657: How to Increase Team Performance Through Clarity, with David Burkus

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
There are many things that help teams work well together, but perhaps you haven’t thought of this one, clarity. Knowing what’s being done and who’s doing it often helps a team achieve more. In this conversation, the practical steps to surface more clarity and drive better performance. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 657.Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:34]:
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born., they’re made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. Such a key conversation we’ve had many times on the show is a conversation about team leadership. How do we help teams to be as effective as possible? Today, I’m so glad to welcome back a guest expert who’s done so much work on this, on helping us to really do a better job at being able to lead a team in a way that, not only produces results, but also where we find joy in the work and and empathy and clarity and so many things that we’ll talk about in today’s conversation. I’m pleased to welcome back to the show David Burkus.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:26]:
He’s a best selling author of 4 books about business and leadership, which have won multiple awards and been translated into dozens of languages. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, USA Today, Fast Company, the Financial Times, and many other outlets. Since 2017, he’s been ranked multiple times as one of the world’s top business thought leaders. As a sought after international speaker, his TED talk has been viewed over 2,000,000 times. He’s worked with leaders from organizations across all industries, including PepsiCo, Fidelity, Clorox, Adobe, and NASA. And he’s the author of Best Team Ever: The Surprising Science of High Performing Teams. David, welcome back to the show.

David Burkus [00:02:11]:
Oh, thank you so much for having me back.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:14]:
I always love talking with you. You are such a great storyteller. I love the research you do. And perhaps most importantly, how many practical things you share with us? We’ve talked about teams previously. We’ve talked about weak connections previously. It’s always so helpful for me on just thinking about what we can do in practice to take some great steps forward. And today, I think getting into a little bit on, like, how we can, as leaders, do a better job of leading teams in a way that builds common understanding. And there’s 2 lenses you look through this in your work on empathy and clarity.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:54]:
And the book actually starts with a story about one of our past guests, Chris Hatfield. And I was wondering if maybe you could share a bit about what got him on your radar screen, and how does he show up as an example of effective team leadership?

David Burkus [00:03:10]:
Yeah. Yeah. So Chris is, I mean, I suppose, like, millions of other people around the globe. The first time Chris came on my radar was watching him float around the International Space Station and do a cover of David Bowie’s Space Odyssey. Right? But I I wasn’t really I just thought, okay. That’s kinda interesting. And, you know, every once in a while, YouTube would recommend some video that he posted about how astronauts brush their teeth in space or something like that. You know, the Chris is known, like I said, outside of the space community, he’s known for all of those different videos and being sort of that Internet celebrity of showing people what it’s like to live in space.

David Burkus [00:03:42]:
Inside the space community, he’s known for something totally different. So he had one of the longest running tenures in terms of he’s been to space 3 different times, over a course of more than a decade, which is very, very rare to have been, you know, so young, go to space and come back and command a mission to the International Space Station decade and a half later. He’s also known as being one of the more successful commanders of a mission to the International Space Station ever. Right? And I think not only when you look at the experiments they did, the publicity things they did, like what everybody knows him for, but also the emergencies they responded to, more on that in a second. And I think kind of the craziest thing is the team that he led, which was 5 people from 3 different countries, Chris is Canadian, and 2 Americans on his team and also 2 Russian cosmonauts on his team, 5 people, very different personalities, very different languages, right, and very different cultural differences, and yet the team never had a single heated argument in their 5 something months in space, as Chris jokes, without the benefit of nice showers or even Scotch to take the edge off of dealing with these personalities. They never once got into a fight.

David Burkus [00:04:52]:
And I the reason for that and the reason we highlight them in the book is that Chris really understood that getting a team to work well together is a is a common understanding or shared understanding problem. NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, those organizations, they nail that sense of role clarity, that level of training you go through before you get I mean, it’s years to prepare for a mission that’s only a few months. But Chris realized, you know, that wasn’t what was gonna make the difference between a successful mission or not. That that that was basics. Obviously, if people didn’t know their things, that would be trouble. But in order to get along and collaborate at their most effectively, they also needed to understand each other as much as they understood their rules and their roles. And so he really focused on building not just the clarity, knowing that training was going to take care of clarity, he focused on empathy. Not empathy in the sense that we often think about it.

David Burkus [00:05:43]:
Right? We often think about sympathy versus empathy. You know, I feel sorry for you versus I feel your pain. I use the term empathy here to mean I understand you so much. I understand your emotions. I understand your thought process. I understand the differences between you and me such that I can predict your behavior. And in doing so, I know how to communicate better with you as we’re trying to collaborate. And so Chris had the team really really get to know each other.

