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"A maker’s schedule is different. It is made up of long blocks of time reserved for focusing on particular tasks, or the entire day might be devoted to one activity."

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Consider the daily schedule of famed novelist Haruki Murakami. When he's working on a novel, he starts his days at 4 am and writes for five or six continuous hours. Once the writing is done, he spends his afternoons running or swimming, and his evenings, reading or listening to music before a 9 pm bedtime. Murakami is known for his strict adherence to this schedule.

In contrast, consider the schedule of an entrepreneur, speaker, and writer Gary Vaynerchuk. He describes his day (which begins at 6 am) as being broken into tiny slots, mostly comprising meetings, which can be as short as three minutes. He makes calls in between meetings. During the moments between meetings and calls, he posts on just about every social network in existence and records short segments of video or speech. In short, his day, for the most part, involves managing, organizing, and instructing other people, making decisions, planning, and advising.

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time."
- Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

The numerous articles we have all read about the schedules and routines of successful people like these often miss the point. Getting up at 4 am does not make someone an acclaimed novelist, any more than splitting the day into 15-minute segments makes someone an influential entrepreneur.

What we can learn from reading about the schedules of people we admire is not what time to set our alarms or how many cups of coffee to drink, but that different types of work require different types of schedules. The two wildly different workdays of Murakami and Vaynerchuk illustrate the concept of maker and manager schedules.

Paul Graham of Y Combinator first described this concept in a 2009 essay. From Graham's distinction between makers and managers, we can learn that doing creative work or overseeing other people does not necessitate certain habits or routines. It requires consideration of the way we structure our time.

What's the Difference?

A manager's day is, as a rule, sliced up into tiny slots, each with a specific purpose decided in advance. Many of those slots are used for meetings, calls, or emails. The manager's schedule may be planned for them by a secretary or assistant.

Managers spend a lot of time, "putting out fires" and doing reactive work. An important call or email comes in, so it gets answered. An employee makes a mistake or needs advice, so the manager races to sort it out. To focus on one task for a substantial block of time, managers need to make an effort to prevent other people from distracting them.

Managers don't necessarily need the capacity for deep focus - they primarily need the ability to make fast, smart decisions. In a three-minute meeting, they have the potential to generate (or destroy) enormous value through their decisions and expertise.

A maker's schedule is different. It is made up of long blocks of time reserved for focusing on particular tasks, or the entire day might be devoted to one activity. Breaking their day up into slots of a few minutes each would be the equivalent of doing nothing.

A maker could be the stereotypical reclusive novelist, locked away in a cabin in the woods with a typewriter, no internet, and a bottle of whiskey to hand. Or they could be a Red Bull-drinking Silicon Valley software developer working in an open-plan office with their headphones on. Although interdisciplinary knowledge is valuable, makers do not always need a wide circle of competence. They need to do one thing well and can leave the rest to the managers.

Meetings are pricey for makers, restricting the time available for their real work, so they avoid them, batch them together, or schedule them at times of day when their energy levels are low. As Paul Graham writes:

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

It makes sense. The two work styles could not be more different.

A manager's job is to, well, manage other people and systems. The point is that their job revolves around organizing other people and making decisions. As Andrew Grove writes in High Output Management:

...a big part of a middle manager's work is to supply information and know-how, and to impart a sense of the preferred method of handling things to the groups under his control and influence. A manager also makes and helps to make decisions. Both kinds of basic managerial tasks can only occur during face-to-face encounters, and therefore only during meetings. Thus, I will assert again that a meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. That means we should not be fighting their very existence, but rather using the time spent in them as efficiently as possible.

A maker's job is to create some form of tangible value. Makers work alone or under a manager, although they might have people working with them. "Maker" is a very broad category. A maker could be a writer, artist, software developer, carpenter, chef, biohacker, web designer, or anyone else who designs, creates, serves, and thinks.

Making anything significant requires time - lots of it - and having the right kind of schedule can help. Take a look at the quintessential maker schedule of the prolific (to say the least) writer Isaac Asimov, as described in his memoir:

I wake at five in the morning. I get to work as early as I can. I work as long as I can. I do this every day of the week, including holidays. I don't take vacations voluntarily and I try to do my work even when I'm on vacation. (And even when I'm in the hospital.)

In other words, I am still and forever in the candy store [where he worked as a child]. Of course, I'm not waiting on customers; I'm not taking money and making change; I'm not forced to be polite to everyone who comes in (in actual fact, I was never good at that). I am, instead, doing things I very much want to do - but the schedule is there; the schedule that was ground into me; the schedule you would think I would have rebelled against once I had the chance.

The Intersection Between Makers and Managers

It is far from unusual for a person's job to involve both maker and manager duties. Elon Musk is one example. His oft-analyzed schedule involves a great deal of managing as the head of multiple major companies, but he also spends an estimated 80% of his time on designing and engineering. How does he achieve this? Judging from interviews, Musk is adept at switching between the two schedules, planning his day in five-minute slots during the managerial times and avoiding calls or emails during the maker times.

The important point to note is that people who successfully combine both schedules do so by making a clear distinction, setting boundaries for those around them, and adjusting their environment in accordance. They don't design for an hour, have meetings for an hour, then return to designing, and so on. In his role as an investor and adviser to startups, Paul Graham sets boundaries between his two types of work:

How do we manage to advise so many startups on the maker's schedule? By using the classic device for simulating the manager's schedule within the maker's: office hours. Several times a week I set aside a chunk of time to meet founders we've funded. These chunks of time are at the end of my working day, and I wrote a signup program that ensures [that] all the appointments within a given set of office hours are clustered at the end. Because they come at the end of my day these meetings are never an interruption. (Unless their working day ends at the same time as mine, the meeting presumably interrupts theirs, but since they made the appointment it must be worth it to them.) During busy periods, office hours sometimes get long enough that they compress the day, but they never interrupt it.

Likewise, during his time working on his own startup, Graham figured out how to partition his day and get both categories of work done without sacrificing his sanity:

When we were working on our own startup, back in the '90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then, I'd sleep till about 11am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called "business stuff." I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager's schedule and one on the maker's.

Murakami also combined making and managing during his early days as a novelist. As with many other makers, his creative work began as a side project while he held another job. Murakami ran a jazz club. In a 2008 New Yorker profile, Murakami described having a schedule similar to Graham's in his days running a startup. He spent his days overseeing the jazz club - doing paperwork, organizing staff, keeping track of the inventory, and so on. When the club closed after midnight, Murakami started writing and continued until he was exhausted. After reaching a tipping point with his success as a writer, Murakami made the switch from combining maker and manager schedules to focusing on the former.

In , Cal Newport describes the schedule of another person who combines both roles, Wharton professor (and our podcast guest) Adam Grant.

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Though Grant's productivity depends on many factors, there's one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches. Grant performs this batching at multiple levels. Within the year, he stacks his teaching into the fall semester, during which he can turn all of his attention to teaching well and being available to his students. (This method seems to work, as Grant is currently the highest-rated teacher at Wharton and the winner of multiple teaching awards.)

During the fall semester, Grant is in manager mode and has meetings with students. For someone in a teaching role, a maker schedule would be impossible. Teachers need to be able to help and advise their students. In the spring and summer, Grant switches to a maker schedule to focus on his research. He avoids distractions by being - at least, in his mind - out of his office.

Within a semester dedicated to research, he alternates between periods where his door is open ..., and periods where he isolates himself to focus completely and without distraction on a single research task. (He typically divides the writing of a scholarly paper into three discrete tasks: analyzing the data, writing a full draft, and editing the draft into something publishable.) During these periods, which can last up to three or four days, he'll often put an out-of-office auto-responder on his e-mail so correspondents will know not to expect a response. "It sometimes confuses my colleagues," he told me. "They say, 'You're not out of office, I see you in your office right now!'" But to Grant, it's important to enforce strict isolation until he completes the task at hand.

"A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner."
- Seth Godin, The Dip

The Value of Defining Your Schedule

We all know the benefits of a solid routine - it helps us to work smarter, look after our health, plan the trajectory of our days, achieve goals, and so on. That has all been discussed a million times and doubtless will be discussed a million more. But how often do we think about how our days are actually broken up, about how we choose (or are forced) to segment them? If you consider yourself a maker, do you succeed in structuring your day around long blocks of focused work, or does it get chopped up into little slices that other people can grab? If you regard yourself as a manager, are you available for the people who need your time? Are those meetings serving a purpose and getting high-leverage work done, or are you just trying to fill up an appointment book? If you do both types of work, how do you draw a line between them and communicate that boundary to others?

Cal Newport writes:

We spend much of our days on autopilot-not giving much thought to what we are doing with our time. This is a problem. It's difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule if you don't face, without flinching, your current balance between deep and shallow work, and then adopt the habit of pausing before action and asking, "What makes the most sense right now?"

There are two key reasons that the distinction between maker and manager schedules matters for each of us and the people we work with.
First, defining the type of schedule we need is more important than worrying about task management systems or daily habits. If we try to do maker work on a manager schedule or managerial work on a maker schedule, we will run into problems.

Second, we need to be aware of which schedule the people around us are on so we can be considerate and let them get their best work done.

We shouldn't think of either type of work as superior, as the two are interdependent. Managers would be useless without makers and vice versa. It's the clash that can be problematic. Paul Graham notes that some managers damage their employees' productivity when they fail to recognize the distinction between the types of schedules. Managers who do recognize the distinction will be ahead of the game. As Graham writes:

Each type of schedule works fine by itself. Problems arise when they meet. Since most powerful people operate on the manager's schedule, they're in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency if they want to. But the smarter ones restrain themselves, if they know that some of the people working for them need long chunks of time to work in.

Makers generally avoid meetings and similar time-based commitments that don't have a direct impact on their immediate work. A 30-minute meeting does not just take up half an hour of an afternoon. It bisects the day, creating serious problems. Let's say that a computer programmer has a meeting planned at 2 pm. When they start working in the morning, they know they have to stop later and are prevented from achieving full immersion in the current project. As 2 pm rolls around, they have to pause whatever they are doing - even if they are at a crucial stage - and head to the meeting. Once it finishes and they escape back to their real work, they experience attention residue and the switching costs of moving between tasks. It takes them a while - say, 15 to 20 minutes - to reach their prior state of focus. Taking that into account, the meeting has just devoured at least an hour of their time. If it runs over or if people want to chat afterward, the effect is even greater. And what if they have another meeting planned at 4 pm? That leaves them with perhaps an hour to work, during which they keep an eye on the clock to avoid being late.

Software entrepreneur Ray Ozzie has a specific technique for handling potential interruptions - the four-hour rule. When he's working on a product, he never starts unless he has at least four uninterrupted hours to focus on it. Fractured blocks of time, he discovered, result in more bugs, which later require fixing.

In Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, Susan Cain describes an experiment to figure out the characteristics of superior programmers:

...more than six hundred developers from ninety-two different companies participated. Each designed, coded, and tested a program, working in his normal office space during business hours. Each participant was also assigned a partner from the same company. The partners worked separately, however, without any communication, a feature of the games that turned out to be critical.

