Some time ago someone asked me:
How do you make your teams have more coherence and communication?
Although it involves many things, in my experience, I have found that cultivating these 4 things helps success:
- Ownership
- Continuity
- Cadence
- Consequence
With Ownership I emphasize being a participant, committing myself, being a professional, an owner, a master; to ACTIVELY GET INVOLVED.
We have to understand that if we decide to participate in a project it is to get involved and be aware of the events from beginning to end. It is valid to delegate the work but we always have to soak up WHAT and more importantly WHY things are being done.
As managers we have the responsibility to know the status of each initiative, as leaders to guide and support our teams in them and as participants to clearly communicate the events.
If we do not pay attention more than when there is a problem, are we doing our job? or if we stop our necks when it has finished well but we never attended, did we succeed?
By Continuity I mean the punctual follow-up of commitments and agreements, to have an understanding of the events in time in a logical way.
The intention of emphasizing continuity is to increase effectiveness; a lot of time is wasted having a meeting where we bring up issues that had already been concluded with agreements and commitments.
However, the importance of continuity falls mostly with people and the importance we give them. This is reflected a lot during the 1-1 when following-up to their concerns, requests, problems or any situation of importance to them.
It should be remembered that the most important thing is the PEOPLE and that, as leaders, our work is to help them become a better version of themselves.
I define Cadence as the rhythm and constancy, the routine that works for each team
The point is, you have to generate positive routines or habits. It is of utmost importance to define the points of contact, review and feedback.
Asking for status updates every day at the beginning and at the end, every 3 days or even every week when they are complex tasks is to fall into micromanagement and saturation, we will spend more time reporting than working and we will only generate unnecessary stress.
On the contrary, giving a list of tasks and not reappearing until the next visit of the Pope or having delegated and trusting blindly without any review until the end of a given project is a total disengaging that undoubtedly will cause conflicts.
Each project is different, and the people who work on them are too, that is why it is important to reach common agreements and commitments that we can trust while continuing to follow up.
Consequence is any reaction to a given action or situation.
Any conclusion must generate at least experience and learning.
In terms of goals and objectives, performance, and deadlines, it is important that SOMETHING happens depending on the outcome; from the recognition (positive) to the call of attention (negative).
However, not everything is about reward or punishment, being professionals means doing our work with the expected quality because it is the agreement we reached but we must always keep in mind that we can make mistakes and fail, that it is not the end of the world, but in the end we must take actions as simple or transcendental as should be.
All of this requires a lot of coordination, memory, empathy, discipline, etc. etc. Personally, it is around these points where "I have been able" to maintain a certain coherence and effectiveness in the teams.
These are not the only concepts, nor the most important ones such as Empathy and Compassion (which I will talk about in the next post) but they are points that I consider important to always keep in mind.