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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.