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So welcome everybody to our latest episode of the Business breaks podcast where we discuss trends and strategies for maximizing team productivity. I'm Dante Healy and I'm joined by my co host, john Byrne will be discussing the different techniques, strategies that managers can use to boost team productivity in this will be sharing our insights on how to create a productive and efficient team. So grab your coffee and join us as we explore this topic of maximizing team productivity. So john to start the discussion, can you share with us what you believe are the most important elements to consider when trying to maximize team productivity to be honest, I think it's at the very beginning, it's, it's getting the right team in place. The team is wrong, there will be no productivity, you'll be fighting losing battles all the time, so you have to get the right people in the, in the right positions on the team and the bright people don't necessarily have to the, the absolute best people, good people with good manager. You know, it's the old adage, it's the total exceeds the sum of the parts and and that's a good team, that's a productive team when the total exceeds the sum of the parts, you know that don't need, it doesn't need to be a team full of superstars that can often get in the way, you know, that that can often be a bad thing, it's a team but everybody needs to be competent, know their role, be good, not great as such, but be good in the role that they have and then all brought together as a team, working together where the total will exceed the sum of the parts. And that to me is that is the ideal situation with a good manager of the team. Regardless of whether that team is a project, team was brought together for a project or whether that team is the business as usual team that's going to be constantly on an ongoing doing the work to get a successful and productive team is get the right people in the, in the positions. Yeah, that's so true. And it's not always having someone who is fully qualified, sometimes you need that blend of experience levels because you want some people who are able to grow into the role as much as people who are willing to hit the ground running even on a project. It's funny actually that I think if managers were more savvy, they'd be able to get undervalued talents purely because when you get people who optimize their CVS and optimize their interviewing technique, you don't really test for their capability to do a job, basically what you're almost selecting on the basis of is their ability to market themselves. So there's always this risk, you can get someone who's overvalued, but who doesn't perform and then in terms of the mix of talents, it's actually funny trying to fill a team full of superstars is actually in a lot of cases counterproductive because they may have the same set of skills and they may be competing with each other for the same types of tasks, roles and jobs. And you know, in organizations, there was that film called Moneyball which was starring brad Pitt, who played a character called Billy Beane and it showed it was an interesting movie. I don't know if you've seen it, it was based on baseball and it was basically looking a team that actually competed quite highly in baseball, but not through having a high budget and hiring superstars, they instead look for under talent and made strategic decisions about the positions they needed. And looking for people who could actually perform by breaking them down into into maths equations. So I think in the corporate world that may have similar connotations, if you're looking for people who are there to do a very technical job maybe, but also be able to work together, so have enough interpersonal skills, having communication and have the right attitude in order to progress those key objectives. And I think as well, one of one of the key positions is the manager of the team, if you have a bunch of good people doing the roles that are good at, but to get them together and to get them, you know, that the total to exceed the sum of the parts is down to the manager and I think that's in my experiences, that's where I got my personal experience. I mean, from what I've seen in other things that, you know, not criticizing managers, that I've had some of them very, very good, you know, but in general where I see weaknesses are with the managers and and the large part of that is because frequently, you know, I'm sure you've seen it yourself and the listeners are probably in, the manager ultimately gets promoted from being very good, technically, and they get promoted up to being the manager of people, but they're not given any kind of training or mentoring, how to manage. And that's a very different, it's a very different role, it's a very different mindset, you know, it's um, you know, if you're the chief, the best widget maker in the world and you know, there's one of two places that often that type of person will get promoted to. One is they'll be promoted over all the other widget makers, but their expertise is actually making is the technical side of things. So then what they start doing is micromanaging, they start interfering with the people that report to them and how they're doing the role and that, that breeds, you know, you know, frustration and with the team or the other role that they'll often get is they'll be, they'll be moved over and put as head of the widget design team because they've been using them so that, you know, they have that little practical expertise to go to design. But then the issue is that they have no experience with design, not only do they not have no experience with managing, they have no experience with design. And what I've seen in situations like that, when somebody kind of gets promoted up to a tan gentle management role, is they frequently and I have come across this in some instances they will, in order to give the semblance of being in control, they will start trying to hog an awful lot of stuff that they really shouldn't be doing and then become a bottleneck. They don't really know what they're doing. So they're afraid to let the experts do their jobs, they start pulling a lot of the stuff and so I think keep it, you know, it gives them a semblance of control that's fake, it's not real. They don't really have control because they don't know enough about it. And they've just been frustrated, the whole team thrown everything off because they're they're bottleneck now, they and their biggest two biggest challenges to biggest weaknesses I've seen with teams when they have the right people in place, it's the manager. And the answer to that is, in my opinion is you train the manager when you promote somebody to be a manager, you should make sure they have training and how to manage people and if you're the person who got promoted and your, your bosses, your company has not given you that training then requested because you know, some people are just natural managers so when they get promoted into it, they're very good without training. But most people, most of us aren't, you know, either get training at the beginning or you will have to learn through experience. But that learning core can cause a lot of friction. So it's better to get