Speed up

Enjoying Simple, Not Easy? Please consider forwarding it to a friend. New to this email? Welcome! Subscribe here.

I love spending time in the mountains and am fortunate to be able to do so often in my home state of Utah. One of my favorite mountain apparel / gear companies is Dynafit.

They have a simple motto which underpins all of the products they make, “Speed up.”

Those simple two words are a great way for any leader to evaluate the performance of themselves and their team. Are we pushing the pace or dragging our feet?

A few weeks ago in my post about codes, creeds, and manifestos I mentioned pace and tempo within the context of legendary Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman who so believes in the concept of speed he titled his recent book, Amp It Up.

When asked about his success building and leading three successful companies (Data Domain, ServiceNow, Snowflake) Slootman said the following:

Change the status quo, step up the pace.

There is a natural human tendency to move slow, delay making decisions, and avoid action. As a leader you must fight against this.

Why is there a tendency to delay

There are three main reasons why teams and leaders tend to move slower than they should:

1. Structural

2. Ambiguity

3. Fear

Structural

Parkinson’s law states that, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

Derived from British Civil Servant and Naval Historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson based on observations made of the British Admiralty’s consistently growing bureaucracy despite a decline in the number of ships at sea.

Bottom line, the amount of time you give to a task is the amount of time it will take.

Ambiguity

We talk about clear communication often on this blog, but when a team is mired in the slow churn of minimal to no progress it is commonly because the leader of that team has not clearly defined their desired end state.

If your team does not know what winning looks like it is not possible for them to win.

Fear

While pressure is a privilege your team may not always feel this way. Slootman calls this general tendency toward inaction the “slack” which exists within an organization. While some of this slack comes from the natural human tendency to move slowly, see Parkinson’s law above, much of it also comes from a more powerful human emotion, fear.

If a team is afraid of the reprisal from their boss, manager, or leader which comes from failure that fear will paralyze them. Like a deer caught in the headlights, if you have not created a safe space for your team to experiment, try, fail, learn, try again you’ve created a monolithic architecture which only functions based on command and control meaning your progress will grind to a hault.

Structure, ambiguity, and fear are all working against you to make your team go more slowly than they should which obviously begs the question, what do you do about it?

Solutions to move your team at pace

Structural

In the same way that Parkinson’s Law can work against you it can be your ally. While it may seem absurdly tactical, whenever things are moving slower than you’d like look at your calendar.

Is the next time you’ll review the topic which you’re trying to move forward a bi-weekly meeting? Does the work really need another two weeks to be complete?

Can you get to a good enough place to make a decision tomorrow?

While Scrum as a Project Management framework can seem overly prescriptive, there’s little doubt that the daily scrum meetings leverage the positive side of Parkinson’s law coupled with a realistic assessment of human nature to ship quality work quickly.

Another tactical improvement to accelerate the pace of work on your team is to introduce the concept of a, “Clearinghouse Meeting.”

I first learned this concept while I was a Chief of Staff and have since seen it used many times to great effect. The concept is simple, every week there is a 60-90 minute meeting on your calendar that is dedicated solely to meetings where decisions are made.

The meeting should exist with the most senior person applicable to the work as the owner. Their role is to make decisions and break ties. A standard deck or memo exists to act as the agenda for the meeting, any party that has a dissenting opinion must attend and is given the chance to argue their case.

Like a judge deliberating in a court room, the meeting owner does not ask for additional data and drag out the decisions, once each party makes their case a decision is made. This is disagree and commit at its best.

As a leader it’s worth noting there is always additional data to pull, facts to consider, but if the decision you’re making is a two way door make a choice and move on. This applies to 90% of the decisions you’ll make in any given year. Gather the minimum amount of facts needed to come to a conclusion, make a decision, revisit the impact when data is collected from the field.

Ambiguity

Ambiguity slows more teams down than anything else. There is a deep discomfort that comes as a human when you lack clarity on what winning looks like.

The good news is, as a leader, this problem is easy to solve. Often great leadership comes down to three things:

1. Communicating clearly

2. Prioritizing effectively

3. Being decisive

Think of each of those three items as a roadmap for removing ambiguity from your team in order to allow them to increase the speed of their execution.

From a communications perspective ask yourself two questions:

1. Have I clearly communicated what winning looks like (end state)?

2. Does my team understand the next deliverable we need in order to move the work forward?

If you can’t answer those two questions about a specific project or piece of work, stop what you’re doing and answer them. Put them in a Slack message, doc, or email (the written documentation is important) and send them to your team.

With regard to prioritizing effectively it’s important to note that the most important thing a leader can do for their team is to tell them what not to do. Effective prioritization is an exercise in subtraction, not addition. There is an inverse relationship between the number of projects / deliverables a team is working on and the speed and quality with which they’ll be able to accomplish that work.

While at first glance it seems counterintuitive, the more projects your team is working on the fewer they’ll be able to deliver. The deliverables will also be lower quality.

Use a simple Impact / Effort Matrix, take things off your team’s plate and let them get to work. This prioritization is also an excellent way to be decisive in practice.

Fear

The biggest way to remove fear as a barrier to your team getting work done is to own your own failures and the collective failures of your team. Slootman again:

I love the idea of, “neutralizing the idea of making mistakes” as a means to viewing those mistakes simply as data points which allow you to learn, course correct, and move on.

No one bats a thousand. The way you handle your own mistakes and the way you react when a member of your team makes a mistake ultimately dictates whether or not you’ve created an environment where your team is comfortable taking risk.

As a leader, own your mistakes and own those of your team. Anger, frustration, these emotions will not serve you when things inevitably go wrong. Seek to understand, learn, adjust your process, course correct, and get back to work.

Action is ultimately the only true antidote to fear.

Conclusion

Take a look at the structure of your team’s schedule, the way you communicate, and the culture you’ve created around mistakes on your team. Undoubtedly somewhere there is an opportunity to improve. Your goal should be to create an environment where you’re team is able to do great work quickly. A solid structure, lack of ambiguity, and removal of fear will allow them to do so.

Speed up.