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Getting Things Done: How the Best Leaders Improve Team Productivity

August 9, 2018 by Guest Author 1 Comment

By Kayla Matthews

Whether you’re leading a team now or aspire to do so soon, productivity is essential, but it’s not always at a consistently high level.

That’s why it’s smart to learn from other leaders about what they’ve done to keep teams working together for the best possible output. Here are some tips.

Keep Meeting Sizes Small

Meetings are inevitable. And if people are asked the things they dislike the most about them, they’ll probably say the gatherings drag on too long or include too many people. To make his teams as productive as possible when they meet, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos institutes a “two pizza rule.”

It doesn’t mean pizza is a part of every meeting, but that if two pizzas could not feed the entire team attending a meeting, it’s too big. Keep that philosophy in mind when determining whether it’s really necessary for so many individuals to come to a gathering you’re planning.

Resist Rigidly Sticking to a Chain of Command

At many companies, there’s an obvious and enforceable chain of command people must go through when distributing messages or attaining information. However, when he sent out a letter to employees that revealed his productivity tips, Elon Musk warned that such a hierarchy was not appropriate for Tesla employees.

He emphasized that communications should go through the shortest path possible to achieve the desired result.

Furthermore, Musk said managers who tried to make employees stick to the chain of command approach would soon have to look for work elsewhere because they’d not be appropriate for Tesla’s culture.

Make Your Office a Comfortable Place to Work

It’s difficult for people to feel productive if they have to tolerate uncomfortable chairs, too much chatter in the office or an atmosphere filled with tension, backstabbing among colleagues and other types of stress.

Although there’s merit in thinking about the way your employees do tasks, it’s also necessary to take a close look at the environment and determine if there are things you could do to make it better.

When Laszlo Bock was the head of People Operations (the equivalent of human resources) at Google, he advocated for giving people freedom at the workplace while providing real-time coaching and forgiving people’s failures as long as they learned from the experiences.

When people feel happy at work, they’re an average of 12 percent more productive. And it’s easy to see why employees are more likely to be in good moods while they work in teams if you’re not hovering over them like a helicopter boss.

Consider enhancing comfort by investing in non-traditional office furniture too. While he was at Google, Laszlo said he didn’t use a desk but loved how his workspace had a couch plus a chair that flexed to allow various angles for a person’s knees and hips.

Encourage Teams to Give Input on How to Make Things Better

Many business leaders can tell there’s something not quite right about their teams’ performance levels but can’t put their finger on precisely what’s going wrong. When that happens, it’s easy to get caught in a cycle of unproductivity and make everyone involved feel frustrated.

Sometimes, though, the trick to getting out of the rut involves urging the team members themselves to give their thoughts on what to do. Mary Barra — the CEO of General Motors and first female CEO of a major auto manufacturer — does that with the team members who have earned her trust.

People see Barra as a person who does things differently in almost every aspect of her work by breaking well-established business rules if doing so gets the results that keep the company moving forward.

People familiar with the company say one example is the way that Barra empowers team members to make cases for the things they think need to happen for improvements to occur. She can make efficient and difficult decisions on her own but knows people on her team have potentially useful ideas too.

Recognize the Individuality of Team Members

It’s easy to take the common approach of attempting to improve team productivity by using a single popular managerial style, for example.

However, it’s often preferable to take the time to learn about each of your team members and understand that they have different traits and may get more done by capitalizing on those specifics.

Ursula Burns, the former CEO of Xerox, is a big fan of mentoring and discusses how she had mentoring during her career at the company that began when she got hired as an intern. Burns says her mentors taught her the importance of relating to people and the perspectives they offer and not trying to intimidate individuals by managing them all in the same way.

Burns had also described the Xerox team as being like a big family and made efforts to form close relationships with employees.

When leading your teams, strive to get to know the things that make the individual members unique. When appropriate, let them work in ways that cater to their preferences.

Better Productivity Is Possible

Throughout your leadership career, you’ll consistently look for ways to help increase team productivity. By learning from the leaders mentioned above and following their tips, you could reach a productivity high point.

 

About the Author: Kayla Matthews writes about communication and workplace productivity on her blog, Productivity Theory. Her work has also appeared on Talent Culture, MakeUseOf, The Muse and Fast Company.

Featured image: Photo by Helloquence on Unsplash

Filed Under: Productivity Tagged With: increasing productivity, team work

How Working Abroad Helped Me Start My Dream Business

September 28, 2012 by Guest Author Leave a Comment

by Kelly Dunning

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I Wanted to Do Something Amazing with My Life

Three years ago I left my home country of Canada to go work abroad. I had just graduated university with a pretty useless art degree and I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

The only thing I knew was that I was creative, loved to write and daydreamed about traveling the world. I wanted to do something amazing with my life, but I just wasn’t sure what it would be. So, instead of settling down into a “career” I applied for a work visa and bought a flight to New Zealand just to roll the dice and see what would happen.

