Smart Teams summary

If you’ve ever played a sport or game of any kind, you will have learned the importance of having good team players. Dig a little deeper, and you will see that what really brings the team together is the focus on a common goal – like winning the game.

The same is true when it comes to work culture. And the only way to guarantee that your team is working towards a shared goal is for it to be purposeful and mindful.

So now you've learned how important purposefulness and mindfulness are for a driven team. But it's one thing to work on your own levels of purposefulness and mindfulness – how do you encourage them in your team?

This is where productivity principles come in. Productivity principles guide behavior by combining a desirable quality that you want to encourage and a situation where it applies. Once you develop a solid set of principles together with your team, you’ll be well on your way to a more productive working style.

Most of us send countless messages on autopilot every day, and as a result, everyone’s inboxes are constantly overflowing.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can take steps to increase the quality of our communication, so that our messages are not permanently dragging each other’s productivity down.

Remember all those project meetings you’ve sat through that dragged on and on beyond their scheduled time, only to leave none the wiser as to what your next steps are supposed to be? Well, luckily, there are specific things you can do to avoid this waste and make your meetings more productive.

The first thing to do is simply decrease the number and length of meetings being held. Consider if you really need a meeting or if the same goal can be achieved in another way. Would a phone call between the main decision makers work instead, with a follow-up informational email to a larger group? And if a meeting is required, does it need to last an hour or would 45 minutes be enough?

Even if the words “project manager” are not in your job title, chances are, you spend most of your professional life managing projects. A project doesn’t have to be something huge – any piece of work that takes a few steps to complete counts, from writing a report to organizing the company Christmas party.

And the success of most projects hangs on how well the people involved work together. Even a seemingly solitary task like writing a report usually means that you need to cooperate with colleagues to get their input on time and in a format that makes sense. So to achieve your goals, better collaboration is essential. But how can you ensure successful cooperation on projects? There are three main ingredients to consider.

Do your clients or bosses expect you to drop everything and react immediately every time they get in touch? If so, like most people, you live in a world ruled by urgency.

When urgency is the order of the day, you’re constantly losing focus and being taken away from the priorities you’d planned. As a result, productivity tends to sink. But the good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, most urgency is completely unnecessary.

You may think that if you’re not the CEO, or at least a very senior manager, you have no chance of making any real difference to your organization’s productivity culture.

But change doesn’t need to come from the top. In fact, it’s often much more effective to start local – by bringing in new ways of working in your own team. If you focus on your immediate team culture, you’ll be able to set achievable targets and reap the rewards more quickly.