When the results came in, they revealed an enormous performance gap. The best outperformed the worst by a 10:1 ratio. The top programmers were also about 2.5 times better than the median. When DeMarco and Lister tried to figure out what accounted for this astonishing range, the factors that you'd think would matter-such as years of experience, salary, even the time spent completing the work-had little correlation to outcome. Programmers with ten years' experience did no better than those with two years. The half who performed above the median earned less than 10 percent more than the half below-even though they were almost twice as good. The programmers who turned in "zero-defect" work took slightly less, not more, time to complete the exercise than those who made mistakes.

It was a mystery with one intriguing clue: programmers from the same companies performed at more or less the same level, even though they hadn't worked together. That's because top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption. Sixty-two percent of the best performers said that their workspace was acceptably private, compared to only 19 percent of the worst performers; 76 percent of the worst performers but only 38 percent of the top performers said that people often interrupted them needlessly.

A common argument makers hear from people on a different schedule is that they should "just take a break for this!" - "this" being a meeting, call, coffee break, and so on. But a distinction exists between time spent not doing their immediate work and time spent taking a break.

Pausing to drink some water, stretch, or get fresh air is the type of break that recharges makers and helps them focus better when they get back to work. Pausing to hear about a coworker's marital problems or the company's predictions for the next quarter has the opposite effect. A break and time spent not working are very different. One fosters focus, the other snaps it.

Remember Arnold Bennett's words: "You have to live on this 24 hours of time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use ... is a matter of the highest urgency."

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Maker vs. Manager: How Your Schedule Can Make or Break You - Farnam Street

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Consider the daily schedule of famed novelist Haruki Murakami. When he's working on a novel, he starts his days at 4 am and writes for five or six continuous hours. Once the writing is done, he spends his afternoons running or swimming, and his evenings, reading or listening to music before a 9 pm bedtime.

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Leadership Reflections 10 - Absolute Clarity - Barry Dore

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Listen to this episode from Leadership Reflections by Barry Dore on Spotify. One of my series of podcasts exploring Mary's traits based on my book, 'Lead Like Mary', available from Amazon This week: 10. Absolute Clarity www.barrydore.com --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/barry-dore/message

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https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/blog/collaboration/ways-sidestep-working-in-silos

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The world is so connected these days, it's hard to believe that any workplace is struggling with a lack of communication.

Yet working in silos continues to plague organizations of all sizes. It causes interdepartmental communication breakdowns and prevents the collaboration necessary for companies to truly thrive.

How can an organization reckon with the realities of silos while simultaneously breaking down walls to create more connected teams?

1. Working in silos might not be the core issue

The first thing to recognize is that working in silos isn't something to avoid at all costs. After all, it's only natural for workers to work well with others who think in the same ways.

"Working in silos is more natural than working collaboratively. It's a tribal mentality," says Ron Ashkenas, co-author of The Harvard Business Review Leader's Handbook and The GE Work-Out. "It's the same thing in organizations. Cutting across silos is an unnatural act."

As journalist Gillian Tett explains in her 2015 book The Silo Effect, it can also be a matter of necessity. "Professions seem increasingly specialized, partly because technology keeps becoming more complex and sophisticated, and is only understood by a tiny pool of experts," writes Tett. "Silos help us to tidy up the world, classify and arrange our lives, economies, and institutions. They encourage accountability."

Silos are often the result of tightly efficient departments, which can be an essential marker in assessing the strength of a company. According to Chris Fussell, co-author of One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams and a former Navy SEAL, the breakdown occurs when the effort of connecting one silo with another becomes too much of a hassle.

"The real problem in most organizations is that those silos are disconnected ... and information travels too slowly, resulting in a failure to adapt," explains Fussell in a 2017 Inc.com interview. "The trick is to connect the silos together effectively."

In other words, your main goal is to ensure that teams in the organization both want to work together and can do so easily.

2. Optimize how you communicate

According to Slack's Future of Work study, 24% of workers are dissatisfied with communication at work, including how information is shared. On top of that, 52% want a workplace where processes are always improving.

Prioritizing transparency and communication on an organizational level can take time. Start with a carefully chosen set of project management tools and a clear set of communication best practices to match.

Also, encourage teams to be conscious of how their colleagues communicate. An engineer might choose to communicate by chat or text, for example, while someone in the sales department might prefer a check-in over coffee.

3. Set the tone from the top

If collaboration is a core component of the way your organization does business, people have to you know, like coming to work and talking to each other every day. It all starts with establishing a positive work environment by:

The more keeping each other in the loop is enforced as part of the culture, the more likely workers will do it.
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4. Establish (and honor) regular checkpoints

No matter your organization's size, ritualize communication on an ongoing basis. To avoid an overload of meetings, you could plan quick weekly check-ins instead. You could also use a RACI matrix to determine the breakdown of responsibilities, including which teams need to be in contact with each other, and when. Workers will eventually feel more comfortable with the act of sharing across silos when they can anticipate it.

"I talked to a CEO of a very large global corporation recently who does a Monday morning meeting," says Ashkenas. "Everybody around the world-and they switch the times up so that it's not inconvenient for everybody all the time-takes 20 minutes to just quickly go around and make sure everybody knows what everybody else is doing, what are the issues they might have to deal with together."

5. When in doubt, stop, collaborate and listen

If you've tried most of this and your silos are simply not connecting properly-or if a bigger, more urgent problem arises-more drastic measures might need to be taken. The GE Work-Out provides one possible solution. It's an intervention method in which the leaders from teams working on or impacted by a project come together to:

Bypass bureaucratic bottlenecks

Develop creative, collaborative solutions

Empower people to put those solutions into motion immediately

"It takes practice, and a systematic kind of structure," says Ashkenas. "Leaders have to continually be pushing people to get out of those silos, but gradually over time, you can begin to overcome some of that natural tendency."

6. Remember why you're making the effort

If overcoming working in silos is starting to feel like another thing on your to-do list, that's because it takes work. But disconnection among teams is a liability that can cripple an organization and its employees. Investing time to talk to one another as you go will help your company in the long run.

In her book The Silo Effect, Tett recounts how getting New York City's municipal departments to share info led to the reduction of deadly fires in derelict apartment buildings. In the long term, regular collaboration is the most efficient, productive way to work.

"The cost of not doing it is far greater than the cost of doing it," says Ashkenas. "If teams go off to do their own thing, and then months pass, and you realize that the plans don't work, you have to go back and do them all over again. It leads to all sorts of problems with getting to market on time, dissatisfied customers-the risks are tremendous."

That said, try not to overthink it. Working in silos might be inevitable, but by building in networks and utilizing the strategies listed above, you can gradually learn to adapt and bridge gaps within them.

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Are your teams working in silos? Learn how to get them to collaborate and innovate together with advice from experts in organizational transformation.

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for departmental projects - next business year and beyond. Greater visibility of current and upcoming projects and opps for cross collaboration/ efficiencies

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ProjectManager

Organizations define a high-level view of their direction with a strategic roadmap. This strategy roadmap is used to show where the organization is, where it wants to go and how it plans to get there. But the strategic goals and the timeline in which to achieve them can change, which means this communication tool must be constantly reviewed and revised.

Let's explain what a strategic plan is in more detail and highlight the benefits of using one. Then we'll break down the components of a successful strategy roadmap and show you how to make one as well as offer some free templates to download to help you get started.

What Is a Strategic Roadmap?

A strategic roadmap is a visual tool that's similar to a Gantt chart and used to communicate the strategic plan of a company. Organizations will create a strategic plan to cover where they want to be over the next three to five years. It shows high-level objectives, initiatives and a timeline over which to obtain those goals that are set by the management team, who direct the effort for the rest of the organization.

The strategic plan also highlights dependencies and potential obstacles that can delay or sidetrack these goals. As noted above, this strategy roadmap is not etched in stone. It will evolve with the organization and as business conditions change. Therefore, a strategic roadmap should be easy to edit so that these changes can be reflected and communicated to the rest of the team. This provides transparency and alignment across all departments and from leadership to individual contributors.

Roadmaps are Gantt charts, but Gantt charts are difficult to make in Excel and even harder to update without using project management software. ProjectManager is an award-winning project management software that makes it easy to build and edit strategic roadmaps. Our roadmaps capture a portfolio of projects and help you keep them aligned with targets in the short and long term. You can filter the roadmap, view which projects are open and highlight key metrics for stakeholders. Plus, you can link all four types of dependencies to avoid costly delays. Get started with ProjectManager today for free.

Benefits of Creating a Strategic Roadmap

There are many advantages to making a strategic roadmap for your organization. For one thing, as we've already mentioned, it's a clear and easy-to-communicate tool that can be shared across the organization so everyone understands where the organization intends to be and how it plans to get there. Using a visual tool like a strategy roadmap is often more effective than documents and meetings in getting the message across. Here are some other benefits.

Ensures Project Alignment With the Strategic Plan of the Organization

The strategic roadmap aligns all stakeholders on the direction and goals of the organization and puts them on the same page. This not only means that everyone is aware of how the organization plans to achieve these strategic goals, but it shows how everyone can work together and achieve them.

Defines a Timeline for the Achievement of Strategic Goals

Strategic goals can be defined, but to achieve them requires a plan and a realistic schedule. When an organization is building its strategic roadmap, they're creating a timeline to show how various projects will work together over the years to make those strategic goals realized. Having a timeline sets up when tasks should be initiated and when they need to be completed for the larger picture to happen.

Breaks Down Strategic Goals Into Actionable Steps

The schedule visualized by the strategic roadmap is made actionable by tasks. These tasks are smaller steps that are executed by teams within the organization. The more tasks, the closer that organization comes to reaching its strategic goals. All long journeys begin with a single step, these tasks are those steps.

What Should Be Included In a Strategic Roadmap?

Now that we understand the importance of a strategic roadmap let's look at what should be included in one for it to be thorough and workable. These are all essential elements to building a strategy roadmap.

Strategic objectives: The whole point of the roadmap is to achieve your high-level goals. This is the lodestar you'll follow and it should be clearly defined.

Initiatives: These are the projects that the organization will initiate to achieve the strategic goals outlined above.

Action steps: Here you list the tasks that'll be taken for each of the initiatives you've listed above. These will explain how you'll execute the projects and achieve their individual goals.

Timeline: This is the schedule for the tasks and projects, their start dates, end dates and duration. It'll help to monitor progress and manage expectations.

Deliverables: Deliverables are quantifiable goods or services that are provided throughout the project and after the project.

Milestones: Milestones are used to measure progress by marking a specific point within a project where a major deliverable is completed, such as moving from the planning to the execution phase, creating a project plan, etc.

Task dependencies: A task dependency is a task that can't start or stop until another task has started or stopped. It's important to know these as they can cause bottlenecks in the project schedule.

How to Create a Strategic Roadmap in 5 Steps

With those components in mind, let's go through the steps that you'll have to take to create a strategic roadmap. They are as follows.

