How to Build A Productive Team

This week, how to manage your team (and your boss) productively

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Script | 365

Hello, and welcome to episode 365 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

I work a lot with managers and business leaders, where a part of their job is to manage teams of people. This kind of work can be quite different from a self-employed graphic designer, for example, whose main work each day is designing. 

There’s an interesting interplay going on in a team environment. Managers need information from their people. To get that information, they need to stop their team from doing their work. Then there is the team who need less distraction in order to get their work done to the highest quality and on time. 

In my experience, the most productive teams are the ones who have found a happy balance between the manager’s need for information and the team’s need to work undisturbed. 

So, the question is, how do you find that balance and if you are a member of a team with a boss who is interrupting you a little too much how do you retrain your boss? 

Two questions from one wonderful listener who has sent in a question.

And with that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Sam. Sam asks, hi Carl, do you have any tips and ideas for managing a team productively (I manage a team of eight) and how to manage a boss who is disorganised and never remembers what she’s asked us to do. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Hi Sam, thank you for your question.

It sounds like you’re caught in the middle of a productivity nightmare. A boss who has no idea how to get the most out of their team and as a consequence you are unable to help your team work productively.

Let’s start with the easier of the two. Managing a team. 

To help you get to the right place, we need to step back a little. A manager’s role is to support their team. To provide them with clear instructions and the right tools, and then to keep out of the way and let them get on and do what they were employed to do. 

At a strategic level that means clear communication—what do you want, how do you want it and when do you want it delivered? 

And then to step back and let them get on and do it. 

Let me give you an example of this in play. 

I record my YouTube videos on a Wednesday. I then create the timeline of the video in Adobe Premiere Pro and send everything to my video editor to do the animations, clean things up and get it ready for publication. 

In a Google Doc, I write out what I want—where I want split screen effects and other animations. I also add the date I need the finished video for. 

That’s communication part. 

I then step back and let my video editor get on and do her thing. I don’t care how she does the animations or what tools she uses—she likes to use something called CapCut, for example. Once I hand it over to my video editor, the task is in her hands and as long as she gets the edited video back to me by the deadline. I’m happy. 

If she has any questions, we use a messaging service called Twist—similar to Microsoft Teams and Slack but a lot less distracting—she will message me. 

And that’s the support part. 

It’s simple, effective and allows my video editor the time and space to get on and do the work without me constantly chasing her. 

Now there is another element going on here. I trust my video editor. She’s never let me down and on those rare occasions when she thinks she will be late, she will message me immediately and inform me. 

If you don’t trust your team, who’s at fault? 

If you want to build a productive team, you must trust your team. It’s that trust that enables you to leave your team alone to get on and do the work you employ them to do. Constantly interrupting them for updates destroys their productivity. 

It’s the same if you ask them to fill out activity reports and update statuses on complex software systems. 

I’ve worked with companies that required their sales teams to maintain a Salesforce CRM system. This meant many of them stop selling on Friday afternoons to update these complex systems which often took them two or three hours. 

When I was in sales, I found the best time to sell was Friday afternoons. People are more willing to close out a sale before the end of the week. Yet, in that company, they were missing out on so much business because management wanted their sales teams to update overly complex information management systems. 

Every person you work with is a different person. Trying to shoehorn people into your system can be counterproductive to the overall productivity of the team. 

As a manager, it’s your responsibility to find out the best way to support you team members so they can work in the most effective and efficient way. That way you avoid stress building up in the team which will undermine any efforts to improve the team’s productivity. 

I recently heard Toto Wolf—the CEO and Team Principal of Mercedes Benz’s Formula 1 team talking about how he manages his team. He implemented a policy of no meetings before 10:00 am. 

What this does is allows all people to have at least an hour of undisturbed quiet time each day for doing important work. 

Now, he’s the leader—the CEO—yet he understands that the managers reporting to him still need time to do their work before spending most of their days in meetings. 

I like another leader from the Formula 1’s world, Red Bull’s Christian Horner’s approach. He doesn’t have an engineering degree or understand the complexities of aerodynamics. He has a team of people who are brilliant at that stuff. 

He sees his roll as the barrier remover. While he’s the boss, and needs to know what’s going on, he knows he must protect his team from the board of directors’ demands and if any department requires something, it’s his job to find a way to provide it for them. 

Productive teams are built from the top. That means the manager must communicate clearly what they want, how they want it and by when. Then step back and let the team get on and do the work. 

I remember another company I once worked for. The director was a highly intelligent person in her field. Yet, she had somehow developed a managerial arrogance where she believed she did not need to learn how to use the company’s database because her project managers could tell her what she needed to know when she needed to know something. 

This led to her project managers dropping everything to find the information she wanted whenever she asked for it. It created a horrible atmosphere in the company and the team was very unproductive. 

She would hold five hour team meetings every Friday, where everyone was expected to attend. This further undermined the teams productivity and they were often late in completing projects which meant project managers had to work late and into the weekend to catch up. 

This director’s staff turnover rate was the highest in the company, worldwide, and it was all created by this one individual who did nothing to support her team. 

The solution was to go back to the basics. Communicate what you want, clearly and concisely—you don’t need weekly five hour meetings to do that—and then to step back and let your team get on and do their work. The work they were employed to do. 

Never, as a manager, believe that your team is there to support you. It’s not. You are there to support them. 

Now, if you are not the manager but have a manager who is destroying your productivity what can you do? 

This goes to managing expectations. 

It’s very easy to fall into line and say yes to your boss whenever they ask you to do something. Yet, doing so is distorting expectations. Saying “yes I will get this task done today as you ask, boss,” will do nothing for your productivity if on the same day you have six hours of meetings and a proposal to get out before 4:30 pm. 

You have to stand your ground and inform your boss of your schedule for the day and explain that you will not be able to do it today. 

I understand, if you have always said yes to your boss, doing this will be difficult at first, but how will you change anything if you do not challenge your boss’s instructions when you already know what they are asking you to do will be practically impossible? 

In effect you need to retrain your boss and set more realistic expectations. 

One tip I often share is to challenge deadlines. If your boss asks you to send them something, reply and tell them you will get it to them by the end of the week (or early next week). 

The worst thing that will happen is your boss will push back and tell you they need it right now. That’s great because they’ve saved you a decision. You need to do it right now. So do it. 

However, in the majority of cases, your boss will accept your timeline. They’re busy too, after all. 

However, the critical part of this is you follow through and deliver what they asked for when you said you will do it. If you don’t, you lose trust. You want your boss to trust you. And if, for whatever reason, you find you cannot do what you said you would do, when you said you would do it, you must inform them as soon as you know—something my video editor will do. 

And incidentally, you should be doing this with your customers and clients too. This can be another area where some preconceived ideas about customers and clients can lead to productivity issues. 

Be clear when you are communicating with your customers and clients. Set realistic expectations—and telling them that you will always be available if they ever need you is not a realistic expectation. What happens if you’re giving birth when they call (as happened to one of my clients), or you’re in a meeting with another client? 

Tell your customers how best to get in touch with you and that if you cannot respond immediately you will get back to them as soon as you can. 

I hope that has helped, Sam. Thank you for your question and thank you for listening. 

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.