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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Paul Maurice, coach of the Carolina Hurricanes professional hockey team, spoke on “Building a Winning Team” at an Association for Corporate Growth meeting recently. The title is somewhat ironic, given that the team was 2-11-3 on the season at the time, as he noted. Although I think sports metaphors are often misapplied in the business context, some of his comments mirrored what I have seen in business teams. A great way to tell that a team is in trouble, he said, is to observe members at a meal. If you have the stars at one table, the rookies at another, and the struggling players in a third, you have a problem. I have seen this in corporate lunch rooms, and it usually means your team has broken into subteams and is not working together. I asked what he did in that situation, and he said he would address individuals in each subteam to have them reach out across the borders. That’s a good first step.

He was surprisingly introspective given the stereotype of a professional coach. A few years ago, he said, the team was doing reasonably well, but after a loss to Florida he went into the locker room and lit into them as their heads hung down. The team lost a large number of games in a row afterward. He said many variables go into losing streaks, but he could not help but wonder how things might have differed if he had picked a better way and time to express his concerns.

But the most powerful thing he stated regarding teams is that you can tell within ten minutes of watching video of a good team what their system is. He listed all kinds of hockey terms I didn’t recognize, being a basketball fan, but the point was that the hockey equivalent of the team’s work processes were done in repeatable ways that an outsider could quickly recognize. On the other hand, he said, you could watch hours of videos of poorly performing teams and never figure out their systems.

In other words, if you want quality, you have to take the time to formalize your processes. Common to every quality control method from Total Quality Management to Six Sigma is writing down or diagramming of processes. That’s the only way you can ensure smooth coordination and handoffs of work—or the hockey puck.

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