1. Create a Strategic Plan for the Next Three to Five Years

First, the leaders of the organization have to meet and create a strategic plan that defines their vision for the future. This involves identifying the organization's goals and objectives and the sequence in which they'll be achieved. While this is usually a three-to-five year plan it can go longer.

2. Identify Tasks or Action Steps to Achieve Your Strategic Goals

Once you have a goal defined, you next have to figure out how you'll get there. This means coming up with the tasks that'll eventually deliver your goal throughout a specific period. Using a work breakdown structure (WBS) is a great tool for identifying all the deliverables in your project and the tasks that are needed to get there.

3. Create a Strategic Roadmap Using a Gantt Chart

Now you're ready to build a strategic roadmap. This is done by taking the action items you've identified in the previous step and adding them to a Gantt chart timeline. You'll need to add a start date and end date for each task and link all task dependencies to avoid causing delays.

4. Identify Milestones on the Strategic Roadmap

We've already mentioned what a milestone is and how it can be used to monitor your progress, but also reward the team when they hit a milestone, which is good for morale. At this point in the process, you'll want to identify and place those project milestones on your strategic roadmap.

5. Estimate the Resources to Execute Your Strategic Roadmap

The one element not addressed until now is the resources required to execute the tasks on the strategic roadmap. These resources are everything from project team members to the raw materials, equipment and anything else they need to complete the work assigned to them. Then estimate the costs for these resources to fund the strategy roadmap.

Strategic Plan Template

Before you can create a strategic roadmap for your organization, you'll need to start by creating a strategic plan. This free strategic plan template for Word allows you to gather some of the most important elements of any strategic plan such as the mission and vision of your business, its business goals, operational plan, financial projections and marketing plan.

What Templates Can You Use to Create a Strategic Roadmap

Creating a strategic plan involves a lot of different techniques and tools, such as Gantt charts. To help you pull all these diverse resources together we offer dozens of free project management templates for Excel and Word. There are free templates to download for every phase of your project. Here are a few that address strategic roadmaps.

A roadmap is just a Gantt chart that addresses more than one project on the same timeline. Our free Gantt chart template for Excel takes away all the complexities of building a Gantt chart from scratch. All you have to do is fill in the spreadsheet on the left with your task, start and end dates and then our visual timeline populates automatically with your tasks.

To organize your tasks into a plan that will deliver your strategic goals you need to use our free action plan template for Excel. It will help you list all your action items and steps, including priority, phase and who they're assigned to. You'll also estimate the duration of each task and identify the resources you need to complete them.

Of course, before you can do any of that you have to have a strategic plan. Our free strategic plan template for Word helps you define your organization's goals. It includes everything from a vision statement to a SWOT analysis and marketing plan as well as financial projections and the team that will help you realize all this.

ProjectManager Helps Create and Track Your Strategic Roadmap

While templates are helpful, they can only do so much. Eventually, you're going to tire of manually updating these static documents that are not collaborative. Project management software can do so much more. ProjectManager is award-winning project management software that helps you plan, manage and track strategic roadmaps in real time. Our tool has features to not only make robust strategy roadmaps but also manage resources and monitor progress to help you meet your strategic goals.

Manage Resources to Stay Productive

Resource management features can help you manage labor costs and keep teams working at capacity. They also help when assigning team members to tasks as managers can see their availability, whether they're on PTO, vacation or even global holidays. Once assigned, go to the color-coded workload chart to see who's overallocated. You can then balance the team's workload right from the chart to make sure that everyone is working as productively as possible.

Track Progress With Real-Time Dashboards

When you need a high-level overview of the strategic roadmap just toggle over to the real-time dashboard. There's a portfolio dashboard that automatically captures all your projects' metrics and displays them on easy-to-read graphs and charts that show you cost, time, workload and more. Unlike lightweight alternatives, there's no complicated and lengthy setup required. Our live dashboard is ready when you need it.

Those are only some of the features to help you meet your strategic goals. We also have risk management features to identify and track issues, automated workflows to streamline processes and secure timesheets to manage labor costs and track how far along team members are on their tasks.

Related Strategic Planning Content

If you still want to learn more about strategic planning we can help. Our site is an online hub for all things project management, with weekly blogs, tutorial videos, guides and free templates that you can download to help with your projects. Here are some of the many blogs we've published that are about strategic planning.
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How to Create a Strategic Roadmap for Your Organization

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A strategic roadmap helps organizations meet their mid-to-long-term goals. Learn how to make one to achieve your strategic goals.

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The Welcome Team can tell you all about what good collaboration looks like and what can prevent collaboraiton

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demonstrations which are open to anyone to join so they can learn what different teams are up to

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Team collaboration is the cornerstone of any successful business. Collaborative workplaces see increased levels of trust, a more engaged workforce, and improved performance.

One study has shown that collaborative teams are 5X higher-performing because they feel motivated towards a common goal.

However, despite the known benefits of effective teamwork, it's rarely prioritized by managers. A recent study from Salesforce has revealed this to be the case. Of the 1,400 executives, employees, and educators surveyed, 86% noted a lack of collaboration was responsible for failures in the workplace.

Running a collaborative team environment is no simple feat. It takes a concerted effort to integrate co-operative values throughout your whole company's ethos. Here, we'll explore some strategies to give you a head-start toward managing your support team for collaboration. Plus, hear from ClickUp's CEO, Zeb Evans, on what teams get wrong when it comes to collaboration.

Jump ahead:
12 Collaboration Strategies What Companies Get Wrong When It Comes to Collaboration, According to ClickUp's CEO Powerful Collaboration Tools

Collaboration Strategies

1. Share the company's mission over and over again.

2. Communicate your expectation for collaboration.

3. Define and communicate your team's goals.

4. Highlight individuals' strengths.

5. Promote a community working environment.

6. Foster honest and open communication.

7. Encourage creativity.

8. Share knowledge, insight, and resources.

9. Lead by example.

10. Get out of the office.

11. Invest in collaboration tools.

12. Celebrate and reward successful teamwork.

1. Share the company's mission over and over again.

Everyone needs a reason to show up each day -- a cause to be part of, and a broader objective to work towards.

Defining your company's mission is the first step towards bringing people together under one common goal and working together towards making it happen.

Your mission should be simple but meaningful. The more compelling the better.

It's your job to give your employees a reason - beyond the paycheck - to show up each day and get passionate about their work. And the more passionate they are, the more likely they are to work together with their teammates to achieve the company's mission. And make sure you're bringing it up often to make sure everyone is clear on the mission -- to the point where everyone on your team can repeat it on their own. That way, when confronted with conflict or challenges, they'll be able to keep the mission in mind to stay focused.

2. Communicate your expectation for collaboration.

Similarly, if your team doesn't know that you want them to work together, you can't expect them to do so.

From the start, set your expectation for collaboration as a minimum standard. Even better, it should be part of your onboarding process so that potential recruits know you prioritize teamwork.

Employees' job descriptions should include details about their own individual roles, as well as roles they're expected to carry out collaboratively. By differentiating these, you're setting clear boundaries between what they should be taking personal responsibility for, and what they need to work on collectively.

3. Define and communicate your team's goals.

Letting your team know what their goals are is not a monthly conversation. Not even weekly. Ideally, you should be discussing your team's goals on a daily basis.

A team that knows their individual -- as well as collective -- goals helps to reduce silos and keep everyone productive.

Morning huddles held at the same time each day can help to foster the idea that everyday team members are working towards something specific together.

Even better, you can take a step back and let your team define their own daily goals.

4. Highlight individuals' strengths.

Recent research by OfficeTeam shows that 66% of employees would quit their jobs if they felt unappreciated. This number jumps to 76% among millennials. People start to look elsewhere if their unique set of skills aren't being used, and their value isn't being recognized.

Not everyone is a leader. Not everyone is a confident public speaker. But a successful team thrives when each member is able to bring their own set of skills to the table.

As part of your recruiting process, you'll have already identified your employees' specific strengths. Make sure you build on these strengths and emphasize them in collaborative environments.

When I was growing my content team, it was important for me to focus on the specific strengths of each person I was hiring and how those fit not only the duties of their distinct role but the collaborative efforts of the content team as a whole.

You can build on this by getting everyone to take a personality or skills test and share the results in a group setting.

5. Promote a community working environment.

A sense of community is crucial for collaborative working environments. 54% of employees state that a strong sense of community led them to stay at a company longer than was in their own interests.

When people feel that their opinion matters, they are more likely to apply themselves more. Conversely, when people know their opinion doesn't count for anything, they feel redundant and team-playing disintegrates.

But it can be tricky to get the conditions right. You don't want to inundate your team with endless meetings and insist on collaboration for collaboration's sake. After all, not all tasks need to be worked on as a team.

A daily morning huddle is a good starting point. At the same time each day, invite your team to get together and discuss their goals, tasks for the day, and opportunities where teamwork would be beneficial. These environments can help teams to align themselves and avoid duplication or oversights.

6. Foster honest and open communication.

Good team collaboration relies on open and truthful communication. The more people feel they can contribute, the more ideas can be shared, the more productive the team will become.

However, for the more introverted team members, this part of the process might not come naturally.

If you create a psychologically-safe working environment in which team members feel safe from judgment, they are more likely to speak openly and contribute their ideas freely. The safer the environment for communication, the more collaborative that space will become.

7. Encourage creativity.

A collaborative team is an innovative one. Likewise, creating the space for creativity will help foster collaboration. It's a virtuous circle.

Brainstorming sessions can be a great way of opening up your team to creative thinking. An environment in which they can put forward and challenge ideas will help employees feel like they have a stake in the company's mission.

I often find that for some team members, brainstorming sessions can be daunting, especially if it's sprung on them without warning. To work around this, I give my team a heads-up the day before to allow everyone to prepare their thoughts in advance.

8. Share knowledge, insights, and resources.

Knowledge, as they say, is power. And if knowledge is shared amongst your team, they will feel more empowered to contribute on an even playing field.

File-sharing software can help your team access the resources they need to do their jobs -- as can internal collaboration software.

But further than that, create spaces -- both physical and virtual -- where your team can share their insights, discuss their failures, and give each other constructive feedback.

9. Lead by example.

You can strategize for collaboration as much as you like, but if you're not exhibiting collaborative behaviors yourself, then this will filter down to your employees.

As a leader of a collaborative team, you need to demonstrate cooperation at every turn.

One-to-ones are a great place to start. Focusing some one-on-one time at regular intervals with each of your team members demonstrates that you are ready for dialogue.

The way you deal with requests and the way you make promises also indicates how you really feel about collaboration. When your employee comes to you asking for support, then honor their request. And only make promises that you know you can keep.

The more your team can trust you to have their back, the more that trust will filter down through your team. And, in turn, the more productive they will become.

10. Get out of the office.

I'm not just talking about corporate event after corporate event, but offsite team-building works.

Getting out of the office regularly helps teams build relationships based on mutual interests rather than what they share in common within working hours. It helps employees see each other as humans rather than just colleagues.