some kind of mentoring or training or Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Sorry to interrupt you john, but when you're, when you're managing, you know what really frustrates me is every time I see a post about leadership versus management and it paints management as bad and that's why I've kind of gone off agile because of the way some of the purest paint managers has been the root of all evil because they think, oh no leaders fix things and managers make equal upset, demoralize etcetera because they're probably, as you say, it's the bad managers that get a bad rap. Give the rest of us managers a bad rap. Especially project management. I mean a huge part of it is communication and being able to problem solve and support the team. It has that leader servant leadership type of model where you can be someone who actually unlocks things helps people problem solve when they're stuck and just generally keep an orderly ship. But unfortunately, in some organizations, they don't reward people who are not making noises. So it's almost like you have to create a disaster in order to fix it and then be remembered be recognized for having identified and resolve some issue. Whereas the managers who are doing their and actually probably proactively preventing things from happening, they tend to be working quietly in the background with very little visibility, rightly or wrongly. And I guess in terms of teams, the importance of team cohesion. But does that go to, does that go to a point where it's not as effective? Because if you're running, say, an efficient ship, do you get to the point where you do fall into to some form of, shall we say, what's the word? I'm looking for stability? Like it becomes too comfortable and you're almost complacent. So you become you create a legacy, you create a structure that is just built on status quo. It has worked for yesterday's competitive environment, but it doesn't prepare you for tomorrow or even the early murmurings of to does that make sense? Yeah. I just just wanted to go back to something that you mentioned at the beginning, the difference the leader and manager and leaders fix things and managers and I and I think that's a bad thing. If the leader is fixing things, you know, a leader should lead, but neither manager nor a leader should be fixing things. The experts that you've got on your team, they're the ones to fix things and the manager just helps manage them to work together to make sure that the right things are being fixed. And if it leader is fixing things then there's problems with the team because it shouldn't require the leader to take that kind of charge. Leader doesn't necessarily have to be a manager. A leader might be on the team, he might be the superstar on the team. Who who? Yes, he will fix things, but he's not fixing them on his own or she's not fixing them on her own. They're bringing the team with him and helping raise the bar that the teams then. But the manager needs to be there to make sure it's productive, you know, yourself from, from certain I know you have many examples that, of situations where, you know, politics comes in and people try to make themselves look good by undermining their teammates. That's up to the manager to make sure to stamp their how manager wants competition within the team is that somebody has done their job that really well. But the other people don't feel they have to raise the bar on their jobs. And the whole team then rises up as you know, standards rise up for the whole team together, working together. The internal competition is good competition. They're not trying to undermine each other. They just see somebody do a really good job and think right now, I have to raise my level up to that, and that's the manager does that because even the leaders on the team, that the manager may not be the leader on the team, Manager does not have to be the leader on the team. Manager has to be the manager of the team. Good manager. And that's where I was kind of trying to get to the difference between management and what got you to be a manager. It's very few people that are managers, they were something else forced and they were really good at it and then became a manager and there's a very different mindset there that, you know, they probably think being the manager now I'm the leader. Now I have to fix things and show the rest of the team how to fix things and we'll know the rest of the people on your team, should be good enough to do that job themselves, you need to manage them and manage the competition on the team to bring the best out of everybody and let them solve the problems many years ago when I first got promoted into management, I was very nervous because I I didn't think I was up to it. I mean, I was promoted on the basis of my performance as a technical specialist, but I hadn't hadn't the confidence actually. The other thing was I was ending up having to lead my peers and be responsible for them and these were people who were my colleagues, we were at the same level. So that felt a bit weird. I spoke to a friend of mine at the time who I trusted and he said the only thing you need really is empathy and you got bags of that. And actually the majority of the issues you have to have to solve for as a manager is the people issues. There's always friction between different personality types. People who want certain tasks, especially when you're distributing the work and trying to get people to move in the same direction. But also thinking about the development of the team, thinking about meeting their needs in the best way possible. So the needs of balancing the needs of the individual versus the needs of the collective to try and not just achieve short term goals, but also think about long term continuity as well. And some of that also involves really structuring your organization whilst allowing some degree of flexibility to do things that will make your team's life easier. So things like procedures, they're all boring jobs, but we have to do them or at least plan for them. Occasionally, once a year, we'd review our processes. I go through it and sign them off. And yeah, housekeeping, housekeeping was always important. You didn't want stacks of paperwork piling up in the office and you didn't want to see a mess in your office either. And I think as well, you kind of mentioned the manager trying to sort friction between the team, but also, as you mentioned, area complacency, the manager needs to sort of complacency that they might not be friction team might get on really well together, but they become complacent and they're not, they're not competing with each other to raise the bar. You know, the they're they're they're just cells. And the manager then needs to try and figure out how to introduce some friendly competition. You don't want to, you know, the death of the team is when you introduce people trying to undermine each other to make themselves look good. But what you want to do is get people to try and to try that little bit harder to make themselves look good and then everybody else will, will raise their bar that little bit more and help each other and help each other to look good. Then you've got a brilliant team and that's on the manager usually, you know, you will get exceptions where the