David Burkus [00:06:06]:
Chris Chris learned Russian so he could better communicate with the Russian cosmonauts. He had the whole team together getting to know each other’s families. I think the craziest thing is he even had them role play how they would respond emotionally in certain high stakes scenarios. Some of them obvious, like, what are we gonna do in this emergency and we’re not, and some of them in ways you wouldn’t really expect. Like, he actually had them role play. How would we respond if we found out that on the ground, one of our loved ones had passed away? And the only people to help that person through that emotionally, the only person to help that man mourn would be us. What are we gonna do? How are we gonna respond? Now, that seems like overkill at first. Right? Like, oh, come on.

David Burkus [00:06:45]:
What are the chances of that? Except that it actually happened. A couple weeks into the mission, Tom Marshburn, one of the Americans, found out that his mother had passed away. And the only people he had to help him mourn and emotionally get through it and stay focused on the mission, etcetera, were those 4. But Chris knew, hey, these are the things we have to prepare for, those sort of unexpected. And then even, you know, there were technical issues too, where within about a week before they were supposed to go home, there was an ammonia tank leak that required a spacewalk. Now normally spacewalks to repair things, you’re planning that a week or 2 weeks in advance. You have everything down to the details. They had 24 hours to prepare to go out there and do the fix.

David Burkus [00:07:21]:
That’s a high stress scenario. And if you have ever been on a team, you know that the high stress scenarios are the crucibles where everybody kind of devolves down into the lowest rawest emotional form of them. And those are the places where people start to get hurt feelings, start to get into arguments and what have you, and they didn’t because they understood each other. They understood not just what was expected of them, but what they could expect of others as well. And that’s what we call that sense of common understanding. A mix of not only do I know my role, my responsibilities, and how it fits in, I know my teammates so well that I know what to expect from them as well. And Chris’ leadership is just an amazing example of that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:07:59]:
I so appreciate you highlighting it and emphasizing that there’s a both and here. And even though I think we’ll talk a little bit more about clarity in this conversation, the empathy piece, like you said, so critical and so much that we can do in order to support the things that are likely to happen. And a bit of intention there can make all the difference on how we respond in those tough situations. And I I think it’s interesting you mentioned the situation where someone might pass away. I mean, who knew if it was gonna happen? It turned out that it did, but we all know that stressors are gonna happen on teams. Right? What it is, we don’t know. But we know that the stressors are going to happen.

Dave Stachowiak [00:08:45]:
And so if we’re able to do a bit of both of this empathy and clarity, we avoid a little bit of the micromanaging thing that sometimes people fall into if it’s just clarity. Very much a both end here. And you do make the point, “the more clarity is created, the better the team performs.” And perhaps an entirely different venue from a space station is a fast food restaurant. And there’s a really interesting example of an organization you cite in the book called Powell Sudden Service. And I’m wondering if you could share, like, how they’ve done that as far as thinking about teams.

David Burkus [00:09:25]:
Yeah. Yeah. Powell’s is if you if you don’t live in kinda the eastern part of Tennessee, you probably never heard of Powell’s. They only have about 30 locations, but they are if you do live in that area or if you study quality, etcetera, you hear about Powell’s pretty consistently because they are one of the most finely tuned. I mean, you could put them against F1 racing teams or or operating room surgical hospitals. They’re one of the most finely tuned machines out there. They’re really, really strong emphasis on clarity that, like you said, actually increases that sense of collaboration too. So to give you an idea of this, right, the average error rate at Powell’s, which is a primarily drive through only establishment, the average error rate is 1 in every 36, 000 orders.

David Burkus [00:10:06]:
One in every 30 is now today at McDonald’s, it’s like well, truthfully, lately, it feels like if I take my kids to McDonald’s, it’s like every other order is messed up. But their, you know, their error rates are 1 in the low 100. Right? 36,000. The the number of of dollars they make per square foot is dramatically higher than even sort of your Chick fil A’s, your known quality things. So they’re like the one of the best kept secrets in this world of of quick service and fast food because of their emphasis on clarity. And and the reason is they really, 1, have a strong learning and teaching culture. Right? So your average employee at a place like Powell’s is gonna spend about a 100 hours in training before they’re actually on the floor working at the restaurant. A 100 hours in training.

