Team toolbox: building a culture of continuous improvement
Whether you’re a newly forming team or a bonded squad who can finish each other’s sentences, embracing a culture of continuous improvement is a powerful ingredient to achieving elite team performance. Implicit in this is the idea that there is psychological safety (thank you Amy Edmondson for your work on this). Meaning, the team members feel comfortable raising questions, concerns and advice while also respecting the members are hard working and capable. For the new team it helps everyone work together on improvement, and gives people a chance to bounce back from setbacks which are bound to happen along the way. For more established teams, it keeps you from getting complacent and losing momentum. It also keeps your work interesting and fun.
Raise the bar. Oftentimes I find people will ask the question after a meeting or project, what did you think? And most people will politely say it was good or whatever platitude gets them onto the next thing. Start by picking a measure that means something powerful to people (stupendous, exceptional, phenomenal, extraordinary…. you get the idea) and then ask “what would have made that meeting or event exceptional?” And then listen and dig into the answers. Thank people and dream big as they share their ideas. This is about the Olympics after all. (Still dreaming apparently.)
Make learning routine. Why wait for a trainer to come once a year to dig into a topic? Most learning happens through experience, on the job. Find ways to build learning into your everyday interactions. At the end of a discussion ask, did we get everything out of the discussion we could have? What should we try next time to improve the results? Or, ask people at your team meetings to share their challenges, then pair people up to investigate and dig into it. Ask the team to create a library of lessons learned or work together on case studies once a month. The idea is to celebrate exploration and people raising challenges they face.
Run retrospectives. Whether you call them post-mortems, sunset reviews, or retros, the sad fact is many teams don’t do this. Or if they do, it’s imposed on them as a fire drill quarterly business review. One of my favorite parts of working with Agile teams is the retrospective. What is it? It’s a safe space for the team to sit down at the end of a cycle, usually every few weeks, and dig into what worked, what didn’t work, and what actions the team should try next time. It’s not about management, it’s not about producing reports, it’s about the team taking time to focus on improvement. I could go on and on, and I probably will since this topic is so rich, but I hope everyone thinks about ways to infuse this principle into their team’s practices. Not only does it do all kinds of great things to the quality of your work, but it makes it really wonderful to go into the office everyday. Happy teaming everyone!