team just are all friends, really trying to help each other and doing that and the manager just needs to stay out of it. But oftentimes, you know, the team is are strangers, you know, outside of work, they aren't together, which means well, it can be very good there. They don't have the same motivation to help each other and that's the manager needs to try and promote that, encourage that and reward that. Yeah. And there's another thing about rewards, If you if you're not responsible for the compensation and have no discretion on how you distribute, say pay rises and bonuses because all that's done centrally through HR and or, you know, HR committee built up of you and your peers, then it gets into those toxic politics again. So you have the collaboration, the strategic alliances. And I had to play that game as well because, you know, it was question of Give and Take. I'll support you on this candidate or this proposal. You back me up on that and some of those had to be discussed outside of the meetings. That's the reality that if you wanted things done, you had to prepare and you had to plan in advance. So if you knew people were susceptible to your suggestions, you needed to make sure you were buttering them up over a period of months, even years in order to get them to back you when you needed those favors in order to promote your own talents within an organization where resources are constrained and you definitely need to have those supporters and alliances when you go into a meeting, Otherwise it's like bringing a knife to a gunfight the collective or jump on you if you're not prepared. So in some cases there were times where I test the waters in terms of promoting a candidate, if they didn't feel confident, I couldn't do it. So you have to also manage expectations. If a team member is ambitious and they're hard working. If they haven't been investing in their internal reputation and also those relationships, then it's a harder job for you as a manager to secure the rewards should always say. And the resources to keep them motivated, at least in terms of compensation. There are other things you can do to motivate them, such as give them opportunities. But there are certain things you have to realize what's within your discretion and what is in terms of rewards. How can they help you? And same with me, I had to help my manager or leader in terms of making it easier for them to promote me as a person. And sometimes if you don't play the politics game, what I found is it becomes harder to get things done. The key thing I think in playing the politics game is you need to try and do well for yourself, promote yourself, celebrate your your achievements and not trying to undermine other people. If you reach the stage of politics where not just make yourself look good, you have to undermine a teammate or a colleague or whatever, then I would suggest you need to leave the company and go somewhere or else because you're no longer good enough there. You can't, you know, if that's what you're having to do in order to make yourself look good is to make other people look bad. You can't compete, then you're you're just getting it's somebody will be able to make you look worse than you can make them look. And that's not a good way to be. So you'll always be trying to get involved in politics. Just work on making yourself look good. Don't try to make anyone else look bad. And that can mean making other people look good as well. So if you're part of a team, you make the team look good. You don't just make yourself look good, you make the whole team look good and you know, you will be kind of, you will be noticed if your team is doing well, you will be noticed. Even if you don't stand out from the team, everybody on, that team will be noticed, including you. And then if you want to take an opportunity to so he's on that or she's on that very successful team. And as a key member of that team, let's give them the opportunity. And in fairness, a lot of those people who are toxic usually get managed out one way or another or else they fine that their team members can no longer tolerate them. So they avoid them. So they get less support when it's needed. So it's about playing the long game. In terms of those relationships, you don't want to build your self a reputation for throwing people under the bus or stabbing them in the back because it becomes harder to get things done through people unless you make it to the top, you're promoted and then it's just coercion, right? And authority every time you need something, you have to threaten with a stick, which I am, you can get touring over time. And the thing is as well, most, even the biggest industries and that they're still be relatively small world. You know, you can pick whatever you think is the biggest industry worldwide. But the fact is, you're not going worldwide, you're going to be in a certain area and we're in that area, it's still a small industry, which means if you create a reputation yourself as being toxic, that reputation will leave the company or in and we'll go to reach out to other companies, they'll know about you when you come looking for a job for a great opportunity somewhere else. Later on, you know, the reputation will be there and they will know about it if they do any kind of research, because most industries are small, certainly at a local level, and most people going at a local level, it's unusual for you as whatever position you are to then go for in the same industry on your side of the wars, It will be somewhere in your current region. Even if you're willing to move, you're not willing to, you're not moving thousands of miles away, You're moving, you know, maybe 100 200 miles away max. And so people will know about it. So it'll backfire. You make a short term game initially, but eventually it will become obvious to everybody you're the toxic person. So, so I wouldn't recommend that as a team to make yourself look good at the expense of other people. Make yourself look good by helping the other people. Because even though you're benefiting them, you were getting the benefit if you're, you know, they are praising you behind your back and it's better than people praising you. True. You don't want to bust your reputation because the world is too small ultimately. And those toxic people are probably struggling and stuck where they are. So they have to keep fighting the good fight or the bad fight, depending on how you call it. But yeah, I think probably we should move on from toxicity towards what really moves the needle when you're talking about teams now we've talked about cohesion, we've talked about the mindset of a manager who can effectively marshal the resources in order to achieve those outputs. Is there something to be said for measurement? So you manage what you measure, Right? So what type of KPs or even Okay, are shall we say should managers apply in order to make sure they understand our my team performing? I think a lot of our idea was a consultant, One of the elements of it is our KPI S one of the key things. We tend to suggest the KPI s are that they're not that with some exceptions, they're not really done on an individual basis, that they are done on a team basis. For the very reason that if you do it on an individual basis, individuals