David Burkus [00:10:49]:
You have multiple different stations in their restaurant, and these employees are gonna be trained on several of them before they join. In fact, one of the things they do that I think is so great, you don’t actually know- you know what time your shift is. You don’t actually know what station you’re working on till you get there. Essentially, you look at the team that you have. You have everybody prepared to play multiple positions, play multiple roles, and so you build the best team you have based on who you’ve got in in the moment. Right, based on kind of who shows up and and what have you. And there’s actually some research that suggest that novelty too, that surprise of knowing what to do, right, it lends to the sense of engagement.

David Burkus [00:11:24]:
They they do multiple things to make sure that that training sticks, by the way, too. So one is that every leader, whether you’re a frontline manager or a store owner, a franchise owner, or whether you’re the CEO, they’re all expected to spend about 10% of their time training other people. Right? Imagine the CEO who still has to take 10% of his time running training programs for either other leaders or or other employees. Right? And even at the lowest level, even when you’re right there at the on the front lines, you might show up to a shift and find out you’ve been randomly selected to get a a pop quiz. They don’t call it a pop quiz. They call it a calibration, which I think is really interesting. And what this looks like is, essentially, they’re quizzing you on how to do certain tasks that you might be called upon to do, whether it’s building out a a sauce burger and French fries, that’s what they call it, whether it’s cleaning out some certain machine or what have you, you get trained in this pop quiz on what are the steps to do this, what’s the proper way to do this. And cheating is encouraged, by the way.

David Burkus [00:12:19]:
Because if you don’t know the answer, you get the quiz at the start of your shift and you have to turn it in by the end. If you don’t know the answer, go ask someone because then they can teach you. Right? So the purpose isn’t to just sort of test your knowledge. The purpose is to create these teaching moments. That’s why I think I love that they call it a calibration. It’s not a calibration in the sense that humans are machines and they’re soulless and we’re calibrating and adjusting them and what have no. No. No.

David Burkus [00:12:42]:
It’s that the system is a learning system. And if a human forgets a step, we need to change the system so that they can, remember, so that they can get that training that they need. So they’re not calibrating people. They’re calibrating the system they’re using to train people, and they’re using these little tests to kind of do it. And you would think, like, you would think this would be depressing. Right? You would think this would be like I’m a cog in a machine type of thing. But that’s not what happens.

David Burkus [00:13:08]:
You have clarity. You’ve been trained in multiple stations, so you not only know what you’re doing. You know what your peers are doing. You know how it fits into what they’re doing. You know the level of performance that’s expected of you, and you expect it from other people. I mean, those are the things that describe championship sports teams. That’s not what describes fast food workers, and so that’s what you get from a sense of engagement. The turnover rates are are at the front lines.

David Burkus [00:13:30]:
They’re a third of the industry. In the managerial lines, they’re almost nonexistent. Right? And the profitability lines, the level of repeat customers, it all flows from that idea, right? That not only are we focused on providing a quality product, but in order to do that, we’re gonna create the best learning system that’s ever existed in fast food or quick service restaurants. And we’re gonna make sure, like I said, that people have role clarity to an extreme. Now another point here, you know, to use the m word, right, micromanager, there is a difference between tracking someone’s activity and being clear on what’s expected of them. Right? So when I talk about Powell’s, we’re not we’re not necessarily using a stopwatch to time how fast you’re assembling a sauce burger, for example. We’re just training to make sure you know what’s expected of you, right? And making sure you have the resources to achieve that objective, that you’ve been trained to achieve that objective, and we’re measuring the output, meaning the error rate. And we just trust that speed is going to take care of itself.

David Burkus [00:14:29]:
And so I think the same thing even in a knowledge work situation that when you’re a true micromanager, it’s because you’re tracking someone’s activity. You’re that jerk that was making people during the pandemic sign on to a Zoom call with you at 8:30 and sign on to another one at 4:30 so you knew they were working all day. Instead of just saying, here is what we’re working on, and I’ll check-in with you if I can be a a resource for you to help you get these objectives done by the end of the week. I’m here, but I trust you. Right? So that’s not clarity doesn’t automatically mean micromanagement. People feel micromanaged when their autonomy is taken from them. You can still provide an awful lot of clarity while preserving peoiple’s autonomy by saying I’m clear on what the objectives and the deliverables and what I expect I’m clear on what the objectives and the deliverables and what I I expect of you and what you can expect for the rest of the team, but it’s on you now that you’ve been given the resources and the training. It’s on you to figure out your best way to deliver on those things. Those are 2 different things.

