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The Trap of Speed
Sometimes when you go too fast, that can actually slow you down. When you ask people who are experts at building race cars, what they’ll first tell you is that, “Yes, you do need a fast engine. But really what you need is good aerodynamics.” Because we know physicists will tell us that the faster the speed, the greater the drag. And if you’re not able to create a car that is both fast with a strong engine and aerodynamic, then you waste a lot of that energy.
And the same idea can be applied into what we’ve called “team drag,” where when you’re moving incredibly fast as a team and you are not creating the systems and putting in place kind of the kinds of relationships you need to sustain through these difficult periods, you will over time see a lot of your time spent on fixing a lot of the issues and looking very much internally into all these many challenges as opposed to focusing on the user or the customer. If you’re feeling some of the effects of team drag, bring your team together, have that productive, vulnerable conversation. We find that team drag is encountered in broadly these four buckets.
4 Areas to Check With Your Team
The first is initiation. “How are you coming together as a team? What is the mission? What is the narrative behind all the work we need to do? Is it anchored on a clear, compelling mission?”
The second is operation. “Are we agreed on how we will make decisions as a team? Who makes final decisions? How we will, you know, resolve disputes?”
The third area is around interactions. “Do we as a team value relationships outside of work? Will we expect people to invest in those?”
And the last is separation. And it explores questions such as, “Are we clear at what point do I need to probably step down because my skills aren’t what we need for the future of this team?” Or, “What’s an appropriate way to engage someone in a conversation about leaving the team?” Or, “Are we clear what a metric of failure looks like so we know when to close and to declare failure?”
Really dive into each of these four areas of team drag and see what you might as a team do to anticipate or or to overcome them if you’re currently facing these challenges.