who just care about their a KPI and will not help the rest of the team. Whereas if you do it on a team basis, every nobody is rolling in together and helping each other because it's to raise the team KPI. So that would be whatever KPI as you choose, A lot would depend on what the team does, what the industry is and all that. But do them at a team level rather than an individual level. Now, if you're the manager of that team, you will probably be keeping an eye on individuals how they're helping contribute to the overall team KPI s. But the key thing would be not, you know, certainly the company level not to allow the company to be measuring individual KPI s, make them measure team KPI is to get your team working together to raise the whole team's KPI. That would be a big thing because that's that's where you get dane dangerous things. I mean, the classic example being three am, when they introduced, they were one of the most creative companies in the world with some of the stuff that came up and then they introduced the KPI where they had to, the people have to hit a certain amount of patents every year, the quality dropped off the board and everybody hit the KPI but they were just patent and it's just volume, not quality and that's the problem. Whenever you do some form of transformation or real, I mean tangible quality improvement process improvement or cost reduction effort, it tends to normally all tied back to improving quality and therefore avoiding rework. I mean that's where you get efficient, truly efficient without having to just paper over the cracks, cut a few heads and then the followings few months or six months down the line, you end up having to invest because things have gone backwards instead of forward because it wasn't a real efficiency. That makes sense. It was just just window dressing. The classic. I think Garrett right. First time you don't have to worry about, you know, dealing with dissatisfied clients or customers whether they're internal or external to the company and you don't have to waste time doing the same thing again to get it right now. That can be aspirational depending on the things. Sometimes it's not possible to get things right, but that's what you should be aspiring to correct your processes, fix your processes. So that case and you know, make small improvements constantly what your goal is unless you're in a disruptive environment and therefore there is no normal, you will never get stability because everything is changing all the time. I think the way you can apply a kaizen is if the process doesn't change for a period of time and then you have the time to improve it. If the processes and strategic goals are always changing, then you have problems or at least problems in terms of locking inefficiency, because you've got nothing to lock to. And that's another issue where we can go up the up the ladder to leadership. What are the priorities if you start changing things all the time, Mish, mashing everything up and then trying to leave your mark, say for example, the guy at the top has moved on for whatever reason and then they're replaced. The new guy decides, hang on a minute, I want to leave my mark. So I think this is the right way to do it. So everything wholesale changes and you've already gone halfway through a project or some sort of initiative and then suddenly that scrapped, we all need to do something completely different that can get chaotic as well and that will certainly impact team productivity. So I guess we have to be careful in terms of what are we optimizing for? Are we optimizing for change or are we optimizing for stability in terms of change? Are investing in a different set of capabilities and talents and skills versus having someone who's probably, I guess it's the comparison between agile versus tailoring is um and scientific management where tailoring is um, is like the ford production line, nothing changes. Everyone has a very small part of the overall process, but they specialist in that, whereas with agility, it's about having a team that has a broad set of skills and a specialization, ideally a specialization in one area where they know enough to collaborate and deal with that uncertainty, such as a new problem and challenge with that will also obviously, I coming back from my kind of consultancy idea, more small medium sized companies walk off the stages of growth methodology and a lot of that as well depends on your stage of growth. So like a stage one company wants 10 employees. Chaos is basically, it is what it is and you know, you just have to embrace the chaos. There's no point in trying to set out big procedures and policies and that that that type of level, because everybody has to do a little bit of everything. But then as you grow, you can't have that type of chaos as you grow. You then scale, you need to be, you need experts, you can scale effectively. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, so, you know, that you can kind of give two polar opposite agile versus you know, the tailoring, both answers are correct. It depends on the company and the context. Yeah. And then within the company, even within a large company, you may have a team who's in an area where they need to be as agile as that because they it's chaos in that area, not in the company as a whole, but whatever they do, perhaps they are, you know, a specialist project team that their clients are, you know, in the state it looks so they have to be able to be very agile to react to whatever state. And then you have others, you know, who are on the production line or something else that needs to be standardized completely because you need to get the same answer regardless of who the client is, that has to come out the same every time. You know, the challenge is knowing where you fit on that. It's not, it's not two points. It's a line between them and you're somewhere on that edging towards one or the other and you need to kind of, you know, a good leader, a good manager will be able to pinpoint roughly what area on that line. They are just contradicted pinpoint and then saying what area, but you know, you're in a region on that, on the line from one extreme to the other and getting that right will make a big part of how you manage the team and who should be on the team. Whether it should be a bunch of generalists, whether it should be a bunch of specialists where there should be a mix of specialists or the mix of generalists and specialists. You know, depends on circumstances as well as goals. Yeah, totally. And it's again, I think that reminds me when I mentioned tailoring is um, I remember working for an automotive company and well at the time it was relatively recently acquired, we were renovating the company, We were transforming it, upgrading it whatever you want to call it. And we implemented a best in class manufacturing system actually based on the production systems of a very famous japanese company, but we created our own flavor of it and that was based around lean manufacturing. And again, a lot of that was based on setting standards, having a mindset of continuous improvement, pursuing perfection and then eliminating waste. And a lot of that was around creating flow states, identifying what was the standard, making sure the team