Team, page 1
Other GTD books
Getting Things Done
Ready for Anything
Making It All Work
Getting Things Done: 64 Productivity Cards
Getting Things Done for Teens
Getting Things Done Workbook
VIKING
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2024 by David Allen and Edward Lamont
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Graphics by the authors.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Allen, David, 1945 December 28- author. | Lamont, Edward, author.
Title: Team : getting things done with others / David Allen and Edward Lamont.
Description: [New York] : Viking, [2024] | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024000351 (print) | LCCN 2024000352 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593652909 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593652916 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593832257 (international edition)
Subjects: LCSH: Teams in the workplace. | Organizational behavior.
Classification: LCC HD66 .A46 2024 (print) | LCC HD66 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/022—dc23/eng/20240315
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024000351
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024000352
Ebook ISBN 9780593652916
Book design by Daniel Lagin, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen
pid_prh_6.3_147032507_c0_r0
Contents
Dedication
Introduction
Section One
The Landscape
1. When “Teamwork” Doesn’t Work for the Team
2. New World, New Work: What’s Happening?
3. What Is a Team? Why Are They important?
Section Two
Key Elements of Productive Teaming
4. Maintaining Control and Focus: The Five Steps for a Team
5. Horizon Five: Purpose and Principles
6. Horizon Five—Principles Redux: Harnessing the Power of Working Standards
7. Horizon Four: Vision
8. Horizon Three: Goals
9. Horizon Two: Areas of focus and Accountability
10. Planning (and Replanning) in a Complex, Fast-Moving World
Section Three
Managing a Team
11. The Structures of Leadership
12. If You Don’t Have a No, Your Yes Means Nothing
13. Delegation That Works
14. So What? Now What?
Acknowledgments
Appendix 1
What the Heck Is GTD, Anyway?
Appendix 2
A Timeless Approach to Using Collaborative Software
Appendix 3
Working Well in a Virtual World
Index
About the Author
_147032507_
To all of you who are working with others to get good things done
Introduction
When Getting Things Done was first published in 2001, it was a game changer. By uncovering the principles of healthy high performance at an individual level, it offered a reliable road map out of overwhelm and transformed the experience of work and leisure for millions.[*] The book continues to transform lives around the world and has spawned a global network of professionals who bring to life its principles for thousands of learners each month in coaching and seminars. Decades later, we know that Getting Things Done® works for individuals, but it has also become clear that the best way to build on that individual success is at the team level.
The team game
This book is about teams, what can go wrong with them, and our perspectives on what to do to restore effective teaming. In this book we want to do for teams what David originally did for individuals: clarify the principles of healthy high performance, then offer a road map for leveraging them in organizations seeking productive collaboration and effective leadership. We’ll share our experience of ways to enhance your awareness of the “field of play” and offer tools and interventions that will bring a new level of flow to how work gets done on teams. The goal? To free up good people to do great things with their lives (or nothing at all, if that is what feels right once they are no longer underwater in a sea of overwhelm).
Most of what we do that is productive, creative, inventive, interesting, and even fun involves some level of coordination and ideally cooperation with others. That could be as big as landing on the moon or as ordinary as a family picnic. What is ironic is that despite the organizational or personal importance we place on these projects, most of the ways we manage them are suboptimal.
We wanted to write a book about teams but not ignore anything that might be relevant in understanding, improving, highlighting, or simply enhancing the experience of working with other people to get cool things done. After our collective sixty-plus years of working with individuals on teams, we were drawn to write this book because it became clear to us that teams are the future of how work will be done well in the twenty-first century. We believe that helping teams work more effectively is the biggest opportunity to positively impact individual performance, team outcomes, and the organizations in which both operate.
We have also seen how the terrain has shifted. For decades the emphasis on human development has been very much about individual change, but in the past few years the context or system in which the individual operates has begun to receive more attention. None of us works in isolation, so no matter how good our personal practices are, we all are affected by the environment in which we work and live. Even when individuals have their own stuff in order, it doesn’t necessarily make collaboration among individuals as effective as it could be. When something has gone wrong with the system in which those individuals are operating, even offering a bulletproof solution at an individual level can only partially resolve the issue.