David Burkus [00:15:23]:
And it is a bit of a fine line for sure, but when you walk it, amazing things happen.

Dave Stachowiak [00:15:28]:
Yeah. And what a great distinction that you’ve just made. And as I think back to so few of us really have the privilege to work on high performing teams. And if I think back in my career, how many teams I’ve worked on that I would really put in the category of, like, a high performing amazing team where I was, like, so excited almost every day to go to work. It’s been one time, I think, that, like, really falls into that category. And it was a lot of years ago. And when I think back to that team, not that other experiences weren’t good, but really high performing ones. And when I think back to that team, the clarity was so clear.

Dave Stachowiak [00:16:10]:
The work that management did to, like, help us all know exactly who was doing what. They still provided a lot of autonomy, but that clarity was really there. And there’s a lot that we can do to do that and create that. And so I thought maybe we’d lean into some of the tactical things that we might do. And I know one of your favorite ones is to hold huddles as a practice for creating some of that clarity. Tell me about that for those who’ve never done something like that. What does it look like, and how does it help?

David Burkus [00:16:42]:
Yeah. So a huddle is is exactly right. One of my favorite activities or habits, if you will, to start building with teams to increase their performance. And if you’re listening to this, you have any experience in the world of, software development, tech, IT, and you’re familiar with the agile philosophy, this is gonna sound an awful lot like a scrum or a daily stand up, which is fine. That’s where I sort of stole it from. I stole it from a combination of that and studying Alan Mulally’s sort of business plan review. Oh. Scrum though scrum scrum’s a rugby term, and I’m an American.

David Burkus [00:17:12]:
I have no idea how rugby works. If you’re listening to this and you do, please reach out to me. Explain. I watched the World Cup recently. I still don’t get it. But I understand the huddle. Right? A huddle is a quick syncing up of action before we all go run the play where we each have to run our own individual routes. We each have to do our own individual moves, but they fit together, and it only works if we know what to expect of each other.

David Burkus [00:17:34]:
Right? Maybe I’m showing my American Rules football bias there, but I apologize. But that’s what a huddle is. And so in a huddle, you get the team together on a regular basis. Could be daily. Most teams in a knowledge work situation, this is once a week. The most I’ve seen it stretched out to is about 2 weeks, to stay effective. And the idea is we sync up on 3 core questions. You can add more if you want, but 3 core questions that each person reports out to each other.

David Burkus [00:17:58]:
This isn’t just a progress report you’re sending to your boss. This isn’t your 1 on 1 check-in. Those are still important, but that’s a different meeting. This is getting together with the whole team and reporting out on 3 questions. What did I just complete? What am I focused on next? And what’s blocking my progress? And if you think about everything we talk about with clarity and empathy, you can see how those 3 fit together. You know, what did I just complete is me saying, here’s what I’ve delivered between then and now. The last time we met and now, here’s what I’ve delivered. Right? So you know where everybody is.

David Burkus [00:18:26]:
You get a status update on where everybody is and the tasks they’re working on. What am I focused on next? This is essentially what am I committing to deliver between the next time and now. This is not people reading out their calendar to you. This is not just people saying, I have this call and this call and doing this. This is what are they going to focus on completing between right now and the next time we meet. Those are 2 clarity questions if you think about it. Those are all about role clarity. What are we committing to do? By when? How does it all fit together? The third one, that’s kind of a clarity question and kind of an empathy question.

David Burkus [00:19:00]:
What’s blocking my progress? In other words, as I look to the answers I just gave you to question number 2, what am I focused on next? Where are the potential roadblocks, derailers? Where do I have a resource gap? Where do I have a knowledge gap maybe? Or maybe I have a skills gap. What are the things that could prevent me from accomplishing what the team needs me to do between this meeting and the next meeting? And this is partly a clarity question, but as I said, it’s partly an empathy question because what we’re really talking about here is having people admit proactively where they need help. You know, in so many business teams, especially, but in any sort of sector, we have a hard time asking for help a lot of times. We think I got it, I’ll figure it out. I I don’t wanna tell people I’m failing. I don’t wanna tell people I’m struggling. That might get used against me. So I’m not.

