How to Unstick Your Amazing Team

Is your company growing, but your Team is stuck?  

This happened to me. We had grown by $12 million in a single year. That represented a growth rate of a little more than 40%.

But internally, our Team was in chaos, shambles might even be a correct assessment. We were overwhelmed, our customers were demanding more and more, and the mess we were making that needed to be cleaned up was getting larger by the day.

Here's what we did and would recommend you consider if your startup or small business is going through its first legitimate growing pains.

Here are the first five things to do to get the Team unstuck and your customers to believe in you again:

1. Value Your Time: First make time management priority number one. When companies are small, calendars are inaccurately kept, meetings are makeshift, and conversations during meetings are meandering. Conversations that should take ten minutes often take two hours.

Stop the madness. Start by creating standing meetings with time limits and precise subjects to cover—this is step one.

AND READ Peter Drucker's concept of "Managing Oneself" in his essay in Harvard Business Review, which discusses effective time management as a core skill for personal and organizational success.

2. Document Your Work: Create collaborative agendas in Google Docs that every meeting attendee must contribute to. Then, use the document to collect meeting notes, issue listings, and delegate action steps. If a team member doesn't add items to the agenda before the meeting, they don't get to bring up the topic during the meeting.

AND READ Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. The book stresses the importance of documentation and checklists in driving efficiency and preventing mistakes.

3. Break the Big into Small: Break Himalayan projects into small hills and mountains that feel conquerable. Learn to project manage. Start by tracking everything in Google spreadsheets and eventually in software like the Gantt Chart-enabled Smartsheets.

AND READ The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland. The author is one of the creators of Scrum, and his book explores how breaking down large projects into smaller, manageable tasks can revolutionize productivity.

ALSO READ The Agile Project Management methodology, studied extensively by scholars like Kent Beck, emphasizes the principle of iterative progress and smaller tasks to achieve larger goals.

4. Right People in the Right Seats: Get the right people in the right seats. Get serious about identifying each team member's strengths and then give them actual ownership of the job they are being asked to do.

AND READ Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don't by Jim Collins.

5. Celebrate the Wins: Celebrate the small wins along the way and celebrate more when significant milestones are hit. But most important is that you use the momentum from everything else you have built to enable your teams to speak openly and comfortably about what isn't working. You must learn to discuss the problems transparently if you are going to get better.

AND READ "The Science of Celebrating Success at Work" by Andrew Reiner in Harvard Business Review. This articleexplores how celebrating achievements improves team morale and fosters a culture of learning from what isn't working.

AND ONE MORE THING

It's so crucial for small businesses to understand that as they grow from small to medium-small, to big-small, to midsize and beyond, the Team will need to be able to do new things. The demands from customers will grow. And the operation you will need to build and manage will become more sophisticated.

Stay learning. Stay improving. Stay growing. Get Better.

John + Team 6AEP