7 Signs Your Team is Fire Jumping

In the previous blog, I touched on some traits of high performance teams. Now for the flip side of the proverbial coin: tails- signs that your team is not on fire, but fire jumping. If any of these symptoms are present in your work environment, it’s time for change.

1. Motion over progress. Because there is a lack of alignment around mission and objectives, people fill the day with process work and meetings, often pursing agendas and outcomes that are not useful and sometimes harmful.
2. Death by Meeting. Not only are there too many meetings, often spanning 80% or more of the workweek, meetings don’t start or end on time, people come late and/or unprepared, and the meetings often don’t have a meaningful agenda or the right people in the room.
3. Shortcuts Rule the Day.  Decisions and execution are short-term oriented. Why take the time to fix a root cause (or even understand what the root cause is) or make a strategic play when a work-around solution that takes less time defers the issue at hand.
4. Everything is a top priority. Pre-emptive interruption of work in progress rules the day. No framework for prioritization exists, or if it does, it is abused.
5. Stuff lingers. Tasks never quite seem to get to completion and deliverables are ever elusive. Action item lists, backlogs, to do lists all rarely change or only grow.
6. Not My Job/Too Busy. The opposite of a collaborative environment. Either everyone is too busy going to meetings to pick up tasks or don’t want to be in the line of fire for yet another deliverable.
7. Work is not fun. The environment is chaotic, unproductive, and has no purpose other than to somehow “catch up”. People have their resumes on the street.