But this doesn't need to wait for offsite events. An impromptu morning coffee or a beer after work can help to solidify relationships and get your team gelling. Some smaller companies adopt a more regular arrangement, in which members of the team "buddy up" and go for lunch one-to-one, rotating amongst the team.

11. Celebrate and reward successful teamwork

How you measure the success of your team will send out signals about what kind of company you are. If you reward effective teamwork and successful collaboration then you are communicating the values that underpin your business.

When you design your employee appraisal metrics, focus on team collaboration as well as individual successes. Make it clear that your employees' team efforts will be noted and collaborative successes rewarded.

12. Invest in collaboration tools.

Creating a digital workplace is the most practical thing you can do to ensure long-term collaboration among your team. And uptake is increasingly high, with 80% of businesses using social collaboration tools to advance business processes.

Given that nearly 3.3 million full-time professionals in the United States consider their home as their main workplace, it's worth investing in the right tools to enable teams to work together without being in the same physical space.

A recent survey conducted by Queens University supports the assumption that social tools assist in workplace collaboration. Predictably, millennials support the use of collaborative tools the most: 49% of the millennials surveyed back social tools for collaboration, with 31% of baby boomers and 40% of Generation X agreeing.

Your digital workspace can look like whatever you need it to be. You don't have to go all-out right away, and your spend can be modest at first. The trick is to try different tools and see what works best for your team.

What Your Team Gets Wrong, According to ClickUp's CEO

Collaboration can seem relatively straightforward, but effective and scalable collaboration is a different story.

Let's dive into some of the biggest roadblocks to successful collaboration, according to Zeb Evans, ClickUp's Founder and CEO.
Already a HubSpot Customer? Click here to integrate ClickUp and use both tools to deliver customer value faster, streamline operations, and be more productive.
1. Your team hosts too many meetings without a clear goal.

Hosting meetings with your team can be a strong opportunity for collaboration - but too many meetings might actually get in the way of productivity.

As Evans told me, "One of the biggest problems I see is there are too many meetings today, and they can be a very inefficient use of time. Oftentimes, there are too many people who don't need to be in certain meetings, and there aren't enough clear goals around the meeting."

To combat this, consider where you can cut down on unnecessary meetings, or limit the meeting's attendees. For instance, perhaps your team hosts a weekly standup where they each discuss what they're working on in a given week.

To create more purpose behind the meeting, you might suggest each colleague instead bring one challenge they're currently facing in their roles, so your team can help support and provide fresh solutions.

Alternatively, take a look at the weekly and monthly recurring meetings on your agenda and consider: Which ones could become asynchronous? Which ones might only need to take place once per quarter? And which ones could we consolidate, or get rid of?

2. Your team doesn't leverage software to create stronger alignment.

Evans continues, "There's too much work about work in general. Too much planning of work, managing of work, communicating about work ... Rather than just focusing on the work itself. And that's when it becomes inefficient."

To combat this roadblock, Evans suggests teams move to a single-platform approach.

As he puts it, "In five to ten years, we'll have more of a connected work ecosystem where all work is either in a single platform, or a single connected platform ... not necessarily replacing everything, but at least connecting with everything so you remove inefficiencies, you have transparency, and you have a level of alignment that currently doesn't exist."

He adds, "In the next of couple years, we'll also see the execution of work align much more closely to the communication around the work."

Leveraging an all-on-one platform is critical for reducing the inefficiency that comes with too many disparate solutions. Without getting your entire organization on one platform, you risk losing the context you need to scale projects effectively.

As Evans told me, "With multiple channels, multiple DMs, and multiple platforms, context can get lost ... but if all of the context is in the same place, then you don't have to repeat yourself, you don't have to continuously ask where things are, and you don't have to ask for status updates or have meetings for alignment; all context is already in the same place."

3. Your organization lacks transparency.

Collaboration is difficult when you're not aware what other teams are working on, and you work in silos across the department.

Having clear transparency into leadership's goals, as well as how each team's strategy contributes to that overarching goal, will help you successfully identify strong areas for collaboration that will help both teams reach that unifying goal.

Evans says, "To have effective collaboration, there needs to be ultimate transparency. Communication needs to happen in the same place, and you need general alignment so people know what other people are working on."

"Of course," He adds, "There's a lot of ways to solve this through software."

Powerful software is the easiest way to introduce transparency across the company. If all your teams operate on one platform, each employee can easily see other projects happening across the org.

For instance, perhaps you're a blogger and you see the social media team is working on a leadership series next month - to get involved, you message the team and ask if you can create a leadership post for the Blog that will be featured on the Instagram channel as part of the campaign.

Ultimately, removing these roadblocks will help clear the way for true, valuable, effective collaboration within your own team, and across the organization as a whole.

Speaking of tools, let's dive into a few team collaboration tools in the section below.

1. Loom

Team Collaboration Tool: Video Communication

Loom is a video communication software that records actions performed on your computer. You can walk through a task, explain its steps out loud, and Loom will use your computer's microphone and camera to capture the entire technical process. So, if you're describing a complicated task to your customer service team, you don't have to meet in-person to demonstrate the process. Videos are easily edited and uploaded so your team can quickly share recordings as soon as they're finished.

This is also particularly useful when onboarding new employees. You can record training then save it your knowledge base for later use. That way, you don't have to set up a formal meeting for company-wide training.

Price: Free

2. Google Drive

Team Collaboration Tool: Shared Documents

If you haven't tried Google Drive, it's one of the best options available for creating, collaborating, and sharing documents. You can create word docs, powerpoints, spreadsheets, forms, and many other types of team-based resources. And, Google Drive has unlimited storage, so you can create as many documents as you'd like.

Google Drive is great for teams who want to work together on projects. Every document can be shared via email, or you can create a link that takes coworkers directly to your project. If you don't want certain users to make changes without approval, you can also control permissions over who can edit the document. Additionally, coworkers can leave comments and suggestions that can render automatically on the piece once they're accepted.

Price: Free

3. ClickUp

ClickUp is an all-in-one collaborative hub that enables you to work across teams, and streamline your operations. Built-in apps, like Whiteboards, Docs, Dashboards, task management, and more, enable you to leverage one centralized location to communicate cross-functionally.

Source: ClickUp

When it comes to Customer Service, ClickUp enables teams to add multiple assignees to support tickets, set specific custom fields based on clients or ticket type, and flag and link common tasks so you can streamline and scale your service processes. Best of all, ensuring your Support team works from one centralized location helps your team provide a stronger, more compelling customer experience.

Price: Free for personal use, or $19/month for Business Plus

4. Asana

Team Collaboration Tool: Project Management

Asana is a project management platform that can help your team effectively manage projects. It has tools that can assist engineering teams when planning sprints, advise marketing when composing their editorial calendar, and track deals that are nearing close for your sales agents. Needless to say, it has something for everyone at your business.

One cool feature that makes Asana stand out is its "Workload" monitor. This tool analyzes how much work is assigned to each employee involved in your project. It lets you know who's working on what and whether their workload will take more than their scheduled work-hours to complete. These types of alerts prevent employees from burning out and keeps them happier over time.

Price: Free

5. Teamwork

Team Collaboration Tool: Project Management

Teamwork is another project management tool that helps teams complete tasks on time. It creates project timelines and sets milestones that are triggered as your team moves closer towards your goals. These recurring incentives keep employees motivated to complete the project before the deadline.

Teamwork also has reporting tools that you can use to improve your project management over time. It has real-time reports and dashboards that monitor your KPIs and highlights the overall strengths and weaknesses of your project. This not only shows you if your project succeeded but also helps you learn how you can improve it for next time.

Price: 9$/month as reported by GetApp

6. Dropbox

Team Collaboration Tool: File-Sharing

Dropbox is a file storage and sharing software that's used to distribute and keep track of documents. You can compose a document on your computer, upload it to Dropbox, and your entire team will have access to that file. That saves you a lot of time from having to email PDFs and powerpoints to everyone individually.

And, once those documents are shared, you can track who opens and views them on your team. You'll know who's engaging with your content and who may be falling behind on updates. This keeps employees accountable and ensures everyone is up-to-date on the most current information.

Price: 15$/month

7. Hightail

Team Collaboration Tool: File-Sharing

With Hightail, your team can securely distribute files both within and outside your organization. That's because it has unique guest features that let people who don't work at your company upload and share resources. So, if you have a third-party employee temporarily working on your team, you can include them on the same platform as your in-house coworkers.

Another cool feature that Hightail offers is a secure download link. You can require recipients to log into their Hightail account before gaining access to a document. This way, if you do send a link to the wrong person, they won't be able to see any sensitive information.

Price: Free

8. Slack

Team Collaboration Tool: Internal Communication

Slack is a popular team collaboration tool, and for good reason, too. Informally dubbed, "The instant messenger for businesses," it lets you communicate with anyone at your company via chat. Employees can set up team channels where they can continuously chat with each other and ask questions in a casual, collaborative environment. Instead of calling meetings or scrambling across the office, teams from every department can work together right from their desks.

One great feature of Slack is that it's very customizable. You can integrate new tools and adjust the interface to behave exactly how you want it. For example, you can create a personalized onboarding message that launches whenever a new user is added. This message can contain information and tips on how to use the app so your new employees ramp up as quickly as possible.

Price: $7/month

9. Flock

Team Collaboration Tool: Internal Communication

Like Slack, Flock is another powerful communication tool that many businesses use to chat internally. However, where Flock differentiates itself is through its additional features. It has a variety of specialized tools that take its platform to the next level.

One example of this is its video conferencing feature. If you're chatting with someone you can seamlessly transfer the conversation over to a video call. That way, remote employees can interact with people at your office in a face-to-face setting.

Price: Free

10. Samepage

Team Collaboration Tool: Intranet

An intranet is a private communication network that businesses use to communicate internally. It hosts every tool that employees need to collaborate with each other during their workflow. This keeps the company's information organized since all of its communication passes through a centralized interface.

Samepage is an example of an intranet provider that businesses use for communication. It combines chat, video conferencing, screen-sharing, task management, and file-sharing all into one platform. It's a great option for larger teams that don't want to lose time jumping between software.

Price: Free

11. Google Calendar

Team Collaboration Tool: Calendar-Sharing

Productivity slows down if you're not sure when people are available to meet. Especially if you're trying to organize teams across departments where schedules don't always align.

Google Calendar solves this issue by providing a shared-calendar experience for your employees. They can log when they're busy and when they're free, then make their schedules accessible to their coworkers. You'll know exactly when to hold a meeting because you'll see whether team members are available or not.

Price: Free

12. Outlook

Team Collaboration Tool: Calendar-Sharing

A rival to Google Calendar is Outlook, which stands toe-to-toe with Google when it comes to its shared-calendar features. Outlook's calendar syncs to your email, so any events you accept in your inbox will automatically show up on your schedule. And, you can view your schedule side-by-side with a coworker's, which can help you decide whether or not to accept a pending invitation.