David Burkus [00:19:45]:
I’m just gonna figure it out on my own. And unfortunately, if you’ve been in a leadership role with people who act like that, they very rarely figure it out. Normally what happens is the problem compounds. And by the time it comes to light, you realize it’s gonna take an awful lot more to fix than it would have if they had been straight about it from the get go. So that’s the beauty of a question like that is it not only helps the team anticipate problems. Over time, you start to grow in your empathy and understanding of each other too because you understand whose strengths are where, whose weaknesses are where, who’s great to help each other on certain tasks. Remember, this is a team wide meeting, so you’re observing sometimes just observing one person say, I need help with this, and another person say, I worked on something like that 2 years ago. Let’s sync up for like 15 minutes sometime this week and I can talk you through it.

David Burkus [00:20:28]:
You’ve now made a mental note that that person is strong in that area. That’s gonna help you over time as you grow in your sense of empathy. Right? So, yeah, you decide if you wanna add other questions, you decide on the interval. The thing I would tell you is is for most knowledge work teams, weekly seems to be pretty good. Some teams incorporate this into their kind of weekly share out or when the the leader, the team leader is sharing out information from on high. But what’s most important here is number 1, this is a team wide meeting where people are hearing from everybody on the team. And number 2, this is about objectives and deliverables. This isn’t about reading your calendar.

David Burkus [00:21:01]:
If everybody’s just reading their calendar, then you probably need to space out and add additional time in between when people are meeting so we can get more focused on deliverables and not just activity.

Dave Stachowiak [00:21:12]:
Yeah. I’m glad you said that because that was one of the things I was thinking as I was thinking about implementing something like this. We’ve all either been in meetings or run meetings at some point where for lack of a better term, it was like everyone’s dreaded standing meeting where people get together and the invitation is like, well, let’s just kinda give status updates to each other, and it’s 45 minutes or an hour of, like, everyone just saying, like, what they did last week, that kind of a thing. And I a lot of us have gotten the wise advice of, like, okay. You use your meeting times for better things than that. Right? But that’s not what you’re saying. I think there’s a distinction here between a, quote, unquote, standing meeting and a huddle, isn’t there?

David Burkus [00:21:50]:
Yeah. Well and I’ll go even further. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a meeting. A Meaning, it doesn’t have to be a synchronous in person or synchronous virtual conversation. I work with a lot of teams where this is just an expectation that on Monday morning, this is what they put in the Slack channel called huddle.

Dave Stachowiak [00:22:05]:
Right?

David Burkus [00:22:05]:
That you report out, or you can even do this in in project management tools. Like, I know you can do it in Basecamp. I’m pretty sure you can do it in Asana and others. You can have, recurring emails that get sent out. Like, Monday morning, everybody gets an email from the tool asking those 3 questions, and you reply with your answers, and then that gets put in a place where by noon on Monday, everybody can read everybody else’s answers so that you just so you know what’s going on. Right? So this doesn’t even have to be a meeting, right, let alone that kinda stand up meeting. The idea here is that we’re just syncing up on all of those activities that we’re becoming aware of, not not just what everybody’s done, which is what those standing meetings you’re describing tend to be, but more importantly, what are they focused on doing so that nobody’s dropping the ball and where can we help each other?

Dave Stachowiak [00:22:50]:
Yeah. I love it. I love it. And, you know, I’m thinking back also about something you said earlier that, there is some both and in this. Like, there are so many things that clarity, yes, and autonomy. Like, making a really clear, really clear effort on doing both. And one of the tactics that, I think really speaks to this is communication bursts as far as how a team communicates. Tell me about that and what that looks like and what’s helpful about it.

David Burkus [00:23:23]:
Yeah. So this is actually one of those sort of fascinating counterintuitive findings, right, which is that in a knowledge work setting, most high performing teams are not in constant communication. Right? They’re not and this is great news to anyone who feels like their entire life is just sitting in on Zoom meetings all the time. Yeah. They tend to have long periods of time where the team isn’t in communication at all. Because they’re running their huddles properly or their regular meetings properly, that then gives people large blocks of time where they can do the deep work of actually delivering on the things they say they’re gonna deliver. Right? And this is where I think a lot of times we on teams team research, we rely on sort of sports analogies or what have you. So this is why I think it was so unexpected.

David Burkus [00:24:06]:
Right? Obviously, a basketball team or a soccer team is going to be in constant communication, but an accounting team is not that, right? A consulting team. In a knowledge work world, it’s not that. It’s actually there’s 2 elements of collaboration. Number 1 is syncing up your work with people. That’s what huddles are for. And then number 2 is doing the work, which is often what Cal Newport might call deep work, things that require focus and not being interrupted. And if you’re asking someone to be in constant contact with you then what you’re actually asking them is to never have time to do the actual work. So most teams, espeically now in a hybrid world, or a virtual world, we have all of these leaders who feel like they wanna be in constant contact with people so they know they’re working. That can be counterintuitive.