In our work teaching workflow management through the GTC® methods to individuals, we’ve seen the frustrations of trying to do great work inside of teams that don’t function. We’ve seen all too many people make amazing changes to their own lives, but eventually leave their organizations for greener pastures because of the lack of structure and the inefficiency in the team around them.
The hurt
This has consequences. When Gallup finds in its 2022 State of the Global Workplace Report that only 21 percent of employees are engaged with their work, it is unlikely that the other 79 percent are the source of the problem; the sheer numbers point to their team or organization as a more likely suspect for where the real problem lies. The global average includes significant variations, but even in North America only 33 percent of people report being engaged, while in Europe the figure is just 14 percent.
Numbers like that led us to some questions we just couldn’t shake: Decades into the twenty-first century, why can’t we figure out how to organize large numbers of people in the workplace? What prevents us from working smoothly with one another? Why can’t we identify a way whereby a larger workforce equals an increased ability to fulfill organizational purpose? Adding more people doesn’t always equal more output. On the contrary.
More than 130 years after the first “scientific management” initiatives by F. W. Taylor, it seems we still can’t reliably coordinate human interactions in a way that doesn’t strain the physical, mental, and emotional health of the people working within organizations.
Not all organizations, of course. There are outliers. But the rare successes serve only to highlight the random and ephemeral nature of their results. Surveys consistently show that most people are disengaged and demotivated by their work, even when it pays them extremely well. In the worst cases the experience of working in some organizations is so bad that it has earned its own descriptor: toxic.
The fix
We believe there is a better way. It’s not complicated, but it isn’t always obvious or necessarily easy, either.
We suggest getting back to basic principles and steering away from complicated software-heavy solutions to what are mostly human challenges. We believe it is possible for teams to take simple steps that lead to a culture of work that supports both individual and team performance.
A culture of healthy high performance is rare, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. This book is an exploration of what it takes to build on the proven principles of GTD to create and nourish such a culture as a team. By respecting those principles, it is possible to develop and maintain the space and perspective to plan quickly based on new inputs, prioritize in a dynamic environment, and execute in a way that keeps you ahead of your competition and in control of your life and work. By identifying some simple standards, structures, and processes at a team level, the individuals on the team have less team noise to contend with, and can get on with doing the work of collaborating efficiently to achieve team aims.
In our now infamously volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, organizational success comes down to the ability to plan quickly, prio
If you get planning, prioritization, and execution flowing, then your team can move up the food chain in terms of the quality of problems it can deal with—away from reactivity into consistently moving forward on things the team cares about. As recent events have repeatedly demonstrated, one of the critical survival skills for organizations is how quickly they respond in moments of radical change.
Those last sentences were written with a global pandemic and an unexpected war in Europe in mind, but the speed of change in our world means that by the time this book is in your hands, your mind may have gone on to focus on more recent crises—our world is not shy about offering us events that demand quick and creative responses to survive and thrive.
Why this book? Why now?
The idea for this book first came about when we were working with a division of a national carrier in Europe. After a few years of our running Getting Things Done seminars in the organization, our client was interested in seeing whether their investment in training was having any impact. We were asked to survey the hundreds of participants we’d worked with up until that time to find out what they felt they’d gained from engaging in the seminars. The results were impressive: productivity was up, stress levels down, and people felt they were getting more quality time with their families.
Those were impacts we expected at an individual level, but we were surprised to see positive systemic impacts we hadn’t anticipated. For example, in our seminars we set aside several hours for the participants to work through their backlog of “stuff” and take their email inboxes to zero. When we started our work in the organization, most participants were turning up with thousands—sometimes tens of thousands—of unprocessed emails in their inboxes. They needed all the time we gave them to clear their backlog. After we had been working for a few years in the organization, many of the participants started turning up with only hundreds—and sometimes only dozens—of emails. That was a bit of a problem for us—we needed to find them something else to do during the time we’d allocated for clearing up thousands of mails—but it was a pleasant surprise in terms of what was happening in the organizational culture. The people who’d already been trained by us were “infecting” their colleagues—who hadn’t yet been trained—with the benefits of remaining on top of their inboxes. The standard for what was “normal” for inbox management had shifted in the organization. That realization provoked a question: What if rather than have those impacts occur “accidentally,” we could amplify them at the team level with slightly different interventions?