Price: 7$/month

13. Zoom

Team Collaboration Tool: Video Conferencing

If you're looking to speak with remote employees in real-time, Zoom can help with all of your video conferencing needs. With Zoom, employees from all over the world can speak with each other in a face-to-face setting. You can launch meetings instantly, or schedule them ahead of time via your digital calendar.

Zoom also has screen-sharing features. If you're in a meeting and a remote employee wants to present, they can share their screen so that every person in the meeting sees their presentation. This is really beneficial for management as they can record these sessions for employees who may be sick or couldn't make the meeting. Between the recording and visual aide, these employees won't miss a beat.

Price: Free

Collaborative teams are more productive teams. And companies that know this invest time and resources in creating environments that are conducive to teamwork.

These environments are creative, open and trusting. They are inclusive and praise individual contribution towards common goals. They value knowledge-sharing and information transparency. And they invest in the tools and technology that make collaboration happen.

Whether you're a large corporation or a small startup; whatever your industry, product or service; you can make steps towards a collaborative setting today and start seeing results from a happier, more valued -- and valuable -- workforce.

To learn more, read our tips for improving team communication next.

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12 Crucial Strategies for Promoting Team Collaboration - Plus, The Biggest Collaboration Roadblocks, According to ClickUp's CEO

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Use these strategies for promoting more productive team collaboration. Plus, hear common collaboration mistakes according to ClickUp's CEO.

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quick links and tips for fixing issues yourself

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What’s our tech stack?

ADO for product dev

Smartsheet for PM

Mural for brainstorming/ workshops

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define value proposition of the team and its sub-parts

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define value proposition of the team and its sub-parts

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So we can all see what we’re doing!

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Visual Management Boards provide your team with a means to display and easily communicate the status of key production metrics. The aim is to have a visual display that is well thought out, relevant and simple for your team to use.

These visual displays are often whiteboards, with metrics updated by hand and the use of colour coding, such as a "traffic light" system to enable your team to tell at a glance how things are going, as well as what is being done when thing's aren't going well.

The type of production metrics can vary, depending on the type of team and industry you are in. Team boards follow the philosophy that what gets managed gets the attention, so key metrics that cover Moral, Safety, Quality, Delivery and Cost must be included. These can be modified to suit each team and support where they are along their lean journey.

What Problem are We Trying to Solve with your Board?

Before jumping headlong into ordering whiteboards (which can be very expensive) and cutting up magnets, we urge you to pause and consider the problem you are trying to solve with your team when implementing a visual management board.

It's very easy to attend a Best Practice Network Site Visit and get enthusiastic about the wonderful board you have seen, then try to force those board to fit your team, industry and work culture. Creating a SIMPLE board is not easy; at TXM we often see boards that are too complex and take up too much time to gather the data and update. This can easily outweigh the benefits of a visual management system when not properly thought through and implemented.

What is the Board for?

For a board at shop floor level, we would like you to consider three elements:
1. Are we having a good day? Think about what a "good day" means to your team - how do we define that in terms of goals? How do we set and measure these targets?
Then discuss how we can show if we have met these targets
2. What do we need to do next to reach today's goals?
Developing a team as we implement a lean excellence system involves sharing the decision making that involves the team and being able to have some control and visibility about their workload and mix is a great step in that direction.
3. What problems are we trying to solve?
As you considered the problems you are trying, you may consider using Concern Strips or

How Do We Measure Status or Progress?

If your process has a long cycle time with many complex steps, then visually displaying the progress can be useful as a summary of what is going on across a large area, where it is hard to determine if we are having a good day through direct observation.

You need to consider your own needs when it comes to flexibility versus simplicity. For example, having printed magnets are a great way to simplify updating a visual management board. However, if your product mix is very large, or is always changing, having pre-made magnets doesn't justify the time to make the magnets, the costs or your efforts.

Then if there is a problem, how do we use the board to highlight it? Howwe update and review the boards are also elements to consider during the design phase. We must consider how we plan to meet around the visual management board and highlight the importance of information by taking an interest, as part of the management team.

This leads into how to roll up information between areas if that is needed for your company. Visual management boards are great for communicating with the teams that can see them. They are less convenient for creating reports and presenting information to the board (as a side note, having the management team walk the floor and seeing the boards is always an option!)

What a Visual Management Board is NOT

A quick word on what a visual management board is NOT, as you step through the design phase. These boards are hard to use to collecting times. They are not just another management reporting tool that adds burden to the supervisors. And they are not meant to be used to have teams competing in a way that doesn't reflect your company culture.

Implementing your Visual Management Board

Now that you have begun to think about the elements of a visual management board, there are the four key steps to follow:

1. PLAN -You must include your team that will be using them. This helps with engagement and develops an understanding of the important factors of running a visual management board on a daily basis

2. DO - Start by testing asimple version and modify on a weekly basis. This lets you learn by doing. Establishing a visual management board is not about creating brownie points for a junior engineer; it must support the production team. Don't make an expensive board and then try to make it work (we promise, it will create more heartache in the long run!)

3. CHECK - When the board is starting to take on its final shape (for now!), make sure you document and support. Even the best systems need review and updating, especially with major changes in production schedule or product mix. Include who is to update which sections, where the information is coming from and how to escalate a problem. Include when and how you will check the visual management board is still working for your team

4. ADJUST - Don't be afraid to adjust elements of the board as your team matures and your processes or product mix changes.

As you head off to implement a visual management board with your team, talking with your team about what you are going to achieve with this new board will help to make your efforts a success. Start simply and build a routine around updating and reviewing the visual metrics displayed on the board. Then use this success to help your team meet its goals.

Robert Chittenden is a Senior Lean Consultant at TXM Lean Solutions

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A visual management board helps your team communicate metrics to a wide range of stakeholders. Here's some things to consider before you implement one.

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we will uncover our team's value

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Possibly hold monthly meetings for an hour (2 weeks after the Team day) to share big developments in each Team/Department, to keep sharing work being done and success stories.

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Opportunity to be productive!

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Run a review/audit of all the tools we're using for key tasks and user research into what works best for us as a team

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How to present the team plan

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common templates for key project stages and work processes

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common templates for key project stages and work processes

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Consistency of approach and methodology can be improved by implementing effective Scouts standards to adhere as MVP

Cross collaboration communication can be improved by mutual understanding of RACI and working on the gaps to strengthen our Scouts

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We have principles to guide our approach, we could embed them more in our ways of work

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Our digital strategy supports our members, grows the movement and puts our people at the heart of what we do

Making Scouts digital first

Being digital first isn't about being digital only, and it's not about being digital for the sake of it.

Most importantly, being digital isn't just about technology - the transformation comes from a combination of changes to people, processes and technology, working together in a different way.

Our digital strategy supports our members, grows our movement, and puts our people at the heart of what we do.

Becoming a digital first organisation allows us to transform the Scouts experience. It helps us produce tools and services for our volunteers, staff and young people which are easy, enjoyable and empowering.

Digital is here to make a difference. It enables what we do.

Our 8 digital principles

We're building our digital principles into the foundations of how we do things, defining the road ahead.

1. We put people at the heart of everything we do
2. We are bold and open to change
3. We create digital-first, responsive and accessible services
4. We use data and insight to drive our decisions
5. We measure, test and learn
6. We engage, collaborate and partner
7. We provide safe and secure services
8. Our systems are flexible, sustainable and interoperable

Find our more about the 8 digital principles

What we've achieved so far

There's been mountains of progress since we started this programme in 2018.

We've launched a completely new website, delivered huge online events and used digital tools to help volunteers continue to deliver Scouting throughout the pandemic. During the pandemic our volunteers spent more than 214 million minutes delivering Scouts on Zoom through our award-winning partnership.

Our vision is that our website should be the one-stop shop for all the digital tools our volunteers need to deliver great Scouting. We deliver our digital strategy through a close collaboration between our staff and hundreds of volunteers up and down the country.

What's next?

We are continuing our shift towards being digital first.

We're developing the core technology systems that'll underpin everything:

The membership system

The learning experience system

Digital tools to help with volunteer recruitment.

Meanwhile, we're upgrading the legacy systems so that everything works together. All of our work is underpinned by our digital principles, ensuring that we listen to our users' needs, we use data and insights to inform our decisions and we measure test and learn along the way.

In 2023

We launched a new digital skills platform for volunteers that was shortlisted for an award.

We are finalising the development of a new system that will help all adult volunteers manage their membership and learn skills to help in their Scouting.

We will also have an improved process for attracting and welcoming even more great volunteers.

We continue to fine tune our website so people can still find what they need as more and more tools go on there.

We are also starting work on additional functionality to improve important areas of the website like safety management and youth programme and data management.

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Our digital strategy puts people at the heart of what we do. Learn more about what it involves and how we're making a difference.

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https://kerv.com/about-kerv/approach/

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Our ethos - stay ahead

Inside-out, Kerv is focused on one idea - to Stay Ahead.

For our customers, it means focusing on the bigger picture - business goals - tailoring our solutions to what you actually need and making your experience all about you. We'll challenge and push you. Helping you to get ahead of the competition. And stay there.

For the Kerv team, Stay Ahead means being the best we can be. Ahead of trends, ahead of the game, ahead of the curve. It's what fuels our culture, giving our experts permission to innovate and the ability to grow.

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Stay ahead of the competition with Kerv - our focus on your business goals means tailored solutions that challenge and push you.

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Work preferences / personality styles

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The Psychology behind a Team Vision — Russellfutcher.com

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A clear team vision is essential for several reasons It’s crucial to the success of a team. One highly rated manager at Google explained that “having a compelling, shared team vision is crucial to the success of your team, as it allows all of you to stay focused and move forward in the

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https://www.integrify.com/blog/posts/how-to-build-a-culture-of-continuous-improvement/

Including a regular cadence of collaborative, multidisciplinary CI review meetings

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How to Build a Continuous Improvement Culture

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How to Build a Continuous Improvement Culture

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Continuous improvement (CI) is an ongoing effort to improve a product, service or process and making it part of your culture is critical.

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Allow time in the calendar to send people from various teams, to sit in and shadow other colleague's working day, to gain insight into how they work and how it could relate to their own working.

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Set and share the goals promoting open environment for communications.

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invite each other to sub team meetings so you can hear what different teams are doing

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invite each other to sub team meetings so you can hear what different teams are doing

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What would the team like to focus on and improve - contributing to business decisions and planning

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https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/online-value-proposition/start-with-why-creating-a-value-proposition-with-the-golden-circle-model/

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Simon Sinek explains how to use the Golden Circle model to truly differentiate your brand's value proposition when most fail

Leadership expert Simon Sinek is perhaps best known for giving one of the most popular TED talks of all time, which you can view at the end of this post. The Golden Circle theory explains how leaders can inspire cooperation, trust and change in a business based on his research into how the most successful organizations think, act and communicate if they start with why.

I think that marketers will find the most value in his Golden Circle model, which helps give focus to how a business can stand out from similar competitors by communicating its differences.