David Burkus [00:24:49]:
But I realize what I’m saying here. Right? Like, sync up on Monday and then don’t talk to each other for another couple days might be really, really scary. So what you might wanna do is just start to set certain hours. Like, I work with some teams where we just set certain hours of the day where we don’t schedule meetings, like, from 1 to 3 or 10 to 2 or sometimes we say only schedule meetings from 10 to 2. Sometimes we have no meeting Wednesdays. Right? We just start to look at what’s the most comfortable amount of time we could commit to, like, no communication right now, focus on getting the work done. And then we gradually expand that amount of time to figure out the right rhythm. And every team is gonna be different, but every high performing team is gonna do that bursty communication that we’re talking about.

David Burkus [00:25:27]:
We’re gonna sync up. We are gonna communicate, but we’re also gonna have that punctuated with long periods of time where we can actually get the work done.

Dave Stachowiak [00:25:34]:
Yeah. You know, as you were saying that I was thinking, I’ve I’ve heard from a number of our members and listeners in recent years who have heard the call on something like that said, okay. I need we need to do a better job in practice, our team organization. And they’ve set up some of those, expectations, and they found that it’s hard for people to kind of honor those boundaries. Like, okay. We’re not gonna have meetings on Wednesdays or we’re gonna communicate between these time frames. You’ve also seen this work really well though with teams.

Dave Stachowiak [00:26:06]:
And I’m wondering what separates the leaders of the teams that are able to if they’re not already disciplined to start communicating a little more and burst to to get in that direction and keep it sustainable versus the people who kinda try it out and, like, 3 weeks later, they’re back to what they were doing before?

David Burkus [00:26:23]:
Yeah. Well, two thoughts here. Number 1, we need really good clarity on what counts as a meeting. Right? So a a a spur of the moment phone call today because I have a question is not a meeting. Right? So we need to clarify. Are we having no meeting Thursday, or are we having no communication Thursday? Because we need to sort of clarify that. Right?

Dave Stachowiak [00:26:44]:
Got it.

David Burkus [00:26:45]:
If we’re only gonna have meetings during certain hours, then we need to maybe come up with clarity on what are reasons to call meetings. Right? I I mean, I’m a big fan of every meeting has to have a purpose. And when you boil it down, there’s really only a few purposes to meetings. 1 is to convey information, which by the way doesn’t need to be a a meeting at all. It could be an email. It could be you talking over the slide deck you were gonna present to everybody and just recording it. Right? But sometimes you need to verify everyone was there and heard it for legal or compliance reasons. So presenting information, discussing information, making a decision, and that’s about it.

David Burkus [00:27:17]:
Maybe adding socialization as a 4th purpose. Those are really about it. And if you’re not really clear on that your meeting fits in one of those 4 categories, then it probably shouldn’t be a meeting. So let’s start there. But then once we know those 4 categories, maybe we set rules on when those things happen. We maybe we only happen from 10 to 2. We call for those. You can call for it to spur the moment, but it has to fit in those hours.

David Burkus [00:27:39]:
Right? So that’s why I say some teams, no meeting Thursdays doesn’t work, but saying, hey, we only schedule meetings between 9 am and 1 pm or 9 and or 11 and 2 or whatever it is that works for your team. That way people know, okay, you might still get called into a spur of the moment meeting, but you still are gonna have untouchable time on your calendar as well.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:58]:
Yeah. I’ve it comes right back to clarity. Right? Like, defining what a meeting is. Like you said, is there a purpose behind it, expectations in advance? It’s never gonna be perfect. But if you do that, boy, you get a lot farther down the road with, trying to make a change than you do if it’s just a pronouncement about what we’re gonna do, but you haven’t really thought through. It kinda comes back to empathy, like, understanding how each individual works best, being able to think in advance of, like, okay. We are gonna have stuff that’s going to come up unexpected. When we do, how are we gonna handle that? It’s a little bit of that goes a long way.

David Burkus [00:28:31]:
Yeah. Yeah. And and, you know, this may not be the the one to start with. Right? If you’re listening to this and you’re saying, oh, this this random crazy guy said we should have no meeting Thursdays. May maybe you need a little more clarity on expectations of your team in doing what I sometimes call a team charter or ways of working document. Like, if you don’t already have that idea that there’s 4 purposes for a meeting and every meeting has to have this and and what have you, you don’t have rules around how you’re communicating, how many what and what number of people constitute a meeting, then you may wanna start with more of that team charter idea. I do this with a lot of teams, and and, basically, what I find is a lot of conflict on a team. Not all.

