All seven of my previous books have focused on improving personal productivity at some level—for individuals, employees, and leaders. I still believe every professional should strive to improve his or her own productivity levels. But after twenty-five years as a productivity consultant and speaker, I've realized just how hard it is to improve your productivity if you're on a team of people who don't care about improving theirs. When you're surrounded by slow-moving individuals, you're stuck in a traffic jam of sorts.
Wouldn't you love it if everyone hopped into the FAST Team Car and raced away? That's why I've shifted my primary focus from helping team members become more productive individually to helping teams become more productive collectively, which is a hugely important distinction.
Throughout the book, as a valuable member of a team, I will encourage you to continually ask yourself questions such as:
“What can I do to make my team go FAST?”
“How can I personally remove the speed bumps that are slowing my team down?”
“In what ways can I take personal responsibility to save time for my team?”
“How can I help my team go FASTER TOGETHER?”
Think of this as the workplace version of President John F. Kennedy's famous statement: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Imagine how efficient your team would be if everyone on it adopted this mindset! Over time, team culture would change so that everyone would always be looking for the fastest way to help each other. This attitude emphasizes the reciprocal, collaborative nature of time. You work to save everyone else time, and they work to save you time.
WHAT IS A TEAM?
What one person calls a team may be different from another's definition. I define a team as a group of people who work cooperatively and collaboratively to achieve goals. The best teams are tight-knit groups of individuals who each have well-defined functions, ideally with a slight amount of overlap so that the team won't fall apart if one or two people go missing temporarily.
A team is distinguished from a work group in that a work group is more loosely defined, usually larger, and generally made up of individual contributors who coordinate their independent efforts; a team shares a common purpose and its members are reliant on each other to achieve their goals. The best teams possess a high level of morale and camaraderie, but they are willing to disagree if that disagreement ultimately shapes a stronger decision. All members of the team then work together to execute the decision.
Teams typically have a leader, though they can be self-contained. They don't always work in a single location; with modern communications, they can be distributed or virtual, with members all over the world. Teams may be large or small, but in the workplace, the best teams contain no more than twelve to fifteen members. Some authorities, like Amazon's Jeff Bezos, would argue that they should be smaller. Large teams become unwieldy because there are too many points of communication, which break down more easily.
By this definition, a two hundred–strong department overseen by a VP is not a team; rather, the department would consist of multiple teams. Some people would be members of more than one team. For example, the VP and her directors, a director and his managers, and a manager and her direct reports—all are teams. In this case, the directors and managers would belong to two teams each.
WHY BOTHER WITH TEAMS AT ALL?
In the modern office, workers deal weekly with hundreds of emails, constant communication, and seemingly endless meetings. These can be managed efficiently, or they can be a huge time drain. It all depends on how the team approaches them. The team can get the job done more quickly together than can any Lone Ranger. Yes, some sports teams have standouts who pull the team's ranking upward—Peyton Manning, Mia Hamm, and Stephen Curry come to mind—but they couldn't do their jobs without everyone else on the team supporting them to the best of their abilities. If you want your business to win the race, everyone must contribute. When done well, the team wins championships and outpaces all the other cars, just like the cover illustrates.
Thus, an important skill for any person in the workplace today is the ability to “team well.” We're all on formal and informal work teams, and while there are things involved with teaming that can potentially slow us down, they don't have to. Fast is the law of the modern business jungle. Race car driver Mario Andretti once said, “If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough.” While we don't want to be reckless, the team will have a sense of controlled chaos when you're doing enough, which is the same feeling you get when driving a Corvette to its true capacity.
Saving time is not just the responsibility of the team leader. Each individual team member must take personal responsibility for going faster. Certainly, the team leader can provide this book for each person on the team, especially if the team isn't firing on all cylinders, but the manager or supervisor becomes a team member/contributor in this process. The team will create its own results. Everyone is responsible for spotting and smoothing out what I call “Speed Bumps,” so they can go faster together.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
You can read this book solo and work to influence your team. If you lead a team, you can get some ideas on how to help your team become more productive. But the most effective use of this book is if the team works on the Faster Together program, well, together.
First, your team should appoint someone to lead your efforts as you work through this book together; however, that person doesn't have to be the formal leader. It can be the formal leader if you choose, but some teams are fairly self-managed, so this will vary. The leader of this program will be called the team “Car Chief.”
In a NASCAR pit crew, the Car Chief performs a majority of the scheduling and day-to-day preparations at the shop prior to the race weekend. According to Wikipedia, this person is “responsible for managing the crew throughout the weekend, ensuring that the car meets all of NASCAR's inspection requirements, and overseeing changes to the car requested by the crew chief or the team engineer.”
Who should be your Car Chief ? In general, the Car Chief can be anyone who's a go-getter, a self-starter, and ready to engage. That should be easy to figure out—who is your resident speed demon? Merriam-Webster defines “speed demon” as “someone or something that moves or works very fast.” In my mind, the term conjures up an image of the Tasmanian Devil or the Road Runner from the Looney Tunes cartoons. Usually he or she is apparent to everyone. It's the person who would be most excited about the team becoming Faster Together, and who constantly makes suggestions about how things can be better. You should all nominate this person.
The Car Chief will facilitate the Faster Together program using a special manual. You may also choose to purchase workbooks to accompany the book for each team member, which should be completed as you read this book. As you implement the program within your work teams and informal teams, this book and workbook will provide a blueprint on how to accelerate your collective productivity. These additional support resources can be found at www.fastertogetherthebook.com.
You'll bulldoze your team's speed bumps, fast-track your Team Car, and achieve greater results more quickly. Using this book, your team will learn to lead each other, pick each other up when someone falls, and work Faster Together.
