Teams Blog

When your team is juggling multiple goals, how do you tackle them? Do you:

• Try to do all of them at once?
• Split them among subteams or individuals?
• Take them one at a time?
• Or, focus on the biggie and hope you get to the rest of them? 

Most teams I’ve worked with do it the last way, with the result that they might get that one goal done and have mixed results on the rest. One common mistake is to take on too many goals, but this is often exacerbated by managers who pile more work on without prioritizing it against the existing goals. In the managers’ defense, though, most teams don’t ask for prioritization. Plus, some set their goals without taking the time to ask stakeholders in every direction what those folks need, so it’s not surprising they soon feel pulled in every direction by demands they didn’t expect.

A study I posted to TeamResearch News recently tackles the timing issue in an interesting way. The researchers ran a computer simulation based on a model that has proven useful in predicting how actual humans act in a variety of fields. They found that in a complex organizations that require internal coordination to achieve goals (like a cross-functional team), having too many goals guarantees failure. No surprise there, but they came up with a number. Specifically, if the organization had eight goals, it always failed to attain four of them, no matter the strategy it chose to address them. This supports my long-held recommendation that a team (or company) have only 3-5 goals for a given time period or project.

The biggest surprise for me lay in the strategies. Focusing on one goal helped performance of all the goals, versus having the whole organization tackle them all at the same time. I can only guess that this works because getting at least one done frees up people to focus on the other goals. However, the better strategies were either to divide them among different people or have the whole organization take them one at a time.

When your team creates its goals for the quarter or year or project, one approach is to immediately assign members or subteams of members to spearhead each. That doesn’t mean other members won’t pitch in, or the subteam won’t bring tasks to the larger group at some point, but it ensures someone is taking full accountability to drive the change. Call it the “divide and conquer” approach.

The other approach is to sequence the goals. If they fall into a logical chain, where you have to do A before you can do B, that’s easy. If not, prioritize them and do them in order. That way the whole team brings its resources to bear on each goal, but if you don’t get through them all, you at least have done the most important.

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I was fired from my first true project manager job. Though I’ll note that the person who fired me was himself fired a few months later, there were some legitimate beefs. The biggest mistake I made was in not telling the sales staff what they were asking for in my first assignment was impossible. I wanted to make a good impression and seem cooperative, but of course the project failed miserably and I never really recovered my credibility. I also didn’t understand the PM role in a customer-facing position. Though the project process I applied in each of my projects was appropriate, and worked well in the rest of the projects, I did not adapt it enough to meet the ultimate outcome: a pleased customer. The boss said I was “too process-focused.” At the time I was flabbergasted by the statement, given that he was a PMP® (certified Project Management Professional) and yet had zero PM processes in place. Projects were inefficient and often missed their targets.

We both might have kept our jobs had we found a better balance between outcome and process. A TeamResearch News summary I just posted reports on a study that addresses this need. It found, first, that student teams who took time to do any planning at all did better at a game requiring teamwork than those who didn’t. Those whose planning focused on the goal rather than the process did better when some of their resources were taking away halfway through the game. The researcher believed the outcome teams were better at adapting their processes to the change. The type of planning made no difference when a team member was added late. I’d guess adding a member required no process change, whereas losing materials might.

This was reassuring to me because my teamwork training method, The SuddenTeams® Program, reflects these findings. The study author, Harvard-trained researcher Anita Woolley of Carnegie Mellon University, writes in her article that managers should “pay attention to how they structure early team meetings and the relative emphasis they place on processes versus outcomes.” Based on what the scientific literature had told me, I have teams address both goals and processes. But the order of events relative to this issue is:

1. Set a team mission.
2. Set goals toward meeting the mission.
3. Identify team stakeholders.
4. Document team and work processes.

Immediately after that, the team dives into process improvement. Written processes are a key step in every quality improvement system like TQM and Six Sigma, and invaluable for improving efficiency and reducing conflict. But The SuddenTeams Program puts the emphasis on what the team is accomplishing and for whom before defining how to get there. As the study shows, and my firing taught me, both the outcome and processes are critical to maximum team performance, but you have to keep your eye on the prize.

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