A Framework for Going Pro

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Alright no road trips or snow storms to act as excuses this week so we’re back with your regularly scheduled Simple, Not Easy programming.

I asked a question last week which I’ve been thinking about a lot lately - How do you differentiate a professional team from an amateur one?

First, thank you to all of you who wrote in with your thoughts on the question many of which I’ll integrate into this piece. Special shout out to my friend of nearly 20 years and loyal reader Drew who gave me some advice which I immediately put into practice with my team at work.

To me professionalism vs. amateurism can be assessed across three different levels:

1. An individual

2. A team

3. An organization

While the exact assessment may differ slightly, there are elements of the framework which can be used universally. Having said that, I most often think about these four items in regard to assessing professionalism at a team level.

Before walking through the framework, why does being a professional or creating a professional team even matter?

Amateurs rely on either luck or the talent of a single individual for success where professionals are interested in creating a machine which makes success both repeatable and predictable.

My preferred framework for consistently moving the teams I lead and am part of toward greater professionalism is the following:

1. Document the standard

2. Train to the standard

3. Hold accountable to the standard

4. Automate and outsource

While this framework serves as a useful tool for any leader working to improve their team it can also be used as a diagnostic to asses teams you recently joined or are considering joining.

Document the standard

Loyal readers to this program know I am a big fan of documentation. There are two reasons beginning with documentation is the first step in the going pro framework.

First, it’s impossible to create a repeatable machine if you haven’t told your team what good looks like. Often I’ll work with managers who are frustrated about X or Y behavior their team is currently doing, or often not doing. The first question I ask is whether or not they’ve clearly communicated that standard to their team. If so, is it documented in a place where the team can easily access and reference it.

More often than not the answer is no. It’s impossible to hold a team accountable to a standard you haven’t set and written down, so be sure to set it and do so clearly.

Second, documentation reduces the likelihood that you have a single point of failure in your system. I have learned this lesson painfully on multiple occasions, but if a certain process or piece of information important to your team’s day-to-day operations lives in a single person’s head, then it might as well not exist.

Nothing will point out cracks in your system sooner than an individual who is a single point of failure leaving the team.

Documentation is the answer.

Train to the standard

Now that you’ve got your standards and processes documented it’s time to train your team to ensure they’re both aware of and able to execute at the standard you’ve set. Lazy, aka amateur, leaders document a standard, send out the doc to their team, then get frustrated when that team doesn’t execute well against the standard.

Training, and more often than not re-training, to standards is the only way for a new behavior to become part of your team’s system and ultimately turn into a habit.

Making standards habitual is the primary aim of any leader looking to impact change on their team. Documentation and training are the first two elements of this equation.

Hold accountable to the standard

After you’ve documented and trained, the next item I look for in determining where a team falls on the amateur to professional spectrum is whether or not they have a structured means of holding their team accountable to that standard.

Trust but verify, what gets measured gets managed, choose your business school catch phrase of choice, but there is a grain of truth in all of them.

If you don’t have a consistent way to check the work of your team, the standard will slip (the same goes for you as a leader for the record). Professionals recognize that humans are fallible, which means the only way to minimize errors is to have a process to maintain accountability to the standard.

A set cadence of meetings, individual status reports you review, team members paired up to check each other’s work. The specific system of accountability will vary from team to team, but if you don’t have one you can’t be a professional.

Automate and outsource

Many good teams have at least two if not all three of the above steps, but it’s a rare team that has a leader consistently asking whether the work required to meet the standards they’ve set should be done by their team at all.

The great news about a clear documented set of processes and standards is they can serve as an automation / outsourcing checklist. Push yourself to consistently review your documentation and ask whether or not your team is best positioned to do the work they’ve been assigned.

Could it be done by an outsourced team at a lower cost? Could a few sprints worth of work from your engineering team automate the work entirely?

A mentor of mine told me that all businesses at scale are questions of moving from one arbitrage opportunity to another. Automating and outsourcing is the way you can act as a general manager to actually accomplish that arbitrage which then allows your team to focus on only the highest impact work they are uniquely trained and positioned to do.

Every leader I talk to lately is being asked to do more with less. Being smart about the work that your team does vs. that which gets automated and outsourced is the best approach to threading this needle.

Conclusion

Document the standard, train to the standard, hold accountable to the standard, automate and outsource. If we were looking at baseball teams single A teams would be doing one of the above items, double A teams two, triple A teams three, and the pros doing all four.

No one wants to play on a single A team let alone lead one. Use the going pro framework to bring your team to the big leagues and watch performance improve as a result.

See y’all next week.