understood the standard and could adhere to it. And also continuously evaluating were those standards sufficient to meet the requirements of the business? So that was a very efficient pro process. But thinking about kind of comparing that with agile and you needed to have that stability on the underlying process because you imagine manufacturing a vehicle is a very, very complex task. You have so many thousands of components, tens or even hundreds of thousands of parts, all of them interconnected. So if you miss one or you get one wrong, the risk was you were losing potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars per day in production stoppages or quality recall issue. There was a huge tail to it around health and safety as well as the financial consequences and ultimately brand reputation. If you don't have a brand, you don't have a business. But then I think I'm thinking rather large scale, but it's the same principle. It's about what is your success? How do you define it and how do you meet those criteria in order to be successful and looking at the resources of your team? The people in your team don't want to call them resources because it makes them, it almost objectifies people as I'll move it there or I'll move it there, I'll reassign it there and they're like chess pieces, right? But it's about how do you combine the team, How do you place them and how do you align their skill sets and their traits in the best positions so that collectively you can perform at a higher level and in business, it's all about competing, identifying who your competitors are. What's the game? What's the definition of success and what's your strategy? What's your playbook in order to achieve that success you're looking for and for your procedures and policies are not getting the right blend of between flexible and inflexible. You know, there's certain things that need to be done a specific way, especially if you're dealing with, you know, pharmaceuticals are and to do help, you know, like manufacturing of a vehicle, you know, there's no flexibility there, this has to do this way. Other things. There's a fair bit of flexibility, but you don't want complete open flexibility. You kind of want chaos. You kind of want your procedures to be a guide that yes, there's flexibility within the guides, but it'll get you in the right direction. But you don't have if if it's possible. As I said, with things like pharmaceuticals, for even food manufacturing and that there are certain things, there's no flexibility there. Regulations, regulations. Exactly. Health and safety hygiene, things like that. You you cannot compromise. There's certain things that are non negotiable, There's certain things that don't change as well. But for everything else to build in a little bit of flexibility so that your procedure is a guide to give your superstars a chance when there are or to give your team your good team members, when they raise everybody, you know, everybody's game gets raised up that they have that little bit of flexibility to just add a little, you know, uniqueness to it because that could end up being your advantage, your critical advantage. This is where they talk about diversity of teams doesn't necessarily mean diversity of ethnicity, but certainly diversity and of thinking diversity in demographics, diversity and attitudes, diversity of skill sets. So you have different perspectives that hopefully create some new ways of achieving things. And that's what we talk about in terms of process innovation. Exactly, yeah, I think diversity of mindset and background is very, very important because if everybody comes from the same background, same education thinks the same way, there'll be no innovation there. And chances are even if it's really, really good at the beginning, everybody else will catch up with them and overtake them and they, because they all think the same way in the same manners and so, you know, have that diversity. I'm not talking about anything by natural thing, chances are that will just cover all other types of diversity that's required, you know, people from different backgrounds with different ways of thinking with different education, different experiences all come together with a good manager to get them all walking together, not trying to show over each other. We're trying to okay, this is my experience. This is your experience. Let's see now between the two of us can come up with an even better way of doing things. My way might not be the best, your way might not be the best. But between us, we probably come up with a better than either. That's the key to a really successful team I think is is walking together like that and in defense of agile as well. Daily stand ups, I've found have been great in terms of allowing everyone to voice their voice, their opinions and views and also simple but powerful. What have you done? What are you planning to do and what's blocking you? Very simple, very, very communicative and also it fosters collaboration because then if there is a blocker, someone else from the team might say, I have something that I think could be a solution. Let's talk offline another kind of methodology that you use that 1 to 1 between the manager and people who report in. But the key thing there is that they should be fairly regular, you know, maybe once a month there. But the key thing with them is that that those ones ones they're not you're not assessing, you're not, you know, it's not a performance review, it's a mentoring. Mean, the manager is going to be mentoring the and both people are responsible for it and, you know, questions for them type of thing would be, you know, what's working, what's not working, what can we do to improve what suggestions you have, you know, in their methodology that's therefore kind of standards of it. And, you know, there you're working with things like, like you were suggesting earlier, you need to help your manager to promote you across the business and that that's where that would come out with the 1 to 1, you know, is the training that you need that we can try and get you involved in. You know, what, what can we do to help, you know, that it's those types of questions. 