I was prompted to check it out after a workshop when discussing the importance of developing a strong digital value proposition as part of a digital marketing strategy a few years ago. One of the attendees working in B2B healthcare explained how they had used it with their agency to develop a more distinctive proposition for their brand amongst similar service providers.

Simon Sinek explains using the golden circle theory to truly differentiate your value proposition

Sinek is the author of several books on the topic of leadership. These include ' Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action', which first popularized his now-famous Golden Circle concept. You can read more about this model and his background on Start With Why.

Sinek's Golden Circle model is an attempt to explain why some people and organizations are particularly able to inspire others and differentiate themselves successfully. The neuroscience behind the Golden Circle theory is that humans respond best when messages communicate with those parts of their brain that control emotions, behavior, and decision-making.

Start with why to truly align your strategy with your goals

Clearly, without a strong customer-centric digital marketing strategy, you will struggle to attract the right customers and increase leads and sales.

That's why we recommend using our Opportunity > Strategy > Action approach to structure your marketing strategy. By starting with identifying the opportunities for your business you can set strategies that directly support your goals.

Our RACE Growth System is our flagship strategy-setting tool for marketers, managers. and small business owners. By identifying opportunities, strategies, and actions at each stage of your marketing funnel, you can prioritize and optimize the marketing activities that will drive your business forwards. Download your free guide today.

Communicate your 'why' to your customers

Sinek explains that 'Why' is probably the most important message that an organization or individual can communicate as this is what inspires others to action. 'Start With Why' is how you explain your purpose and the reason you exist and behave as you do. Sinek's theory is that successfully communicating the passion behind the 'Why' is a way to communicate with the listener's limbic brain. This is the part of our anatomy that processes feelings such as trust and loyalty - as well as decision-making.

Successfully articulating your 'Why' is a very impactful way to communicate with other humans, define your particular value proposition and inspire them to act. Sinek's theory is that communicating 'Why' taps into the part of the listener's brain that influences behavior. This is why the Golden Circle model is considered such an influential theory of leadership. At an organizational level, communicating you're 'Why' is the basis of a strong value proposition that will differentiate your brand from others.

Anthony Villis has a useful visual on the First Wealth blog relating the aims of the Golden Circle to the psychological response.

How

The organization's 'How' factors might include their strengths or values that they feel differentiate themselves from the competition. Sinek's view is that 'How' messaging is also able to communicate with the limbic brain - the important part that governs behavior and emotion. But his opinion is that organizations would do better to improve how they articulate their 'Why', in addition to 'How'.

What

It's fairly easy for any leader or organization to articulate 'What' they do. This can be expressed as the products a company sells or the services it offers. For an individual, it would be their job title. Sinek argues that 'What' messaging only engages with the neocortex - the part of our brain that's rational. His argument is that this part of the brain is less of a driver of decision making than the limbic brain: the part that 'Why' and 'How' reaches better. Successful people and organizations express why they do what they do rather than focusing on what they do.

Some critics argue that Sinek's Golden Circle model is actually just reflecting passion. Passionate leaders and passionate organizations express their commitment and enthusiasm authentically, and this is what inspires others rather than the manner in which they express themselves. Other critics argue that Sinek's theory implies humans don't use their reason at all when making decisions, which is debatable.

Either way, our Content Marketing Matrix is structured to help you think through two key dimensions of which types of content will best support the path to purchase for your target audience. The two dimensions are:

1. Awareness through to purchase conversion funnel shown on the horizontal axis

2. Emotional to rational content engagement formats available shown on the vertical axis

If you're feeling inspired to start targeting your customers and better articulate your 'why', we have the tools and templates to help you plan optimize your marketing strategy. From annual and 90-day planning templates, to granular tactics to stand out against competitors on your key channels.

All our marketing solutions are integrated across our RACE Growth System, designed to help you unlock new approaches to marketing using a customer-centric focus. Download your free guide to find out more.

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Golden Circle model: Sinek's theory value proposition : start with why

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Sinek's Golden Circle model explains how leaders inspire cooperation, trust and change if they 'start with why' value proposition as a theory

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In person kick off meetings for new projects to brainstorm involving reps from each team?

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Remove all the apps that are duplicated!

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Use monthly team meetings for project kick offs/brainstorms so that everyone is in the loop

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Clarity the topics with the proof of document or may recourse will make the things easy and help to finish in time with the quality .

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 clear vision with resources and timelines 

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 clear vision with resources and timelines 

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Clear

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Regular all-team project progress reviews

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Regular all-team project progress reviews

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Build a habit of talking about progress of our projects across the whole team so we all know where we are - bring new voices and ideas into the conversation and make sure dependencies don’t get missed

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For 99% of organisations, providing a high quality customer experience is a top priority. The challenge countless leaders face however, is making their team follow a process that consistently enables them to deliver.

Whether you operate at a single site or across multiple locations, a lack of adherence can open the door to missed opportunities and costly mistakes.

"Consistency requires a commitment to making a lasting change."
BrightWork

Such risks can leave leaders awake at night, worrying how to get everyone aligned to improve consistency and elevate experience.

Showing Your Team How To Follow A Process

Ensuring process adoption doesn't simply happen overnight.

It takes time to learn what is working, what needs improving and what tools need to be put in place to hit your targets.

Only then can a process can be effectively introduced, controlled and followed.

"Processes shouldn't be operated with a set and forget mindset.

You need to be consistently evaluating what is or isn't working and use that information to build more ideal systems."

Implementing a standardised, best practice approach to common tasks and procedures takes more than finding the right templates.

Your team also needs time and stability to improve project outcomes and measure overall progress.

The benefits of achieving consistency are innumerable.

The challenge is how to make your team follow a process in the first place.

Here are 3 simple steps you can follow, to introduce consistency at scale.

1) Pick & Document Your Process

The first step in any process journey is to focus your efforts. In that regard, it's critical to concentrate on one process at a time.

"Developing consistency goes against human nature.

It's burdensome, especially at first, and takes a lot of energy.

Don't make the process even more challenging by trying to do too much all at once.

The trick is to pick one goal to focus on at a time."

Initiating change, receiving a positive reaction and securing adoption takes time. Too much at once can become disorientating.

Embarking upon a period of discovery can help you isolate the process most in need of improvement.

Take the time to collect all the relevant data, and discuss varying approaches with all contributors.

This helps identify what best practice for that process actually looks like.

Once that has been ironed out, it's time to formally document your new approach and begin rolling it out.

2) Implement & Scale Your Process

The next stage is implementation. A top tip is to start small and scale up.

This will ensure any roadblocks are removed and everyone understands what is expected of them.

"When everyone on the team can access the necessary information, you'll find more consistent performance from employees."
The Balance

Once your process has been tested via real world application, you can not only demonstrate success, but explain to any concerned employees how following the process will be of benefit to them personally.

Having each individual, store or region working to the same format means fewer gaps.

Accountability increases and transferable insight elevates the abilities of everyone involved.

Rather than stumbling at the first hurdle, a consistent process ensures your teams can adopt a winning formula for maximum performance.

3) Manage & Engage Your Consistent Process

Research suggests that it could take months to permanently change your behaviour. The key to a successful adoption is to benchmarking.

" If you're not benchmarking your performance, you're just playing with yourself."
10 Essential Skills For Process Management Success

By celebrating the small wins you achieve along the way, you can keep everyone engaged whilst proving the positive impact.

With your process selected and implemented; there is only one real way to ensure your team follow it consistently.

A way to guarantee that, no matter what, everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet and presenting your customers with the best experience available.

That is to create a culture of engagement.

"When conducted effectively, streamlined processes can revolutionise a business, setting it on an upward trajectory to outperform all competitors."
PROCESS MANAGEMENT 101

Investing the time in discovering your best practice workflow, implementing it's application across the team and managing it's ongoing operation is the only way to deliver the best version of your business, 100% of the time.

And it is through communicating the value of consistency to each contributing actor that engaging with process, and effectively managing actions on an operational scale, becomes second nature.

Effective process management allows for the same experience to be delivered irrespective of how, where or why a client interacts; no matter how dispersed your teams.

It is through consistency at scale you can begin to see wholesale improvements for the better.
Updated 20/9/2022
Ready to explore how Anthill can help your team follow a consistent process? Schedule a demo today.

anthillsoftwareleeds -

Tags: Process Management

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How To Make Your Team Follow A Consistent Process | Anthill

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Learn how to master your customer experience by helping your team to follow a consistent process that delights, 100% of the time.

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Have an extended period of time in the planning stage of a project/task.

This will help ascertain the best methodology going forward, to limit the amount of wasted time changing mid project.

This will also enable a solution to be envisaged with greater clarity from the outset.

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https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/staying-one-step-ahead-at-pixar-an-interview-with-ed-catmull

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Ed Catmull has been at the forefront of the digital revolution since its early days. The president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios began studying computer science at the University of Utah in 1965. In 1972, he created a four-minute film of computer-generated animation that represented the state of the art at the time.

In his 2014 book, Creativity, Inc., Catmull chronicled the story of Pixar-from its early days, when Steve Jobs invested $10 million to spin it off from Lucasfilm, in 1986; to its release of the groundbreaking Toy Story, in 1995; and its acquisition by the Walt Disney Company, for $7.4 billion, in 2006. But even more, he described the thrill and the challenge of stimulating creativity while keeping up with the breakneck pace of the digital age.

Catmull recently sat down with McKinsey's Allen Webb and Stanford University professors Hayagreeva Rao and Robert Sutton for a far-ranging discussion that picked up where Creativity, Inc. left off. They delved deeply into Catmull's rules for embracing the messiness that often accompanies great creative output, sending subtle signals, taking smart risks, experimenting to stay ahead of uncertainty, counteracting fear, and taking charge in a new environment-as Catmull did when he became the president of Disney Animation Studios.

The Quarterly: One of the questions we had after reading your book is how do you, as the leader of a company, simultaneously create a culture of doubt-of being open to careful, systematic introspection-and inspire confidence?

Ed Catmull: The fundamental tension is that people want clear leadership, but what we're doing is inherently messy. We know, intellectually, that if we want to do something new, there will be some unpredictable problems. But if it gets too messy, it actually does fall apart. And adhering to the pure, original plan falls apart, too, because it doesn't represent reality. So you are always in this balance between clear leadership and chaos; in fact that's where you're supposed to be. Rather than thinking, "OK, my job is to prevent or avoid all the messes," I just try to say, "well, let's make sure it doesn't get too messy."

Most of our people have learned that it isn't helpful to ask for absolute clarity. They know absolute clarity is damaging because it means that we aren't responding to problems and that we will stop short of excellence. They also don't want chaos; if it gets too messy, they can't do their jobs. If we pull the plug on a film that isn't working, it causes a great deal of angst and pain. But it also sends a major signal to the organization-that we're not going to let something bad out. And they really value that. The rule is, we can't produce a crappy film.

The Quarterly: So that's the rule; that's the strategy?

