. Right. One of the things that this guy observed was that what Toyota was listening to the employees and they wanted the Coke machines move closer to the washrooms. Next day they had the maintenance man out there and the two wheelers and they're rewiring and they put these in there. And so the guy was talking to people, observing this. What you know, why are they doing that? I've been told not to bring any improvements back. That don't mean at least a million dollars in savings a year or half a million in savings a year. What are they saving by putting these boxes over there, moving the Coke machines over? Answer, they're earning the trust and the appreciation of their employees. So what you guys are doing in the first parts I heard about describing capacity defense is you're respecting, you're listening to the ideas that people have, which is great because most companies don't do that.

And Toyota wasn't the only one that saw benefit in these micro experiments, resulting in more trust and buy in, as Michael pointed out. In fact, Ashton inside her team right now she's working on a major project of rolling out a new task management structure and a lot of new methods of operating in addition to that, actually through our process driven foundations program here at Process Driven. And as she goes through this transition of migrating how her team thinks, operates, functions and tracks their processes, she's had to deal with the challenge of buy in as well. To tackle this challenge, Ashton actually applied this concept of feedback and coupled it with some actual experiments to allow her team to, you know, let me just have her explain.

I gave the ones who had ideas, you know, about things that had already been built and I was like, okay, you need to do the beginners, you need to get this certificate, that certificate. And then once they brought those back to me or continuously bring them back to me, I started actually making them like a ClickUp sandbox account for them to use. So then when they're having these ideas, they're able to create it in a space that I can see but without actually like touching the stuff that I build. And it's. So it's them learning, it's giving them the incentive like to learn it and then they, you know, have a playground to go try everything out on. And it's not me doing every single, you know, I can kind of delegate some of those ideas as they come.

Now, the optimistic side of me absolutely love this idea, but the realistic side of me started to think about the day to day of a small team where you have 10, 20 people and you only have a few hundred hours a week that you can actually get work done. And I kind of had this thought that, man, if we just have a free for all of do whatever you think might be best, we could end up doing the wrong thing. Something that might be great for you because you have time, but really isn't the best way your time could be spent when we think about the overall business vision, right? So I brought up this topic with our panel of operators and here's what Theron had to say. How exactly we keep people focused when we give that discretion downward? Because I think there's this to one extreme, right? A leader or team lead is directing everything and so everything must go through that one person. On the other extreme, there's the likelihood where we make this ideas list something that everybody has access to, everyone has full discretion over anything that touches an area you work in. Feel free to do whatever you think is best. But then there runs the risk of misalignment where time is being invested in things that, Ashton, you might have already solved or that's going to be deleted next month, or how do we balance that alignment with broader vision, with autonomy.

So I can tell you what I tried to do a long time ago, which was force everything to go through. I think I was trying to leverage like six thinking hats and just I want somebody to think through every component of a project or an idea that they have. And the six thinking hats, for those not familiar, it's just hats denoting different types of thinking. And I forget what the color associations are. But one's purely from a process standpoint. One's like the creative, one's very positive minded, one is the negative minded, finding all the ways it can go wrong and so on. One's very fact based and numbers based and the other is very emotions based. And just what kind of things does this kind of create in you? And I tried to get everybody to think through their ideas, thinking that, oh yeah, if we do this kind of thing it will, it will help the quality of all the ideas. And the feedback that I got was that it just created a lot of red tape. And then, you know, people got discouraged from sharing ideas because they wanted to ready, fire, aim rather than, you know, go through the entire process. So what I try to do when somebody's a direct team member of mine, I'll try to have them, you know, explain the idea and really get to a proof of concept as soon as possible. Just a rough draft, sketch it out if it's something that they can sketch out. But otherwise I've, I found, you know, generally sometimes it's, it's best to let them try. And even if it creates misalignment and it creates a little bit of failure, that's something that we can then use as a coaching example not just for them but for the entire team to say, hey, next time we're going to try to implement this template or something for the entire team. You got to think through it by this. And so this is the person that will be responsible for when you try to do that. And pain and mistakes create education better than instruction do sometimes.