1 to 1 meeting is a very good one monthly. It's a recommended thing on the re wilding methodology that I use my consultancy and it is so very important. I've used them long before in previous companies that was in myself. But the key thing is it's not a performance review. Often people will think 1 to 1, that's the performance review, No, monthly want to, one is mentoring, you know, the manager should be the mentor of the employee for that, for that, for that meeting and afterwards, you know, just follow ups that every, both people, both people are responsible for, both. People have to say what they think is going well, what they think is not, you know, what's working, what's not working from both points of view and have suggestions from both sides and it's come to it because you could find out many things there that, you know, that that is a very different ideas of what's working and what's not working so much to the extent that you may find that what one person said is working, your person has in their list for, it's not working, is to make sure everybody's on the same page. What's mentoring? Not performance? Obviously though, if you're doing it well, it will lead into the performance review being very good because there's no surprises if there were people were going off kilter, well, the mentoring will have brought them back on long before, but that's, you know, apart from the, the, that you suggested there for making a team work, that's a good one as well. If you've got a team, have one to ones at least once a month for each of your direct reports. Remember mentor, not as a performance review, that becomes harder with the daily stand up to be fair, but at least weekly or even every two weeks, you should have a connect offline with your team members. I think you're right, it does help give them perspective on where they are, how they compare against their peers. And I remember even in the performance reviews there were people who certain managers were promoting and by promoting, I mean endorsing for opportunities to develop and even promotion, but at the same time there were also some which who were being promoted and then when they switch roles to a development opportunity, they failed. So I think there's also a certain degree of bias in there. So you should be checking yourself against your perspective against the other person's perspective and then not jumping to snap decisions despite how much experience you may have. And if you think you've seen it all and you can assess someone, it's funny, different situations have different nuances that need to be validated, especially if you're going to do something that could act in the detriment of someone's career, whether it's rotate them out to a lower graded role or even possible demotion or sacking like people who are on effectively performance improvement plans. It's one of the hardest things to do to go through for a person. And even as a manager, I had to assess someone who was on a pep to make sure they were performing for me. I found it very stressful. It was a team that I actually took over. So the person who was on this pet, I was taking it over on behalf of a colleague, my predecessor midway through, I just had to finish it off. And whether I did the coup de Gras, actually I didn't, I kept them on, but I made sure that they were supported through the process so they could at least be shown to be performing and it was six months of having to thoroughly document everything they did, how they behaved. What was the feedback from internal customers in order to ensure that they were not sacked. And that was quite a tough process to go through. Like I say, emotional for him and also a lot of time consumed for me where I would rather be doing something else to move the department forward. That's one of the reasons why it's kind of important to have one to ones that are not performance reviews that are mentoring because if that takes that type of pressure off, it's a much more pleasant meeting, even even when the criticism because if something's not working and that something is you you're not providing me with enough support or whatever, but it's not said and it's not confrontational, it's and the tone is so shall we say, it's so tense because, you know, everything you're doing is because you're complying with employment laws, you're taking HR boxes. That effectively minimize the risk of getting sued after the event, especially when you've got unionized workforce. But that's the idea of the one to ones though, it's not HR taking boxing exercises, the team essential exercise. It's getting the mentoring and getting everybody on the same page in a more much more relaxed atmosphere because you're not walking out of that having been given out and you're walking out having agreed, these are the targets for the next month, but not targets is often to the benefit of of the person that the the employee, you know, you know, it's it's dave being Dave said, okay, I need training in a certain area, okay for the next meeting, have a list of potential training courses that you can do, you know, and that that's their target for the next and then the manager would have to take her on to to go and, you know, make sure there's funding there for them to do the course and time given. But that's all part of it. You know, it's not necessarily that they're going to do a full time course. They could be doing it, you know, one evening, a week course for the next six months. So, but that's up to them that they're working together, they're not being told to do by the manager that it's an agreement and it's a more relaxing atmosphere. If all you're doing a performance review meetings on an individual basis. That's where you're going to get the stress that you were mentioning earlier, because there's a lot of pressure on that. It has to be box tick has to be going out to hR that this was this is what came out of all the rest of it. But the the idea of the monthly one to ones are it's a mentoring, it's a semi formal, it's not completely informal. There's obviously, you know, it's a professional thing, but it's not formal, it's not going, there's no notes getting sent up to H. R. This is what came out of this meeting. No, this is between the manager and the employee, we're agreeing what's best for the team, our specific thing in it. And you know, I'm mentoring the employee, I'm mentoring you or your mentoring me, whichever is whoever's the manager and the employee, but the employee is is walk with the manager to say these are where I find challenges. These are the ideas I have that might make it easier for me whether that's, look, I'm no good at this type of role. Is there any chance I can get into this type of role or whether it's like I'm enjoying this, but I'm a little out of my league, I could do it. Of course. My excel is not up to stretch. I'd like to do an advanced excel course wherever and the manager agrees with them. Okay, come back to me with some suggestions as to what courses you can, that's your goal for next month and and there's a little target both sides, you know, have the manager has to maybe make sure there's funding in place for next month when you come back with the courses and various things like that. But it's informal, it's not something that you're going to be pushed on directly with your performance review at the end of the year or whatever your bonus does not rely on having good 1 to 1 meetings. The 1 to 1 meetings are just extra help, not, not something to be fearing. And then that's kind of draws the distinction between capability and attitude. So you've got, you've got on one hand, someone who's out of their depth, who's find their best, but isn't performing for that reason, then you've got people, I remember this guy in, when I was doing accounting exams and there was this guy, he was in the classroom openly talking about, well I'm just looking to find as many courses as I can do, so I don't have to be at work. So there are people who like to skydive off work and therefore, you know, those are the people who really deserve a bit of a kick up the backside if they're managing to dodge actually doing anything productive the company because at the end of the day, they're drawing a salary and if they're getting paid for educating themselves and picking up certificates all power to them, but from a business perspective, as a manager