How To Align Your Team, Continuously Improve Work, And Make Everyone Stronger
Every morning, I ask my team to stand in a circle to have a 5 minute meeting.
Everyone answers 3 questions:
- What did I accomplish yesterday?
- What will I accomplish today?
- What is in my way?
At the end of the sprint (in our case, one week of work), we review how we did.
This is called the Sprint Retrospective.
We look at how much stuff we did and whether we did the right stuff by asking two questions:What went well? (So we might replicate those things in the next sprint)What could we improve?From there, we turn the most notable things into action items, sometimes requiring teams to assemble around them.
It sounds straightforward and easy, but do you know what the hardest part about this is?
Not skipping the meeting.It feels like it’s just this one time or that we don’t really need to have the meeting because not that much stuff happened this week . . .
I’ve never run a Sprint Retrospective that hasn’t generated meaningful action items.
It’s this discipline, early on in your work that is the compounding interest of your project.By staying the course, you will continuously be aligned as a team, you will be focused on the right work, and you will have a team that feels capable in the face of challenges.
2 Minute Action
Since it’s Saturday, chances are you just finished a work week.Take today’s 2 minutes to ask yourself “what went well?” and “what could be improved?”
1% Vision and 99% . . . .
It's not hard work.It's not a tribe of mentors.It's not a monthly subscription to Harvard Business Review or a bank account flush with cash.It's not a Ph.D., it's not a good night's sleep, and it's definitely not the new Bowflex you just bought.You've heard that it's 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, but the amount of hours you're putting in isn't as important . . .It's alignment.Are your behaviors aligned with your vision?Is your team aligned with where you're going?You can work hard for 40 years, but if you're pointed in the wrong direction, the distance you've traveled means nothing.So have your vision and commit to the work, but don't forget to align your values and behaviors to the outcome.
2 Minute Action:
Where would you like to be in 5 years?Be specific. Car, house, job, title, salary, partner, teammates.How much do you travel? Where do you go? Who do you see? What do you say?Are you pointed in this direction? What is misaligned?What habits will you have to kick? Which ones will you have to start?Can you do it all at once? Which one is most important?Can you live with yourself for not doing it all at once?It's up to you how you get through this, but your brain has a lot of power over how you frame all of this.Remember that big, hairy, audacious goals are always made up of lots of small, actionable things."A year from now, you'll wish you had started today." - Karen LambCrush it, today.