Smart Teams: How to Move from Friction to Flow and Work Better Together

This revised edition first published in 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd Level 4, 600 Bourke St, Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia

First published as Smart Teams: How to Work Better Together in 2018 by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd

© John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd 2023

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

ISBN: 978-1-394-19130-7

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Disclaimer

The material in this publication is of the nature of general comment only, and does not represent professional advice. It is not intended to provide specific guidance for particular circumstances and it should not be relied on as the basis for any decision to take action or not take action on any matter which it covers. Readers should obtain professional advice where appropriate, before making any such decision. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the author and publisher disclaim all responsibility and liability to any person, arising directly or indirectly from any person taking or not taking action based on the information in this publication.

About the author

Dermot Crowley is a productivity author, speaker, trainer and thought leader. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, and moved to Sydney, Australia, in 1993.

He has more than twenty-five years' experience working in the productivity training industry and has run his own business, Adapt Productivity, since 2002.

His passion for helping workers, leaders and teams to work in a more productive and balanced way has led him to work with many leading organisations around the World such as the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, PepsiCo, Walmart, Citi, Westpac, Deloitte, Allens Linklaters, Allianz and KPMG.

Dermot lives with his family in sunny Sydney. When not training or writing, he can be found in the kitchen practicing his other passion — cooking.

Acknowledgements

Book number two, like the dreaded second album, has been both incredibly fulfilling and more than a little challenging. Could I do it again? Was I a one-hit wonder? Was Smart Work even a hit? All of those doubts crept in at night, but of course there were lots of people behind the scenes to support me and keep me on track.

This is now a revised edition of book number two! As with my first book Smart Work, we believe that the lessons in Smart Teams are critical to working productively in the hybrid workplace that we now work in, and it was worth refreshing to ensure it maintained its relevance

First, a huge thank you to my family, who support me and create the space for me to do audacious things like write books. Finn, you inspire me and give my life meaning. Here's to many more mountains to climb!

To my family in Ireland. Not quite James Joyce, but not bad for a Dub! Thank you for always believing in me and talking me up to all at home.

To Vera, who has helped me to believe in the positive power of my message. You reflect the best version of me. Thank you.

To my team at Adapt — Tony, Chauntelle and Matt. I look forward to bringing Smart Teams to life with all of you. Thank you for supporting me while I wrote it.

To all of the Thought Leaders family. I am constantly inspired and driven by your amazing company. A special mention to my mentors, Matt and Pete. I would never have started this journey without your encouragement. Matt, focus is coming!

A big thank you to all of the amazing experts who contributed to this book through interviews. It was a blast, and I learned so much. Thank you, Colin, Matt, Donna, Lynne, Harley, Paul, Scott and Stephen.

Finally, to my Smart Support Team. Thank you to Kelly for project managing me and helping me transform a pile of rubbish into an elegant state. To the team at Wiley, thank you for trusting me again. Chris and Jem, it was great to work with you again. You make my words better. And to Lucy, who fought hard for a great idea.

And mostly, thanks to you, the reader. That you have invested your money and time in my words is humbling. I hope you find the return is great.

How to use this book

Like Smart Work, this book has been written with a practical focus. I want you and your team to do something different after reading this. I am sure you have the same aspirations, but I am also sure this is not the first business book you have bought. Did you implement your learnings from those other books as well as you had hoped? Maybe not. So here is my advice on implementing Smart Teams and starting to turn around your experience with the issues we will discuss.

Read it cover to cover, or flick through to the sections that grab your interest. Then try to identify the productivity issue that, if resolved, would have the greatest positive impact for your team. Focus on that first, and create a project to implement it straight away.

In chapters 2 and 3, I outline a process to help you and your team to decide on the most impactful productivity principles to focus on when working together. Make the time to do this exercise — it will have a real impact. In chapter 9, I propose a range of simple projects that you could implement with your team over the next couple of months to create and sustain change. I don't ask you to do them all — just pick one and implement it.

You will invest precious time and energy in reading this book. I know that is hard when you are so busy. You will then need to invest time working with your team to improve how you communicate, congregate and collaborate. Again, not easy when you are busy. But that is the point. You need to spend time to make time! Don't waste the initial time spent reading this book by doing nothing with it.

Buying this book was your first investment. Reading it your second. But implementing the recommended projects will be your third and most lucrative investment.

Introduction

Since publishing Smart Work I have had many conversations with clients about the best way to increase productivity across a whole team, or across an entire organisation. Individually, they loved the Smart Work approach, but they wanted to apply the concepts in a sustained way to everyone involved. This is far more complex than helping an individual increase their personal productivity.

Helping individuals to work more productively through a set of systems, processes and habits is a crucial starting point for increased team productivity. But to boost productivity across many workers in a sustained way we need to go beyond personal productivity and examine how we work together.

We need to look closely at how leaders, managers and team members communicate, congregate and collaborate, and ensure that everyone understands the impact that our poor work behaviours have on others' productivity. Finally, our leaders must take responsibility for creating a culture and an environment that will allow productivity to flourish in the long term.