who's probably spent more than his fair share of working well for even 18 hour shifts? I think that's a bit of a slap in the face if you're trying to achieve something, not just for yourself, but for the business as a whole, and trying to be a team player. I think that's another thing with superstars who, who have probably a lot of, shall we say, pick up a lot of qualifications. Some of them probably did it in their own spare time and had great structures in place and personal plans and were able to manage their time. Well, some of them might have just shook their responsibility in order to pick up some certifications as well. And I like to think that I haven't seen too many examples of those sort of people in my time, but you do get a few and you need to recognize who's got the right attitude versus who's just lacking the right skills, but that's a lot easier to do. And if you're having, you know, regular informal meetings, yeah, decide who should do rather than doing it once or twice a year and a performance review, because, you know, at that stage, then let me do this course, and you're kind of, yeah, okay, we'll do the course then, and, you know, that that's it, whereas if it's if it's a regular thing, you're not always coming up, of course, is to do, and when it does come in, you're kind of saying, okay, but where does that help you in, what's not working, you know, that's the idea of it is, it's what's working, what's not working, how can we, how can we improve? So the course should only be for how we can improve what we're trying to improve here and what we're doing, and it might not, obviously that was just the example I gave, they might not always be a course that could just be more support, you know, I don't really know what I'm doing in this area, okay, give me time to grow in the role or you do manager well, actually your colleague, so also is really, really strong in this area, so what we'll do is we'll get you shadowing them for a certain amount of time and then by this time next month we'll see how it's going. You know, there's many different ways, but that's it, it's not, it's an informal thing, so, um and then combine that with your, what you're mentioning area about the stand ups, because even in non agile environment, the stand ups work really well, I mean, I've seen the stand ups being used by an accountant team, an accountant team generally, and it was an account team for a big multinational, so they're not agile, they have to follow, you know, pretty strict things in that area where they were, you know, what they were doing, but they still had a morning stand up, just so everybody could kind of update with what they're doing and if they were getting stuck on that, but that kept the team together, especially in that environment where they were, because in that environment it was in a company and they had a hot desk, open plan seating policy, which meant that the team was very rarely actually all sitting together. So the stand up was their way around that, even if the team were spread out across the open plan office and couldn't converse with each other easily throughout the day. As a team, they would at least have that 15 minutes every morning and what frequently was happening, it was somebody was calling out there having a little bit different than somebody else would say, oh, I can give you a hand with that wouldn't be as strong benefit if the team were in their own little environment in room because they just be talking during the day. But many companies now seem to be having this idea of hot desks and open plan. I I've never understood that because it's every piece of research ever been done shows it's the most unproductive method of office space. Yeah, they could be, they could be located completely separate ends of a large building, right rows and rows away. Well out of earshot. And that's one of the challenges with remote working. I think remote working has been brilliant. I'm 100% working from home with the occasional visit into the office, but and it has so many advantages, I can work more hours. I can be more productive. But on the flip side, I think it's a challenge for people who are less experienced in the team because they're going to miss the advantage of learning through osmosis and having your ear to the ground, not to say it can't happen, but you have to put more effort into it. Make the time to reach out to other people. Ask for help, admit when you're struggling with a problem and communicate more, because that's the big advantage of having a daily stand up is the continuous communication because you're not waiting till weekly or monthly connect in order to give all your news. So you're not mulling over it. It's very fast. It's supposed to be, you don't have come to me with a bad news plus a solution, give me where we are and we can figure it out together as a team. And that's, as I mentioned there, the work from home and the hybrids and all that, that's where I stand up could really come in even as a zoom. You know, I do them at the moment. I'm just looking on a project and the project management, you know, I don't do a daily stand up with their team, but three times I was going to say snap, if you did a daily stand up, you'd be doing the same as me mate, there's no need at the moment because we actually do meet daily, but we're kind of having a we meet with our clients effectively internal customers and that the project is serving. So, but we're on those calls together but we have three calls a week where it's just us, just the team. You know, it's it's scheduled for half an hour just purely because the team's meeting and that's the default setting. What it takes about 15 minutes because it is a stand up. That's all we're doing is we're just having a quick call, you know what we're doing. But you have slack, you can you can disperse and everyone has 15 minutes blocked in the calendar of uninterrupted time. Exactly. And and and it works and we would not be as efficient without it because, you know, I hate to point this out to you, but you're not 100% working from home if you're occasions going into the office probably 99% working from home. But I'm 100%. I have never I've never actually seen, I have seen the office I've seen many years ago before I got, you know, before I was working for the clients I see in the office since I've been walking for the clients. I have never seen their office I've ever seen. And to be honest, I don't need to because the people I'm working with are based there. They're based in the US in India in another irish office, that's on the other side of the country and then there are the subject matter experts in my specific team that I have the thing that they're in a different office. Some of them are in Poland, some of them are in Argentina, so there'd be no point in going into the office because I still be on a zoom call try but that would be weakly stuck if we weren't having a regular stand up as a team. Actually, that's funny, you should mention that the times I was in the office, I had to find a meeting room in order to to have those meetings with distributed teams, as you say, across the US across other countries in europe and in India, so it does have its own challenges working in an office because at least in home I've got my