David Burkus [00:29:06]:
Some of it’s personality based. 4% of the population is sociopaths. Right? So there’s some level of conflict on a team that happens for reasons that need to be dealt with more severely, but a lot of conflict happens on a team because we all have assumptions about what behavior we’re we expect from other people that we’ve take for granted, that we don’t share with them. And then we get mad when they don’t communicate in the way that we’ve decided is the perfect way to communicate even though we never had a conversation about that. So when I do a team charter, this isn’t a new employment contract or anything like that. It is more of a frequently unasked questions document that we’re just gonna get out and ask. What are reasonable times for setting meetings? What are the four core reasons for setting meetings? How far in advance do we need to call for a meeting? Even sometimes those are big questions, but sometimes I get a lot of success with teams when I just ask questions like, what’s a reasonable amount of time to wait for an email response? Is it 24 hours? Is it 12? Is it some people would go, I have to respond to every email? Yeah, maybe. Like, we need to have that conversation.

David Burkus [00:30:04]:
And so what we do in a charter is we go question by question and we come up with rules of the road that we can live with for 2 or 3 months. It’s not gonna be perfect the first iteration, but but we’re going to try and follow all of these rules for a set period of time, and then we’ll come back and we’ll go, how did they work, right? So again, if this communicating in bursts idea or having these punctuated times where we’re having no meetings is something your team is struggling with, it’s probably because we need to get more clarity about how we’re gonna work together. And so you may wanna do something like a team charter.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:31]:
I wanna ask you about one other tactic, which is the invitation to make priorities clear and I highlighted this passage that you wrote “several years ago Inc Magazine asked senior leaders at 600 different companies to estimate how many of their employees knew the top priorities of the organization. The average senior leader estimated 64% of them would be able to name the top three priorities. When Inc. Then followed up with the employees, only 2% could accurately name their leaders’ priorities.” Wow. That’s a big delta. And as I was thinking about that, I couldn’t help but just be reminded myself, David. I had a conversation with one of our members about expectation in our community a few weeks ago.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:14]:
And they said to me, like, oh, well, that’s not at all clear. And as I thought about it, I thought, well, oh, yeah. That’s only clear in my mind. I’ve never actually said that out loud. No wonder. No wonder they didn’t know and have a framework for it. And it’s just it’s so easy to get trapped in this, like, oh, I know it. I’ve said something.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:38]:
I’m in that 64%. I’m sure, like, people know what’s going on, and we just we just don’t do a good enough job of making things and priorities clear, do we?

David Burkus [00:31:47]:
Yeah. Yeah. And for two different reasons. Right? The the first is that sometimes we just have too many. If you have more than 5, you don’t have real priorities. I I once worked with an organization, and their 5 year strategic plan had 4 teen top level objectives, and then each one had 3 to 4 KPIs for that and no one’s gonna remember that. Right? No one is going to remember that. 3 to 5, if you’re more than 5, you don’t actually have any priorities.

David Burkus [00:32:14]:
Priority, we forget this. Priority in the English language used to only be a singular word. Like for the 1st 100 years that we used this word, it was what was the priority. The idea that it would be plural is a relatively new concept, right? And so I think we need that mentality. So some of it is that. Can you boil it down into that? The other thing that tends to happen where people that results in a lot of the 2% is, look, the world changes, and it changes faster than it’s ever changed before, and it’s going to change faster in the future. Like, this is as crazed and volatile you think right now is, this is the calmest that your operating environment will ever be for the rest of your career.

David Burkus [00:32:56]:
Think think about that. Right? And what happens is as things change, sometimes the priorities need to change and sometimes they don’t. And where leaders often fail is not being clear on what changed. So you might even call it make priorities clear, but you might call it keep priorities clear Because sometimes new things come in, we fall for that sort of tyranny of the urgent that, like, Stephen Covey used to talk about forever, and people are now operating on something that is urgent but not actually one of the top priorities because their sense of urgency supersedes that and so they’re operating on it. And but actually, the priorities didn’t change. And then sometimes the priorities do change and we didn’t communicate enough that in light of this environment, this isn’t all that important anymore, so put that on pause while we refocus on this. So a lot of times, you get this ambiguity because the environment changed and the leaders didn’t do a good enough job adapting fast enough.

