How Can Smart Teams by Dermot Crowley Turn Email Overload and Endless Meetings into Productive Flow?

What Makes Dermot Crowley’s Smart Teams Strategies Essential for Hybrid Collaboration and Friction Reduction?

​Smart Teams by Dermot Crowley outlines purposeful, mindful, punctual, and reliable behaviors to eliminate email noise, unfocused meetings, and interruptions, helping leaders build superproductive cultures that boost hybrid team workflow and results.

Implement Crowley’s four core behaviors and meeting diet principles now to cut friction and foster reliable collaboration across your team’s detailed productivity roadmap.

Recommendation

The growing deluge of email, incessant meetings, attention-demanding messages, and more seem to conspire against office productivity. Help is on the way. Author Dermot Crowley offers practical advice explaining how you can eliminate much of this “noise” and “friction,” and focus more on getting your work done effectively and on time. This is possible, Crowley promises, even while you take the time to communicate and collaborate with your team. He includes valuable tips on how team leaders can promote a culture of “superproductivity.”

Take-Aways

• Maximum productivity requires coordination and collaboration.
• Get rid of organizational friction.
• Every team should seek a productive flow.
• When team members work well together, they can build “smart” teams.
• Positive change in your team’s culture depends on specific actions, not amorphous principles.
• A team must develop its “productivity culture.”

Summary

Maximum productivity requires coordination and collaboration.

For a team to be productive, its members need the proper systems and processes in place. To achieve full productivity, they must come together and coordinate their efforts.

To build a “smart team,” its members must be able to “communicate, congregate, and collaborate.” They must understand that even one person’s unproductive behavior will have a negative impact on the entire team. Team leaders should promote a productivity culture within their team and their organization. To strive toward that goal, it’s helpful to understand culture as “a set of collective habits.”

“We need to look closely at how leaders, managers, and team leaders communicate, congregate, and collaborate, and ensure that everyone understands the impact that poor work behaviors have on others’ productivity.”

The all-important triumvirate of communicating, congregating, and collaborating proves particularly challenging for teams in hybrid or remote work environments. Team members based in scattered locations must remain aware of the necessity of connecting without creating noise. For example, as remote employees attempt to carry out teamwork from home, they tend to depend on email – a source of noise – for communicating with one another, with their team leader, and with other colleagues. As a result, it’s not unusual for leaders and their employees to receive dozens of emails daily.

While personal productivity training can help bridge this gap, a shift in your team’s working culture will have a far greater positive effect. As you build a culture of productivity, identify and address the practices that impede it. For example, abandon the “death-by-meeting” orientation that has become routine in many companies. Cutting out unnecessary meetings gives team members more time to do their jobs.

Get rid of organizational friction.

To increase your team’s productivity, consider how you can address these challenges.

1. “Information overload” – Excess emails aren’t the only impediments choking worker productivity. Other obstacles include “instant messaging, phone calls, voice mail, collaboration tools, customer management systems, and project dashboards.” Ensure that your organization’s internal communications function smoothly and without overlap to avoid adding irritating static that distracts team members from their responsibilities.
2. “Too much time in unfocused meetings” – In typical meetings, one or two people attend to the actual work at hand while everyone else looks on passively. Today, most meetings take too much time and fall into the category of “spectator sports” for many of those present.
3. “Distractions and interruptions” – These include not only stuffed inboxes, but also unnecessary visits, text chats, or phone calls from irrelevant outsiders or from coworkers who waste their colleagues’ time.
4. “Unnecessary urgency” – Leaders often ask team members to respond urgently to matters that may seem immediately pressing, but are not important. Letting reactivity dominate your culture cuts directly into the quality of your employees’ work.

These factors have a negative impact on productivity. However, many managers worsen their team’s situation by not controlling the workload they assign or the pace of the work. As a result, many employees lose confidence in their team’s ability to maintain smooth forward momentum. This drives employees to engage in additional emails and meetings. It also fosters “more interruptions and urgency,” which create further slowdowns, fueling friction, not flow.

In 1986, Italian Carlo Petrini began the “slow food” movement. He demonstrated against having a McDonald’s fast-food restaurant open near Rome’s historic Spanish Steps. Similarly, the corporate world now needs a “slow work” movement that shifts away from non-productive, speedy reactivity and toward increased focused, thoughtful responsiveness. This would slightly slow the pace of work, allowing team members to focus on performing better instead of merely faster.

Every team should seek a productive flow.

Teams are most productive when members maximize both their individual productivity and their group productivity.

Set a goal of transforming unproductive friction into a productive workflow. Team members who try to improve their individual and team productivity reflect a “selfless mindset,” akin to a service mindset. Their goal is to help everyone cooperate to eliminate unproductive friction.”

“As a leader, you have an opportunity to boost the productivity of those around you, and to set up your organization for many years of sustained productivity.”

Each team member should endeavor to avoid disruptive behavior and to become “superproductive.” Superproductive teams maximize everyone’s energy and embed heightened productivity in their company’s DNA.