spare bedroom which I've converted into my own office. So it's nice. It's I don't need to I don't need to do too much. Whereas I'm hunting around for a room, I need to book it in advance if it's busy and there's those sort of administrative hassles that I have to deal with I think. But you hit on a great thing there with that example because so many people now, even even if the bulk of them are in the office will be somebody who's not having that stand up is essential in that situation if everybody on your team is in the office and in the same room, small room, you know, where they can speak to each other during the day, stand up is not necessarily because they can just call out during the day oh, I'm stuck on this one, but if you've got anybody who's not there or if you're in an open plan office where they're dispersed or you've got people who are off site, whether all of them are off site, however, you need that stand up meeting, even if you're not running an agile system that that that that that stand up is um it's much more gradual, that's now, I think an essential and combine that from a team point of view stan with the monthly one to ones that are for mentoring, not for performance, review and you have the basis there to really put together a strong, strong exactly. If you can take anything out of scrum, I'll go for the daily stand ups just to be more effective as a team, just have that regular communication touchpoints, collaborate, share your information, share what's concerning you and share what you've done and what you're planning to do. Exactly. And as a manager, a lot of your time is spent more, you're talking about, you're almost a scrum master. Oh, I am a scrum. Master your project that I was a scrum Master on. And but even even as just any kind of a team, even if it's not project team, it's business as usual as the manager a lot of the time. You are a facilitator. Yes. You're having to manage your guiding the team. You're saying these are the goals, this is the area direction and you're having to manage the team, you know, manage holidays, manage all the rest of it. But your bulk of a large chunk of your time, I'm certifying although project manager, so it's not quite business as usual. But a lot of your time is your facilitating somebody's getting stuck on something. You're facilitating. How do you fix them? You may have to reach outside the team or maybe someone else on the team, but you're facilitating people. You're not just a pure strict, manage, manage, manage, manage sometimes manager doesn't do this, you facilitate authority doesn't help. It can be counterproductive if you're, I'm a project manager as well, john I switched to scrum mastering if the project has certain phases which require degree of flexibility and exploration, shall we say. But generally speaking, my background, I love, I love an old school gan chart. I love my work breakdown structure. I love being able to analyze things because that's kind of my bias, but at the same time I can do the people piece as well. I can manage emotions. I can defuse situations, I can also get people to open up and get to the root of a problem without making them feel threatened or on God and concluding on optimizing productivity, you know, we have we have talked about the people side of things. We talked about attitudes, we've talked about toxic cultures and how detrimental they are. We've talked about project managing teams, we've talked about leading teams, we've talked about a couple of techniques for giving you the best opportunity to lead the team, mainly to do with communications and the stand ups. And we've talked about continuous learning to grow your team members experience giving them the right opportunities. We haven't talked about tools but our tools important. I mean you can use the era, you can use zoom or teams collaboration tools, tools that once ones are kind of a tool that their stand ups are until they're using teams as a tool or zoom or you know, some some teams and corporate zoom licenses mean that your meetings get automatically transcribe so you can go back to them and pick out the key points if action items were called out. I think that's a useful feature. So it saves on the administration. Yeah. And you know, again, I suppose a lot will be technically depends on the specifics of your team, what it is that you're trying to achieve, you know, that the tools are pretty standard and you've covered a lot of them. You're talking about, some specialist area that you do. I know solicitors have a specific accountants will have a specific, you know, we know a bit more about accounting. So we'll have tools accountant stuff and all the team will be working on that, you know, and that will, you know, often times the RPI system or that, that, you know, somebody will put something in and it will be moved up to the next person for approval or review or whatever. So all those types of tools all work as well on the team. The tools are kind of probably the easiest thing. The tools will be industry specific and the work specific to what you're doing and chances that you will know what tools you need to use it. What I've found as well is tools are very much the same there much of a muchness once, you know the principles behind them and most of them have like very detailed help sections. So if you want to know what you did, for example, Microsoft projects in smart sheets, then it's pretty much the same old, Same old. It's just important might be somewhere slightly different pretty quickly unless I have configured it and taken a whole chunk of functionality out for whatever reason, because I want to standardize things can be a problem. Yeah, I just, you know, as I said, you know, you due to continuous improvement as we mentioned, you're aspiring to perfection but by the same token do not let perfect get in the way of good, you don't need this, as you said, kind of at the very beginning don't necessarily try and load your team, will hold all the superstars, load your team of competent good people and then as a manager that's you're trying to get the also exceed the sum of the parts and that's that's where you have a truly efficient, truly productive and a great team. Great teams rarely have great great individuals. They have really good individuals who work well together and create great team. You don't need you don't need to have a paris Sanja man football team. What you need is more of a team of collective individuals. Maybe one or two exceptional players but not everyone needs to be a superstar. Having one or two kind of raises the bar that everybody else raises up to that little bit. So that works well. But as you said if you have too many then you run the bigger risk of egos ultimately that it boils down to egos getting in each other's way and then you have an inefficient. Okay well thanks john with that said I think we've milked that topic as far as we can without going into too many of our personal stories. But it was fun and as always thank you very much for your insights, john thank you. This podcast shares experiences and insights gained from business I. T. And digital finances hosted by two leaders who have made the leap themselves. This show is dedicated to helping listeners think differently about their career aspirations