So with their sandbox account, that's kind of where they're allowed to work, to mess with stuff and it's, it's become sort of like a more eager to learn the platform, whereas before, you know, they were pushing back with the change and things like that. But now it is becoming like, okay, well if you think that this will work and you have the credentials, then I can give you access to this area. And if you've proven that it, it works, you know, it still needs to go through a change management request and everything. But definitely if it's going to improve, if it's just overall you've already tested it, that sort of thing, then it will go live and you know, we'll make that announcement. So it's really become, you know, something pretty cool where there was a lot of pushback in the beginning and it really is like a competition and they, you know, they really want to see, you know, see what they can do, but it is in like a designated space and it has to go through me like, because I'm the one that built it, you know, before any change is made for, you know, customer bases or processes or anything. But they're able to create them and you know, bring them up for sure. Yeah.

What you're, what you're describing there reminds me of in continuous improvement they do it by having two systems. There's the production system, you know, what you're producing every day that brings in money from the customers. And then there's the, the improvement system, right? You have to, you have to manage that production so you know, you're meeting cost targets and revenue targets and you find out where your big problems are and can focus on those. But the people within those processes are focused on doing better within the system that they're in. And there's all sorts of things that they can do, moving equipment around, trying different, different experiments and so forth. But the improvement system, which is what you're talking about, ideally that is something that everybody also has access to and can play a role in and becomes a contest and becomes exciting because we have ideas for improvement. We've found a way to attach it to what we're trying to improve in the business. But that is, it's a smaller number of projects. Right, but it's measured, it's, it's fed. Right, it's nurtured. And so by having those two, it sounds like that's what you did. And the fact that people are enthusiastic about it means that you've struck a nerve and you're, you're being successful.

Okay, so that was just a few of my favorite moments from this 45 minute call with these operators talking about how we manage and focus our team's productivity by triaging our approach to ideas. If you are a member of the Indieops network or you're about to become one, you can access this full recording as well as the process map we had before and after as well as all the templates we created based on these groups findings inside the process improvement lab inside the membership. Watch that full recording for additional details. Like me challenging Michael to sell his high end consulting for just $1 US challenging Theron to have a follow up conversation around how to do a bottleneck analysis as well as how we can create a process map and templates inside our task management tool to actually bring this new workflow to life. So I'll be sharing some templates for Indie Ops members who wish to adopt these best practices that our Operators have shared. So all that is inside the lab if you want to check that out. But before we wrap this video up, I want to say a giant thank you to Ashton, Michael and Theron for making this video possible. Let me just give them a moment to introduce themselves.

So I have been in the digital marketing industry for almost close to 20 years in various roles, usually on the project management, the operations leadership side. My role tends to focus on the intersection, I would say of some financial stewardship, stewardship delivery management and organizational development. And by that I'm managing the money, I'm managing the process and I'm managing the people or at least trying to influence those things to go in the right direction. So capacity is a big part of that, managing scope and managing the hours that we spend.

I finished school with a math degree and I had to recover from that because my first job was a sales job. And over the years four different industries from business forms to minicomputer, MRP software you would call today enterprise management to factory automation to I was the head of sales and marketing for an engineering firm and went into sales training and sales management consulting until my first book was written sales and marketing the Six Sigma Wayne 2006 became management consulting working all over the world and then in 2014 sales process excellence which earned the Shingo Research Award, highest honor in the process excellence industry and the only business to business sales and marketing book that earned that honor.

I am Ashton. I came from the childcare industry but self proclaimed nerd at heart and once they put a computer in front of me I started taking over that world and I was implementing softwares into you know, multi site locations until eventually that company had offered me a position with them. So then I was you know, training other schools and things like that to use that software, doing workflows, building out, just basically digitizing the whole process from enrollment to hiring to landing pages, custom content, all that good stuff. And so that kind of got me my foot in the door to where I am now. And I found myself in the tech auto industry and I love my job. They did not currently have an infrastructure when I started so they said oh you know how to do that, come do it over here. So I, I use Layla and all her content and I figured that out so it's definitely been a, a wild ride and it's still going.

And by the way Ashton, if you're watching this, your self description is definitely far too humble. You do way more than that. But anyway for those of you guys watching, thank you so much for taking the time. If you want to connect with any of our special guests, go ahead and find their information in the description below. Support the companies they work for because those companies allowed them to come on and do this work. If you enjoyed this kind of format, you can watch another video in this series by watching the playlist we'll have linked here at the end screen. And until next time we talk, remember to enjoy the process.