No matter how great our personal productivity, and how good our intentions, every time we interact with others there is a risk that we will drag their productivity down, or that they will drag ours down.

This happens because we are busy, under pressure, tired and sometimes a bit lazy. We don't intentionally set out to hijack or kill our colleagues' productivity. Our work is complex, and we are human. And as we push hard to achieve our goals and deal with the everyday issues that come our way, we can leave a trail of collateral damage in our wake.

This is now especially true as many organisations move to hybrid and remote working models in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. As many of us moved to working remotely or working between home and the office, the volume of email noise and meetings only increased, while our ability to collaborate effectively became more challenging.

Can you relate?

I saw this first hand at an off-site team day for one of my key tech clients last year. I was presenting to the leadership team and their top 60 managers. I had been working with the executive team for several months, and this was the start of an initiative to drive the productivity principles to the next level.

It being a tech company, they all received a high volume of email. Most managers were getting 300 to 400 (some over 500) emails per day. This ludicrous volume of email was causing stress, missed deadlines and lots of rework, and was diverting the managers from the important work they should have been focusing on.

Midway through my presentation, their CEO stood up and asked, ‘How many of you feel like you are getting hammered by emails?’ Almost everyone put their hand up.

So the CEO said, ‘Think about this. Last month we were all at the half-yearly conference for three days. How many of you noticed that our email volume dropped to about a third of the normal level over those three days?’ Again, most raised their hand. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘Connect the dots for me. What happened there?’

Finally, someone in the audience said, ‘We were all in a room together, so we weren't sending emails to each other. So our email volume fell.' The penny dropped for everyone in the room: when it came to email volume, they were creating their own problems.

In their heads, they had been blaming external forces — their US head office, customers, suppliers. Everyone but themselves. But the reality was that they themselves had created an email culture that had gone wild.

Email was the preferred communication method, even to the person at the next desk. Everyone was CC'd on everything. ‘Reply All’ conversations were rife, sometimes generating 30 to 40 emails for each individual, even though the conversations were relevant to few of them. No wonder their inboxes were overflowing!

Many of those managers had already implemented the Smart Work system to manage their own productivity, but how could they possibly keep up when faced with the deluge of emails in their inboxes each day? How could they be expected to focus on the right stuff when they were drowning in the wrong stuff?

Personal productivity training was a part of the solution, but the greater need for the group was a shift in culture. A move away from the rampant email culture that had evolved over the years to one that used email in a more thoughtful way. A shift away from the ‘death by meeting’ culture to a more balanced one, with fewer meetings, involving fewer people, taking less time and achieving better outcomes. A shift away from a culture of complicated collaboration that just frustrated people, to one where great things were achieved when they worked together.

Having said that, this was a highly successful global organisation, so they must have been doing lots right. And they were. They got stuff done. But the costs of a less-than-effective productivity culture were high, including long hours, stress, lack of balance and high turnover.

The culture of our team and organisation often works against our efforts to be productive — and our leaders can be a part of the problem.

Productivity problems at the team level

Smart Teams is not about task lists or zero inboxes. While these are critical at the individual level, they are not the focus here. This book looks at how we can work together to solve the common issues that challenge our productivity daily.

There are four key productivity issues that we face when we work together in complex environments such as the modern corporate office.

1. Information overload

Hopefully you are not dealing with the extreme volumes of email faced by the managers in the earlier story, but I bet you are not too far from this! How many emails do you get each day? Fifty or sixty? Not too bad. One hundred? That is a bit harder to manage. Two hundred? Now you are feeling the pressure. More than that and you are officially drowning!

What started out as a simple, useful communication tool between academics has become a nightmare for many workers today. Don't get me wrong, I love email — just not too much of it. And it is not just email that is overloading us with information. Each day we juggle numerous other information systems, including instant messaging, phone calls, voice mail, collaboration tools, customer management systems and project dashboards.

We simply have too much information these days, and it’s sometimes difficult to turn this information into intelligence.

Studies have suggested that our stress levels start to elevate when we receive more than 50 emails daily — and that applies to most people I work with! We need to reduce the volume of emails and other information we send and receive. Most of it is just noise, and the signal is getting lost.

While taking advantage of the speed of communication and the easy access to information that tools such as email provide, we need to get back to a more focused way of working.

2. Too much time in unfocused meetings

Meetings are an important way for us to get work done, working with and through other people. But for some of us, especially senior managers, they have taken over our whole week, leaving us with little time to get anything else done.

These can be resource-heavy collaborations during which only one or two people in the meeting are actually doing the work, while everyone else watches on. There is an old Irish joke that sums this up well: ‘How many workers does it take to dig a hole? Six. One to dig the hole and five to stand around and watch.’ Meetings should not be a spectator sport. If you are not a player, should you even be there?

If not managed well, meetings can have adverse consequences. Your workday should strike a healthy balance between time working