When team members work well together, they can build “smart” teams.

The concept of “smart” teams has nothing to do with intelligence. “Smart” refers to team members’ ability to work well together and to agree on which behaviors are most productive in their situation.

“A lot of friction is caused by managers delegating poorly and workers taking on delegation without asking the right questions.”

All team members should practice four individual behaviors – being purposeful, mindful, punctual, and reliable – that have a significant impact on their team’s productivity.

1. “Purposeful” – Each person should work with intent and purpose on his or her priority assignments. To maximize the impact of this strategy, each person needs to understand the team’s goals and priorities. Amazon and Apple succeeded by creating purposeful, focused teams.
2. “Mindful” – Each team member should be mindful of how his or her actions affect other team members and the overall organization. This might mean focusing on your teammates’ needs before your own to minimize friction and promote the team’s workflow. Mindful team members serve themselves and others.
3. “Punctual” – Delivering your team’s work on time requires members to avoid procrastination and to plan for achieving deadlines and completing their tasks according to schedule. This makes each person responsible for being proactively efficient. Consider how important such punctuality is, for example, in the US Navy. If a ship is due to leave a West Coast port at 9 a.m., and a crew member doesn’t show up until 9:10, that sailor will miss the ship, which might not dock again until it reaches Honolulu or Asia. The Navy never tolerates unpunctuality. Your team members should treat being on time with the same degree of attention.
4. “Reliable” – The people on your team must be able to rely on one another. They must trust that their teammates have their back. If you make a commitment, you must honor it, and that requires being able to prioritize your obligations. Reliability is crucial in the dire circumstances members of the military may encounter. If a combat squad member is unreliable, fellow soldiers could die. Being reliable is essential to your team and your organization.

Positive change in your team’s culture depends on specific actions, not amorphous principles.

Purposeful, mindful, punctual, and reliable team members can eliminate a good deal of the friction and lag time that can drain their team’s productivity.

Unfortunately, a team can’t adjust its culture unless its members embrace the inherent value of productivity and delineate their “specific productivity principles.” For example, when it comes to punctuality, the team leader must set an example by being on time for meetings, wrapping up meetings on schedule, and delivering each meeting’s results in a timely manner.

“We are always busy, but busyness is not enough in a high-performing team. As Henry David Thoreau once said, ‘It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about’?”

Cooperation is “the process of working together for a common purpose or benefit.” Teams depend on mutual cooperation under the guidance of a thoughtful leader. To achieve it, they must implicitly understand why they do what they do. Every member – not only the team leader – must collaborate fruitfully on joint projects. In today’s work world, projects are ubiquitous. They are the common mechanism companies rely on for their teams’ accomplishments. No one on a team can succeed without collaborating.

Sincere cooperation is intentional, not automatic. Team members need to possess the skill, capability, and desire to engage wholeheartedly with one another. They can cultivate an “active mindset” and use it to weigh the requirements of their work and to calculate how well and how quickly they can respond to urgent requests. They must decide how much they can help someone else without dropping the ball on their own responsibilities and team obligations.

“Urgency rules, everywhere.”

Team members must communicate effectively. That requires making “less noise” and being direct and clear. Limit your team’s emails to essential information, so members don’t bury each other under a blizzard of back-and-forth messages. To reduce noise, be mindful about not sending blind copies of every email to every person. Use CC purposefully and move from emails to direct conversations if that avoids repeat messages. Often, mass-copied emails have almost no relevance to many of the people the sender copies. Your team members can’t be productive if they must read or respond to hundreds of emails a day.

A team must develop its “productivity culture.”

Prioritize developing your team’s productivity culture by following these guidelines.

1. “First, do no harm” – The Latin phrase for this famous concept is “primum non nocere.” This represents the ancient Hippocratic Oath for physicians. This wise dictum also applies to team leaders who want to suggest new methodologies and approaches to enhance their teams’ productivity.
2. “Lead from the front” – Leaders who dedicate themselves to “personal productivity” inspire their team members to do the same.
3. “Remember that you are always on show” – When you are the leader, your team members automatically will try to pattern themselves after you – from your words to your actions.
4. “Create projects for the team to rally around” – To boost your team’s accomplishments, establish specific group productivity projects. One such project could be trying to minimize work interruptions. It is probably impossible to eliminate all the interruptions that slow your team, so focus on reducing interruptions whenever and wherever you can. If you make this a team project, teach every member why he or she must cut back on interruptions that interfere with team productivity.

You can cut costs cost and boost productivity by removing impediments and eliminating friction. Take a long and careful look around your organization. Find a productivity impediment you can eliminate quickly. Get rid of it by any reasonable means. Repeat these steps again and again to address other productivity impediments.

“Fight to protect your team’s time – it is their most precious resource.”

Don’t try to do everything right away. Heed the wisdom of Calvin Coolidge, the 30th US president, who said: “We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.”

About the Author

Dermot Crowley is a productivity author, speaker and trainer. He founded Adapt Productivity, where he serves as director.