Five Sure-Fire Steps to Get Your Whole Team Pulling Its Weight

According to data published in 1995, 31 percent of college-educated male workers are regularly logging 50 or more hours a week at work, up from 22 percent in 1980. About 40 percent of American adults get less than seven hours sleep on weekdays, up from 34 percent in 2001. For these folks, meals are rushed and lunches are choked down on the run. Yet a recent study by America Online and Salary.com says the average worker wastes 2.09 hours a day surfing the Internet, chatting with co-workers, running errands or making personal phone calls, costing employers about $759 billion a year in unproductive salaries.

What's going on? Businesses across America have downsized, eliminating large numbers of middle managers in a effort to streamline and increase productivity. The result is a few people, less than a third of the total, are doing a great deal more work. But many workers, what used to be called staff or direct labor, are coasting along just as they always have. Maybe even more so. As businesses have downsized and eliminated hierarchies, many have organized into interlocking teams. Often the problem is team leaders and a few team members the leaders can count on end up doing most of the work. Leaders are afraid to delegate, or perhaps they have tried delegating and found the ball gets dropped too often, and they end up the ones who take the heat.

It doesn't have to be this way according to Stephen Hawley Martin, author of a new book called "Lean Enterprise Leader: How to Get Things Done without Doing It All Yourself." Here are the five steps he cites to get a dysfunctional team clicking like a it's on the way to the Super Bowl:

1. First establish ground rules. Have the team meet and agree on rules for the team such as being on time, frequency of meetings, and informing others immediately if an agreed upon deadline will not be met. These become bylaws that can be posted publicly and placed in a team handbook that serves as a public record.
2. Use Action Reports to assure accountability and to create urgency to complete tasks. Rather than rambling minutes of meetings, only tasks the team has decided on need to be documented. Who is responsible, and the agreed-upon completion date, must be clear. Copies of these Action Reports should be distributed to all team members and to the executive in upper management responsible for the area of the business in which the team operates.
3. Each team meeting should begin with an Action Report review. Those who were assigned tasks must give a report on where they stand. This will create peer pressure to perform, as will the task-owner knowing upper management is aware of what the individual has taken on and is supposed to accomplish.
4. Action Reports should include the good and the bad and be updated after each meeting. When commitment dates are met, this should be noted. When they missed or moved, this should be clearly indicated as well.
5. Make everyone aware Action Reports will be used at review time. They document the history of performance for each team member and should be referenced and used as such.

Click here to learn more about the book "Lean Enterprise Leader: How to Get Things Done without Doing It All Yourself."

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