David Burkus [00:33:46]:
You know, that’s the other sort of dilemma of a 5 year I don’t even know why you’d make a 5 year plan, to be honest with you. You could say, here’s where we wanna be in 5 years, but you should probably be revising it every 6 months to a year.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:57]:
Yeah. Indeed. Well and and speaking of, like, keeping things simple, I mean, 3 to 5 things. We’ve, I think, zeroed it on maybe 3 to 5 pages of the book in this conversation. There’s so much more here. We’re intentionally not talking about psychological safety because we’ve had some conversations before on it. There’s a ton in the book. There’s a ton on purpose.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:19]:
You and I have talked about that in a past episode. I’ll mention it afterwards. So for those who I think wanna get better at this specifically of how do I really start thinking about big picture creating the environment where I’m helping a team to perform well. What a great starting point the book is. David Burkus is the author of best team ever, the surprising science of high performing teams. David, thank you as always for your work. So appreciate it.

David Burkus [00:34:44]:
No. Thank you so much for having me.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:44]:
Episodes I’d recommend. One of them is episode 149, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth. That is the title of Chris Hatfield’s book. We talked about him at the start of this conversation today and his, work as an astronaut and certainly his public presence in social media and all the wonderful things he has done to feature his work in space. Within space, what an incirble leader he is and highly respected. He talked on episode 149 about just how he approaches career and life and some of the key principles. A great opportunity to learn from such a well respected leader. Again, that’s episode 149.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:35]:
I’d also recommend episode 233, how to make deep work happen. Cal Newport was my guest on that episode, And he talked about the reality that a lot of us find in organizations that it’s so hard to sometimes find 20, 30, 40 minutes to actually focus on deep work. David and I talked a bit about some of the strategies that we can use in a team to actually elicit a little bit more of that focused work time. We go into great depth than that in episode 233 with Cal on some of the ways you may approach that in your own work. You may approach that with colleagues and how to actually find more time to do the deep work that actually is really essential, especially for leaders to stop and think and plan and do so much of what leadership calls us to do, episode 233. And then finally, a wonderful compliment to this conversation is the last time David was on the show talking about how great teams find purpose. That’s episode 481. We talked about clarity in this conversation, but we didn’t talk that much about purpose. A important compliment, of course, having a articulated and clear purpose for a team is critical.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:45]:
David talks in detail in that episode of a couple of different ways to look at that. And chances are your team is gonna fall into one of those pieces of the framework, episode 481 on how to make that even more intentional in your organization. All of those episodes, of course, as always are on the coaching for leaders.com website on all of the apps available publicly. But if you set up your free membership at coachingforleaders.com, in addition to all the access to the episodes, you’ll be able to search by topic. And perhaps you’re looking for a bit more on team leadership. It’s one of the categories inside of the free membership. You can search the episode library by topic and find all the episodes we’ve done on team leadership, not only with David, but many others over the years. If that’s, key for you right now, I’d encourage you to set up your free membership.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:35]:
Go find that in many other episodes inside of the library. Just go over to coachingforleaders.com. It’s also gonna open up access to all the other benefits inside of the free membership. One of them is my library. If you click on Dave’s library, when you get in there, you’ll be able to search for any topic of interest to you. There’s 100 and 100 of hashtags of things that I’ve categorized over the years, other podcasts, videos, things I put in the weekly leadership guides that you receive. Those of you have the free membership on email. All of that has been databased for years.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:08]:
You can just go in, find the topic you’re looking for. If you’re looking for a credibility piece for a client, or maybe you’re looking for a specific topic or an article on a specific situation you’re facing right now, so much in there. That’s just one of many benefits inside of the free membership, coachingforleaders.com for that. And if you’re looking for a bit more, I’d invite you to discover more about Coaching for Leaders Plus. One of the plus benefits is topic guides. In addition to all the episodes themselves, I have put together a guide with a detailed answer to a specific question. There’s a whole series of them inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus. And when you click on that question, you’ll be able to see a video from me.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:51]:
The episodes I recommend on that question. Some of the key points, reflection questions, and ability to share it with others. Just one of the many resources in Coaching for Leaders Plus. You can find out more by going to coachingforleaders.plus. Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next week, I’m glad to welcome Harvard professor, Frances Fry, on how to help change happen faster, an important conversation, especially now in organizations. Join me for that conversation with Francis next week, and I’ll see you back on Monday.