Ed Catmull: Our real rule is to make a great movie. Our business is predicated on this. Of course, we need the film to be financially successful, and restarting a film is very expensive. But if we're to avoid becoming creatively bankrupt, we have to do things that are high risk. This affects the entire culture-everybody keeps raising the bar, upping the ante in terms of what goes on the screen. This raises costs, so we have a continual struggle to reduce our costs.

People coming in from the outside, as well as employees, look at the process and say, "you know, if you would just get the story right-just write the script and get it right the first time, before you make the film-it will be much easier and cheaper to make." And they're absolutely right. It is, however, irrelevant because even if you're really good, your first pass or guess at what the film should be will only get you to the B level. You can inexpensively make a B-level film. In fact, because the barriers to entry into this field now are quite low, you can get to B easily.

If you want to get to A, then you have to make changes in response to the problems revealed in your first attempt and then the second attempt, et cetera. Think of building a house. The cheapest way to build it is to draw up the plan for the house and then build to those plans. But if you've ever been through this process, then you know that as the building takes shape, you say, "what was I thinking? This doesn't work at all." Looking at plans is not the same thing as seeing them realized. Most people who have gone through this say you have to have some extra money because it's going to cost more than you think. And the biggest reason it costs more than you think is that along the way, you realize something you didn't know when you started.

The Quarterly: You mentioned signals a moment ago; say a bit more about that.

Ed Catmull: Restarting something that doesn't work is costly and painful, but in doing so, we send a major signal to our company. But there are other signals, too. We put short films at the beginning of our movies. Why? Nobody is going to go to a movie because of the shorts, and neither the theater owners nor Disney gets any more money because of them.

So why do the shorts? Well, we are sending some signals. It is a signal to the audience that we're giving them more than they're paying for, a signal to the artistic community that Pixar and Disney are encouraging broader artistic expression, and a signal to our employees that we're doing something for which we don't get any money. While they all know that we have to make money and want us to, they also want a signal that we are not so driven by money that it trumps everything else.

The Quarterly: Are there any other signals you'd highlight?

Ed Catmull: Here is a simple example, so simple that most people would overlook it: our kitchen employees are part of the company. I think a lot of companies overuse the phrase "our core business"-for instance, "making food for our employees is not our core business." So they farm it out. Now, in a lot of companies, including ours, there are certain things you do farm out. You don't do everything yourself. But this notion of "our core business" can become an excuse for being so financially driven that you actually harm your culture.

If you farm out your food preparation, then you've set up a structure where another company has to make money. The only way they can make more money, which they want to do, is to decrease the quality of the food or service. Now we have a structural problem. It's not that they're bad or greedy. But in our case, the kitchen staff works for us, and because it's not a profit group, their source of pride comes from whether or not the employees like the food. So the quality of food here is better than at most other places.

Also, the food here is not free-it's at cost. Making it free would send the wrong signal about value to the kitchen crew. Everybody loves the chef and the staff. We have people who are happier. They're not gone for an hour and a half because they're going somewhere else to get a decent meal. They're here, where we have more chance encounters; it creates a different social environment. That's worth something to us, to our core business.

The Quarterly: You said that risk taking is critical to your artistic and, ultimately, your business success. Could you describe how you think about risk at Pixar?

Ed Catmull: For me, there are three stages of risk. The first stage is to consciously decide what risks you want to take. The second is to work out the consequences of those choices; this can be fairly time consuming. The third stage is "lock and load," when you do not intentionally add new risk. The trick is to make sure you do stage one-doing something that has risk as part of it.

For example, when you're building a team for a film, if you have a team that's worked together before and it's exactly the same team, you know they know how to work with each other and that they can be very efficient. If you keep going this, though, you're going to end up with an ingrown team. On the other hand, if you build a team with all new people, then they won't see looming hazards, and they can fall apart. So you put together a blend. The mix of new and experienced people is a conscious risk taken at the beginning-stage one. The second stage then is getting the group working as a coherent whole for the heavy-duty work at the end of a production.

Likewise, with technology, we know that if we don't change the technology from film to film, we can become extraordinarily efficient because everybody knows how to use it. But we also know we'll become out-of-date if we do that. So we introduce new technology. Sometimes it's a small risk and sometimes it's a complete replacement of the underlying infrastructure-a huge risk, with great angst and pain. But our people buy into it because it's for the good of the studio, even though they know it will cause them so much trouble.

Similarly, if you consider the stories themselves, they're all hard to make-it doesn't matter whether it's an original film or a sequel. But there are different levels of commercial risk. If we're making a sequel to The Incredibles, it is low commercial risk. It is very hard to make, yet low commercial risk. A sequel to Frozen would be low commercial risk. However, if we make a movie about a rat who wants to cook or a trash compactor that falls in love with a robot, this is high commercial risk.

But if we only made low-commercial-risk films, we would become creatively bankrupt. Again, we make conscious choices to assume different levels of risk. This isn't the same thing as risk minimization or spreading risk. In the case of Pixar, every film we have started in the last 20 years, except one, we have finished. These are our babies.

The Quarterly: In your book, you suggested that Disney Animation fell into a trap like that.

Ed Catmull: When Walt was alive, Disney made impactful films. After he died, the quality went down. Then in the '90s, they had four more impactful films- The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King. At that time, they thought they had found a template to consistently produce good movies. They said "animation is the new American Broadway." So every film was a musical with five to seven songs and a funny sidekick, and they kept doing that. Spectacular success doesn't lead to deep introspection, which in turn leads to wrong conclusions. You see this all the time, right? Successful companies draw conclusions about how smart and good they are, and then a significant number of them fall off the cliff because they drew the wrong conclusions.

The Quarterly: You said the barriers to entry have fallen in your business. What other big changes are taking place?

Ed Catmull: We can all see that technology is changing and, just as obvious, the way people spend their time is changing. One result is that major tentpole movies have become increasingly important because they bring a lot of people into the theaters. These are a great social experience, although I should add that none of us wants to see the smaller films marginalized-they bring a lot of creativity into the industry. It is a real dilemma.

Meanwhile, if you look out 10 or 20 years from now, will the changes we are seeing lead to new business models? Change is coming, and the impact isn't clear. In my career, I've gone through many major transitions. If you pay attention, you can get it right about two to four years out. After that, we are doing a lot of guessing. I can see, though, that more people in this industry embrace change than ever before.

On the hardware side of things in our business, the technological change, frankly, is driven by the gaming industry. Even though we were the originators of the graphics technology, which they fully acknowledge and are thankful for, we're just not big enough to drive people to design chips for us. So we are fortunate that there's this major gaming industry and that graphics chips keep getting better so we can keep driving forward.

But there is nothing stable in this environment. Disney is in the extraordinary position of having three graphics and animation R&D groups-Pixar, Disney Animation, and now ILM [Industrial Light and Magic, acquired by Disney when it purchased Lucasfilm in 2012]. In addition, we have two research groups at major universities to keep driving the technology, as well as research at Disney's Imagineering. Participating in and driving change are taken very seriously.

The Quarterly: So it's about placing a lot of bets and hedging your bets?

Ed Catmull: My own belief is that you should be running experiments, many of which will not lead anywhere. If we knew how this was going to end up, we'd just go ahead and do it. This is a tricky issue-people don't want to fail. They put a greater burden on themselves than we intend to put on them. I think it's natural because they never want to fail. One of the things about failure is that it's asymmetrical with respect to time. When you look back and see failure, you say, "it made me what I am!" But looking forward, you think, "I don't know what is going to happen and I don't want to fail." The difficulty is that when you're running an experiment, it's forward looking. We have to try extra hard to make it safe to fail.

The Quarterly: That's fascinating. Experiments are great in retrospect but not in prospect-because you're scared.

Ed Catmull: In addition to the asymmetry, there are two meanings to the word "failure." The positive meaning is that we learn through failures. But in the real world-in business, in politics-failure is used as a bludgeon to attack opponents. So there is a palpable aura of danger around failure. It's not made up; it's real. This is the second meaning. So we have these two meanings and, emotionally, we can't separate them. And we don't actually call something educational until after it happened.

The Quarterly: So what can you do about that?

Ed Catmull: On the film side, we are making more experimental films that aren't burdened with the expectation of theatrical release but give us the opportunity to try something riskier. For feature films, we try to make sure that a certain number are "unlikely" ideas, which force us to stretch.

The Quarterly: It sounds as though you think a lot about fear and how to counteract its corrosive effects.

Ed Catmull: Fear is built into our nature; we want to succeed and we respond physiologically to threats-both to real threats and to imagined threats. If people come into an organization like ours and they're welcomed in, what's the threat? Well, from their point of view, they're thinking, "this is a high-functioning environment. Am I going to fit in? Am I going to look bad? Will I screw up?" It's natural to think this way, but it makes people cautious.

When you go to work for a company, they tell you something about the values of the company and how open they are. But it's just words. You take your actual cues from what you see. That's just the way we're wired. Most people don't talk explicitly about it, because they don't want to appear obtuse or out of place. So they'll sometimes misinterpret what they see. For example, when we were building Pixar, the people at the time played a lot of practical jokes on each other, and they loved that. They think it's awesome when there are practical jokes and people do things that are wild and crazy.

Now, it's 20 years later. They've got kids; they go home after work. But they still love the practical jokes. When new people come in, they may hear stories about the old days, but they don't see as much clowning around. So if they were to do it, they might feel out of line. Without anyone saying anything, just based on what they see, they would be less likely to do those things.

Meanwhile, the older people are saying, "what's wrong with these new people? They're not like we were. They're not doing any of this fun stuff." Without intending to, the culture slowly shifts. How do you keep the shift from happening? I can't go out and say, "OK, we're going to organize some wild and crazy activities." Top-down organizing of spontaneous activities isn't a good idea. Don't get me wrong-we still have a lot of pretty crazy things going on, but we are trying to be aware of the unspoken fears that make people overly cautious. If you're just measuring yourself by your outward success, then you're missing a huge part of what drives people.

The Quarterly: In light of your experience integrating Pixar and Disney, what do you think a new CEO coming into an existing organization should-and should not-do during the first month or so?

Ed Catmull: When we came to Disney, we spent two months just listening. Obviously, John [Lasseter, the chief creative officer of Pixar and Disney] and I were talking with people, doing some coaching and so forth. But we drew no conclusions for two months, about people or anything else. We just watched. The idea is to pay attention to the psychology and the sociology of the people.

When you come in and you're the new boss, everybody's rather nervous. They're trying to figure you out, too. So you should start with the assumption that everybody's trying to do the best they can. For me, it's not even putting people on a provisional basis by saying, "well, we'll see how they work out." I'm just assuming they're going to work out. When they start to falter, you help them. And it's only after you've tried to help them-and they don't respond after repeated tries-that you do something.