Now I make a living as a full time freelance travel writer, which allows me to wander the world and work from anywhere I choose. In the past couple of years I have traveled and lived in New Zealand, England, Portugal, Italy, Scotland, the USA and Thailand and I am writing this from a hostel in Malaysia with many more Southeast Asian destinations in my near future.

How did the decision to work abroad allow me to create my dream business?

Being Penniless in New Zealand gave me the Idea

I had a job when I first arrived in New Zealand, as a tour guide in a creepy old prison on the North Island. It was there that I met Lee, a gregarious English guy who completely won me over with his down-to-earth charm. After a couple months of working on the North Island I wanted to see the South Island so I headed down to Christchurch where Lee happened to be working, having left the prison a few weeks before me.

My plan was to find a job in Christchurch as well, but things didn’t go as planned. I struggled to find full time work even though I was sending in applications every day. I found a part time job as a pub crawl host but that was only one night per week and my travel savings were quickly disappearing. I started to get more and more desperate and I began to think of any possible way that I could make some cash, including offering my gardening and babysitting skills on the local classifieds.

I remembered that my parents had mentioned a freelance writing website and I started to look around on the internet for places that I could find paid writing jobs. I was getting nowhere with my job search and writing random articles for a few extra dollars would be better than having to look under the couch cushions for enough change to buy lunch.

Sometimes it is only when you are in a situation where things start to get desperate that you are forced to think outside the box and try something unconventional.

I did a few little articles here and there and earned a few bucks. I started to like the idea of online writing, but I didn’t really take it seriously until the next stage of my working abroad adventure.

Working My Butt Off in England Gave Me the Drive

After we had lived in Christchurch together for a few months, Lee and I realized that our travel romance had the potential to be something more and he asked me to come back to England with him. I said, “why the hell not?” and I jumped on the plane to Manchester.

When I arrived, the first thing I did was take the first job I could find (I was penniless, remember?). I soon went from being unemployed to working 45 hours per week at a daycare facility plus Saturdays at the local football club. Although I enjoyed it and I was glad to have money again, it was hard work.

Meanwhile the little bit of writing work that I had done in New Zealand was beginning to grow into the odd article here and there. I kept at it, working on my writing during evenings and weekends. Between my two jobs and my writing projects on the side, I sometimes worked around 50-60 hours per week.

I started to realize that the conventional full time 9-5 job wasn’t for me but if I was going to be able to make a living on my own terms I would have to put in the work first to earn that freedom. I invested hours and hours into building up my freelance writing portfolio.

I worked more on my writing when I had to squeeze it in around a full time job than when I was unemployed and had all of the time in the world. That seems backwards, but it is true. Do you know the saying “if you want something to get done, give it to a busy person?” When I had all that time, I was lazy and stretched everything out so it took longer. When I was super busy, I needed to make every second count and I was more motivated to get stuff done.

When you fill up your plate with a lot of new challenges, sometimes you can surprise yourself with how energized you are to succeed.

Teaming up With a Fellow Adventurer Gave Me the Techniques

One of the most important parts of building up my dream business was not what I did while working abroad but who I met. I wouldn’t have been nearly as successful as I am now without my amazing partner Lee.

Our skills complement each other out because although I love writing I am not so good at the organizational and planning side of things. Lee’s logical business minded brain has helped me take my raw talent for writing and turn it into a business model that actually works. He helped me with solutions for time management, ways of organizing my work and my invoices, strategies for increasing my productivity, tools for recording my progress and so much more. My writing business grew in leaps and bounds and it started to actually look like a feasible source of income!

When you go take your business on the road and work abroad you end up meeting people who share the same goals as you and are able to offer you fresh insight that is vital to your success.

It took me just over a year from those first writing assignments in New Zealand to the day when I was able to quit my “day job” and start writing full time. That was over 18 months ago and we are still going strong as we travel around the world.

The experiences during my time working abroad were the essential catalyst to my success as a world traveling freelance writer, a dream job that I would never have created if I had stayed in one place.

Author’s Bio:
Kelly Dunning writes for Global Visas, the world’s leading authority on immigration and working holiday visas.

 

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Filed Under: Business Life, Successful Blog, Writing Tagged With: bc, increasing productivity, LinkedIn, self-employment, small business, working abroad

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