Daily Outcomes (“Three Wins for the Day”)
One of the best ways to start to create a high-performance team is by asking
each person to focus on three wins for the day. If they focus on three outcomes,
not tasks, they will start to focus on value. Tasks will naturally follow, but now
they are the right tasks, because you are starting with “value-first.”
By defining an outcome, you rise above the noise and create clarity around what
you will be attempting to achieve with your time and energy for the day.
After all, if the outcome is not compelling, it will be hard to find your motivation.
If the outcome is not clear, it will be hard to focus your efforts or know when you
are done or know what good looks like.
By focusing on three wins, everybody starts to get into the habit of focusing on
value. Once you know where the value is, you found the short-cut.
Value is the ultimate short-cut.
You just cleared the air of all the distractions and noise that you can stop wasting
time on. You can know accelerate your effort because you can actually see a
target in your mind’s eye.
In your daily call, when you go around the team and identify the what they
achieved the day before, what they’ll achieve today, and where they need help,
the focus on wins will elevate the discussion from minutia and tasks to outcomes
and value.
The team will shift from “doing a lot of work” to “making things happen” and
“shipping value.”
The rhythm and momentum will start to help you over humps and people will
find themselves getting over hurdles and walls that previously blocked their
paths.
Of course, the specific practice of asking people where they need help will play a
key role in debottlenecking the team and making incremental progress.
This daily incremental progress quickly adds up, and your practice of focusing on
three wins at the team level and the individual level, will help you tell and sell
the story of impact in ways you never could before.
This appreciation and acknowledgement of wins in an authentic and deeply
meaningful way will help people flourish and bring out their best, because they
can directly connect the time, energy, and effort they spend to impact that’s
recognized and valued.
This simple habit really helps distributed teams flourish well beyond just getting
things done or making impact in a big bang way … it builds a system that can
learn and respond, and continuously flow value, while dealing with setbacks and
hurdles in a more powerful, more unified way.
The wins help unify the efforts and get synergy where focus and effort could
otherwise fork.
Friday Reflection (“Three Thing Going Well, Three Things to Improve”)
This is your best chance to step back and take the balcony view. The simplest
way is to just add a 20-minute appointment with yourself so you can dive deep
around the following questions:
1. What are three things going well?
2. What are three things to improve?
As a team leader, you should ask yourself those questions as a leader, and as a
team.
What can you improve about your execution or leadership, and what can you
improve about the team in terms of the system or the people or the output.
In a distributed team scenario, I simply ask the team to add their own
appointment to their calendar at a time in the AM, and make it a priority. I allow
space for this, and create buffer.
Creating Space on Fridays to Decompress
Early on I used to ship on Fridays, but that created problems, pain, and panic,
and didn’t create great weekends.
Who wants to end the week with that kind of stress and risk?
So years ago, I moved to a practice of always shipping on Wednesdays. This
allowed time to respond to problems and helped ensure that Fridays could be as
stress-free as possible.
As one of my mentors puts it, “Brains work better when their rested and
relaxed.”
Improve the Team with the Help of the Team
The other practice I use to help flow the information is I ask each person on the
team to share with me their insights into three things going well and three things
to improve at the team level (people, process, product.)
I then synthesize this across the team to figure out what our best actions might
be to fold into the next week.
This is the continuous learning loop that helps create a high performance team
that is highly adaptive and responsive to change, and learns how to learn in an
effective and systematic way, without suffering from “death by process.”
Keep a Focus on Learning and Flowing Value
Avoid death by process. Too much process can limit the success of any team,
especially where change is the norm.
As my mentor put it, process is what kills the necessary innovation and learning
for growth and survival that you need in a changing landscape.
That’s why the key is always “just enough process” while keeping a focus on
learning and on flowing value in a continuous way.
At the end of the day, if you use the following mantra, reminders, and rhythm for
results, you will achieve great things:
1. Monday Vision (“Three wins for the week”)
2. Daily Wins (“Three wins for the day”)
3. Friday Reflection (“Three things going well, three things to improve”)
It’s a powerful recipe for results that has served me well time and again, with
creating high performance teams from scratch around the world.