Here's another thing that isn't obvious that we tried to be very careful about. Let's suppose somebody doesn't work out. And you, as an experienced person, know fairly soon that they don't have the ability to do the job. If they're leading a team and you've determined they can't do it, what should you do? The normal thing is to say, "why would I waste people's time by letting a poor leader stay in place?" We don't say that. The reason is, if we remove somebody as soon as we figure out they can't do the job, we've just induced fear in the other leaders. They don't usually see things as fast as you do because they're focused on their jobs. It makes them think, "oh, if I screw up, they're going to remove me." So the cost to the organization of moving quickly on somebody is higher than it is if you let the person go on too long. You make the change when the need for it becomes obvious to other people. Then you can do it. I will admit that there are a couple of times, though, that we waited too long. This is a hard part of managing.

The Quarterly: As you look ahead, what worries you?

Ed Catmull: Everybody talks about succession planning because of its importance, but to me the issue that's missed is cultural succession. You have to make sure the next level down understands what the actual values are. For example, Walt Disney was driven by technological change and he brought that energy into the company. This was sound and color in the early days of the film industry. Then, in the theme parks, he used the highest technology available to create experiences and animatronics.

But after he died, the people left didn't fully understand how he thought. So it fell away from the company, and it didn't come back until Walt's nephew, Roy Disney Jr., used his authority to reintroduce the concept. He insisted on getting into a contract with Pixar, over the objection that our software wouldn't save any money. He said, "no, I want it because it will infuse energy into animation." He was very explicit about it-he understood better what Walt was doing.

The question is, "if Walt understood it, why didn't the other people understand it?" They just assumed that he was a genius, without thinking about what he was actually doing. Thus, the value wasn't passed on. Today, much of our senior leadership's time is spent making sure our values are deeply embedded at every level of our organization. It is very challenging-but necessary for us to continue making great movies.

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Staying one step ahead at Pixar: An interview with Ed Catmull

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The cofounder of the company that created the world's first computer-animated feature film lays out a management philosophy for keeping Pixar innovative.

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Bring back project updates in monthly team meetings?

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presentations from the trustee board to drive direction (GEM model)

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presentations from the trustee board to drive direction (GEM model)

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do they care about monetisation, growth or engagement - then aligning our goals to it (GEM model)

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Silence silo-ing and increase collab with a focus on populating that canvas with your weekly plan

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High-level insight. ...

They encourage experimentation & innovation. ...

Learn new tools. ...

Foster stronger work relationships. ...

Improve communication skills. ...

Alignment to the company goals & mission. ...

Get things done faster. ...

Solve big problems.

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Carve out intentional time to plan for the year ahead, share team plans, build the team and develop the culture

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If you want to know more about something, ask

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consistency in methodology and processes

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consistency in methodology and processes

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Encourage colleagues to use a consistent toolkit

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Encourage colleagues to use a consistent toolkit

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We can make lots of shiny toys, but we will need some control to make sure we don’t end up with too many or using the same things differently!

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Set out a roadmap for development and upgrades and lead the change being brave to challenge stakeholders if requests don’t align with overall goals/ roadmap.

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Opportunities to Explore to Improve Corss Collaboration.

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Opportunities to Explore to Improve Corss Collaboration.

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1. Establish Clear Goals and Objectives: Ensure that all teams understand the overall goals of the organization and how their work contributes to them. This can help foster a sense of unity and shared purpose.

2. Promote Open Communication: Encourage teams to communicate openly and regularly with each other. This can be facilitated through regular meetings, email updates, or collaboration tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams.

3. Create Cross-Functional Teams: Form teams that include members from different departments or disciplines to work on specific projects or initiatives. This can help break down silos and encourage collaboration.

4. Provide Training and Development: Offer training programs or workshops focused on communication skills, conflict resolution, and teamwork to help employees develop the skills they need to collaborate effectively across teams.

5. Implement Collaboration Tools: Invest in tools and technologies that facilitate collaboration, such as project management software, shared document repositories, or video conferencing platforms.

6. Encourage Relationship Building: Organize team-building activities or social events to help employees from different teams get to know each other better and build trust.

7. Lead by Example: Leadership plays a crucial role in fostering a collaborative culture. Leaders should demonstrate and promote collaboration through their own actions and behavior.

8. Reward Collaboration: Recognize and reward teams and individuals who demonstrate strong collaboration skills or who contribute to cross-team initiatives. This can help reinforce desired behaviors.

9. Encourage Feedback: Create channels for employees to provide feedback on communication and collaboration processes, and be responsive to their suggestions for improvement.

10. Regularly Evaluate and Adjust: Continuously assess the effectiveness of collaboration efforts and make adjustments as needed. This could involve conducting surveys, holding focus groups, or monitoring key performance indicators related to collaboration.

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senior leadership to share priorities in the GEM model on a quarterly basis

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senior leadership to share priorities in the GEM model on a quarterly basis

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do they care more about growth, income or engagement?

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Official Teamly Blog - Official Teamly Blog - Your Project Management Resource

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Cross Team Collaboration: Improve Team Building & Productivity

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Let’s explore the benefits of cross-team collaboration, tips on how to break out of the silo mentality, and examples of successful collaborations between teams.

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what is happening in the world shared in team meetings

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what is happening in the world shared in team meetings

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external people and/or ideas shared with the whole team and space made to implement work

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Do we have a vision/strategy doc that shows our goals/objectives as a team, projects, how projects align to certain objectives?

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1. Brainstorming: This involves numerous conversations between the design team and the client to ensure that everyone understands the project and its potential pitfalls.

2. Research: In addition to market research to stay on target with the branding, various forms of technical research are necessary to form the basis of future design decisions. Teams work together to compile all of the necessary information and, in turn, bridge any gaps in expertise.

3. Iteration and user feedback: During this process component, multiple design renditions are crafted, critiqued, and given feedback from various avenues. With multiple styles and origins of feedback to implement, collaborative communication and organizational systems are essential for ensuring no data gets missed.

Healthcare Teams

Team collaboration in the healthcare industry is essential for ensuring patients receive top-quality, holistic care.

There are many ways, especially amid the popularity of telehealth (providing healthcare services without in-person appointments), that practitioners, office staff, and technical support staff may collaborate to keep things running smoothly.

For example, LA’s Office of Education, Care Health Plan, Department of Mental Health, and Hazel Health collaborated to bring mental telehealth services to K–12 students in LA County schools.

It’s easy to understand why staff in the healthcare and telehealth industry need to collaborate within their team and with others external to their company to accomplish tasks.

For example, to keep appointments flowing smoothly, practitioners must ensure their availability is accurately documented in their company’s scheduling software.

In the event of a scheduling error, a practitioner may have to work with both a member of the technical support team to resolve the issue and the front desk staff to avoid double bookings until the issue is resolved.

In other telehealth ventures, some workplace collaboration examples include:

Ensuring that the marketing of the telehealth service is within legal guidelines. While a practitioner may have an idea for a telehealth startup, onboarding team members with back-end legal knowledge is essential.

Billing and processing insurance. Using insurance for telehealth can be more complicated when compared to in-person patient visits. Practitioners will need to onboard a billing department familiar with the ins and outs of telehealth.

Ensuring meeting tools are fully functional and working properly during patient appointments. In the event of a major screen lag or other problems during an appointment, a practitioner may have to work with tech support in real time.

Hybrid and Cross-Functional Teams

Since all employees don’t work from the same physical location, hybrid and cross-functional teams need to be adaptable and flexible to work together effectively.

Implementing cross-functional collaboration allows organizations to respond to external changes in a timely and flexible way.

The challenge, however, is establishing communication and effective knowledge exchange among team members.

Creating cross-functional teams is a great way to experience the benefits of collaboration.

Benefits of Cross-Functional Collaboration

When teams with different expertise combine their ideas in real-time, it’s more efficient and less clunky than piecing together the individual components of a project after the fact.

Improved employee engagement and workplace satisfaction

Company culture plays a large role in overall workplace satisfaction.

Cross-functional teams provide a massive opportunity to strengthen company culture by increasing the level of interaction between all departments, preventing individual teams from becoming “siloed.”

Increased productivity

As we mentioned, an employee’s underlying motivation isn’t always about impressing the boss.

Workers often care deeply about how they are perceived by their peers. For this reason, implementing cross-functional teams may provide an extra incentive for team members to put their best foot forward.

Encourages innovation and creativity

Cross-functional teams provide an added sense of security. When experts with different backgrounds come together in agreement regarding how to move forward with an assignment, it makes way for a sense of camaraderie to cushion potential blows.

For this reason, implementing cross-functional teams may reduce instances of finger-pointing in the event a risk creates negative consequences.

Knowing that there is less of a chance of being ousted for an idea gone wrong leaves people more comfortable with suggesting innovative solutions they may otherwise keep locked away.

Additionally, the more that various teams collaborate in real-time, the more people and unique perspectives there are to serve as the inspiration for new ideas.

Real-Life Examples of Cross-Functional Teamwork

Household brands like Apple and Netflix use cross-functional teams to drive innovation during product development. And the benefits of collaboration are hard to miss when you look at their success:

Apple

One principle that Apple stands by as a factor in its success is collaborative debate. For example, it took the collaboration of 40 specialists when working to develop their dual lens camera with “portrait mode.”

With so many hands on the drawing board, those in upper-level management sometimes act as tie-breakers to make the final decisions.

However, with the number of inevitable stalemates that arise, there isn’t always time for those in higher positions to use their authority in those moments, making collaborative skills an essential component of Apple’s overall success across all staff.

Netflix

According to Netflix, “A dream team is one in which all of your colleagues are extraordinary at what they do and highly effective working together.”

At Netflix, cross-functional teams work closely together while still retaining independence. The goals of the company are clearly defined, specific, and well-known to all employees. Team interactions are focused on overall strategy and objectives rather than specific tactics.

Check out this video to learn more about how Netflix implements collaboration:

With almost 32 billion in revenue in 2022, it’s clear to see that their prioritization of collaboration is paying off.

The Best Collaborative Skills for Employees

Recent survey data shows there is one thing Boomers and Millennials can actually agree on: the primary purpose of physical office space is team collaboration.

In order to collaborate and work together effectively, employees need certain skills and abilities. For example:

Attitude

Purpose-driven and positive attitude

Humble and resilient

Open to change and evolution

Accepting constructive criticism

High emotional intelligence

Problem-Solving Abilities

Conflict resolution skills

Ability to solve problems under pressure

Data management skills

Communication Skills

Written and verbal communication skills

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testing & input wall in the office - maybe near a coffee machine

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testing & input wall in the office - maybe near a coffee machine

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quick questions and areas for people to input into designs, testing plans and upcoming priorities

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grillers  - any questions go and senior leadership have to answer them honestly

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grillers  - any questions go and senior leadership have to answer them honestly

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weekly collaboration time - 1-2 hours a week for people to go and spend time with another team. they can take it like they would volunteer leave

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weekly collaboration time - 1-2 hours a week for people to go and spend time with another team. they can take it like they would volunteer leave

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every team member has a connection to their local groups - the point of contact for their area(s) of choice

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every team member has a connection to their local groups - the point of contact for their area(s) of choice

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they are a point of contact for getting user testing in place, for exploring questions and for proactively understanding what the movement wants