Another reason for this book is that, while sending smart, motivated people back into the trenches with better tools is rewarding, at a certain point we began to feel we were not speaking to a big part of the problem they faced. It became painful to watch them return to teams where the structures and processes were so poorly thought through that the individuals—even those who’d acquired world-class skills in what we teach—could only ever protect themselves against the encroaching chaos. It started to feel as if we were doling out bandages in a situation where a machine gun nest was causing all the carnage. Bandages can be welcome in such a situation, but they are nowhere near as helpful as preventing the carnage in the first place.
There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.
—Desmond Tutu
It’s not that our work had no impact—our clients were grateful for any support we could offer—but we could see that to help them get the full benefits, we needed to address what was happening at the team level.
Too often, the structures and processes on a team can make it more difficult to work and collaborate, not easier. Once individual effectiveness has been addressed, the solution to what ails most teams is obvious if not easy: designing and maintaining a team environment that minimizes the noise and friction of collaboration. If we get both of those things right, the efforts of the whole can equal much more than the sum of the parts. In designing teams we need to remove the things that get in the way of their members doing their real work and to create environments that allow them to perform at their best. The genesis of this book was in the realization that there are simple—almost mechanical—steps that teams can take that will both ease collaboration and support individuals in doing their own work.
Finally, the market has repeatedly asked us for a book with this perspective. As soon as our clients have understood the power of GTD to help individuals to work more effectively, one of the most frequent questions we hear is, “How do I get the rest of my team to do this?”
That question points to a pressing need: to connect and align individual excellence and wider team performance. By building on what optimal productivity principles do for individuals, this book will offer a better way of working with others, while simultaneously nourishing an environment that fosters creativity and the flourishing of skills.
Many of the principles of team productivity are based on ideas explicit or implicit in the earlier GTD books, but others are entirely new. This book builds on those earlier ideas, or at least on some presumption of individual skill in handling the volume and complexity of modern work, but we don’t think it’s necessary that you be currently using GTD. We’ve tried to write this book so that anyone can pick it up and benefit from it without having read the other books and still be able to do useful things with their team.
We both have made a substantial investment of our life energies in GTD, of course: David as creator of the methodology and author of previous books, and Ed as the founder of two of the largest GTD franchises globally. We do care that members of your team have some systematic approach to handling their workflow, as we believe that the foundation of team productivity and coordination lies in individual prioritization and reliability. The effectiveness of the suggestions that we make in this book about teams will be completely undermined if you have individual team members who are unable to find their bottoms with both hands. But if you are aware of some other approach that enables people to make, track, and deliver on their commitments in a way that makes them dramatically more productive but significantly less stressed, then feel free to use that approach. Apart from a condensed refresher of the original material (see appendix 1), we won’t go deeply into the specific principles and skills covered in Getting Things Done, Ready for Anything, and Making It All Work. If you are looking to improve your own game, or the game of a particular member of your team, then we strongly suggest having a look at those books as well.
Lessons from football
To understand the focus of Team, it might be helpful to think of the different ways you could improve a sports team. Any team sport will do, but let’s use football—or soccer—as our example. The football metaphor is apt: as we write, there is no sport played in more countries and cultures than football. Over the past thirty years the GTD model has proven its ability to impact effectiveness in any country or culture where it has been tried. Better still, on multicultural, geographically dispersed teams, it has provided a common understanding and a common language for getting things done together.
There are several levels at which you could start to improve a team: you could work on raising individual skills, training each individual to play better; or you could go to work on how those individuals play with one another as a team, on passing and trapping the ball and how individuals collaborate to score or defend; or you could focus on the identity, or culture, of the team.
Individual skills development is an obvious place to start, as it is relatively easy. Everyone wants better players, and time and consistent deliberate practice will enhance individual performance. No one can do the practicing for players; it is the responsibility of each individual to put in the time to raise his or her own game.
