A team I know set up a project management system. It was very light: a short list of the work, an owner on each item, and a status to change when something happened.
A few weeks later, the list and the work didn’t match. Nobody skipped it on purpose. That team did its work together, in the same room, and made its calls and moved things forward while everyone was sitting there. Updating the system was a separate job, done alone, at some other point in the day, and their week had no such point.
The system was light enough. It didn’t get used because it wasn’t in the path of the work.
Two small steps that worked
A team I was on started listing its decisions in a shared spreadsheet. Four columns: the decision, the date, who made it, and who would take the action by when. The list turned out shorter than any of us expected, and the team stuck to what was on it. We spent less meeting time asking “what did we decide?” and making the same call again.
As a leader, I added one step before my semi-annual reviews. Before I read each person’s outputs, I looked at their Working Genius, the model from Pat Lencioni and The Table Group that sorts work into what gives a person energy, what they do well without the energy, and what drains them. It changed what I saw in the outputs, and it made my coaching better.
Both steps were small. Neither one asked anyone to learn a system or buy licenses.
What the two that worked had in common
It’s reasonable to believe that the lighter a step is, the more likely people are to use it. Lightness matters. A step that costs more than it saves won’t last, however good the idea behind it.
Both of the steps that worked were also attached to something already on the calendar. The decision list got filled in during the meetings where the decisions were made. The Working Genius step happened inside the review I was already sitting down to do. Nobody had to find a new time for either one.
The tracking system asked for a new time. For a team that did all its work together in one room, a solo update later in the day was a new habit with no place in the week.
A step gets used when it happens inside work people are already doing.
Where to put your one step
Pick an occasion that already happens. The weekly team meeting, the one-on-one, the review, the Friday wrap-up. Choose one that already has the people and the attention the step needs.
Add the step inside it. If your team decides things in a meeting, open the decision list on the screen in that meeting and fill it in before anyone leaves. If you review people twice a year, do the extra step at the start of the review that’s already on the calendar.
Check the placement when it gets skipped. A step that keeps getting skipped is usually sitting outside the way the team works.
Move the work before you conclude that people don’t care or are resisting the process.
For the team in the room, the version that would have fit was the same list, open on the screen while they worked, updated out loud as things moved.
A process that asks for the update somewhere the team isn’t already working will get an out-of-date record from even the most careful team. On the team I was on, four columns filled in during meetings we were already having gave us back the time we’d spent deciding things twice.
If you want a read on where your own work is losing its decisions and context, the diagnostic takes about 10 minutes: Take the diagnostic