4 Crazy Moves Leaders Can Make Today To Actually Improve Team Outcomes

Change needs some crazy

Call me crazy but I…

• Don’t believe deadlines motivate.
• Don’t believe working solo is more productive than teamwork.
• Don’t believe that isolating teams from customers allows them to focus.
• Don’t believe change is a cost.

I do believe (with crazy abandon)…

• Solving a customer need inspires and motivates.
• A team focused on one thing eclipses a group of people working alone.
• A team who knows its customer realizes more value with less effort.
• Change is an investment in future effectiveness.

And you have to be a little crazy if you want to make real change actually happen.

Why are these beliefs so outlandish?

They simply go against the grain.

Many norms of today’s corporations go against what my experience shows is the bedrock of extraordinary teams. My worldview is uncommon. It’s enough for many to label my actions as “crazy”.

And crazy is not a popular stance in a world that rewards conformity.

Crazy is not how I would describe acceptable behavior in the corporate setting. It’s all about following the rules. But drawing inside the lines is the opposite of what you need if you want to embrace change. Excelling in today’s competitive environment requires a break from the rules. A break from the pack.

You have to be one of the crazy ones to avoid stagnation.

Yet, many managers today are scared to move into uncharted territory and be seen as different. They don’t lead down new paths. In turn, their teams and products fall well short of their potential.

Leadership requires you to be bold and go where others have not.

You have to accept being seen as different than your peers.

Read that again.

Some call this crazy. Some call it courage. Let’s be honest, to step outside the management circle to lead change requires guts.

Today’s teams need this. They are stuck in a bad system.

• Stuck marching toward uninspiring deadlines
• Stuck working alone in a team (a team in name only)
• Stuck delivering tickets with no tie to customer needs
• Stuck in a rigid way of working not fit for their context

They desperately need bold leaders to pull them up out of this tar pit.

It’s time to break teams free from their suffocating box so they can breathe cleaner air.

And to do it, you have to be a little crazy to go from managing to leading change.

4 Crazy Moves You Can Make Today To Improve Your Team’s Outcomes

I was not always one to walk on the wild side.

Early in my career, I was a rule-following manager. I wanted to keep my job and fit in. Going with the flow seemed like the right move for my best career. I knew all the plays and ran them with precision. I was climbing the corporate ladder, following all the rules, happy in my lane.

But then, one day, this all turned upside down when I was assigned a team in trouble.

My job was to pull this team out of the ditch and get them going back on the right track. Little did I know this team had been following all the rules.

• It had an aggressive (but fake) deadline to spur urgency.
• Everyone on the team had a task to do and was very busy.
• The lead handled the customer, so the team could be heads-down.
• The team followed the standard ways of working like all other teams.

Yet, they were flaming out.

• Quality was deprioritized in an attempt to stay on plan.
• Key decisions were delayed because everyone was busy working.
• Customers felt in the dark and had not seen anything in six months.
• Stakeholders couldn’t tell if the team was on track, ahead, or behind.

I had to shift the tide for this team, or they were toast. And if I couldn’t help them, I was too.

Below are the 4 crazy moves I made to get them back on track. These were unpopular acts made possible by the severity of the situation. And plenty of folks deemed me completely out of my freaking mind at the time. But when my tactics worked, I didn’t seem so crazy after all.

If you feel like walking a bit on the wild side, you can steal them (come on, live a little dangerously).

Let’s dive in.

Crazy Move 1: Drive To Value, Not Deadlines

Many make the mistake of thinking a deadline lights a fire under a team.

But more often than not, it lights the team on fire, and not in a good way.

• Problems pile up as there is no time to fix them.
• Space for reflection and improvement evaporates.
• Work loses its luster with long hours and high stress.
• Team members retreat to silos to protect themselves.
• Finger-pointing runs rampant to escape blame for problems.
• Optics paint a rosy picture and obscure the chaos to onlookers.
• Delivering by the date becomes the team’s uninspiring purpose.
• Quality plummets as corners get cut to attempt to meet the date.
• Everything is started and not finished in the rush to make “progress.”

That list is dreadful, and my team was experiencing every one of these toxic symptoms.

You might think my team is an outlier. But I can tell you from my experience since then, it is not. Team after team I have seen facing a deadline reap the same or worse painful impacts.

The crazy solution is to drive to value instead of a boring, toxic, fake deadline.

Value is an outcome, a result. It is not equal to delivering by a date.

A team aimed at achieving value meets its goals sooner and avoids the pitfalls of deadlines.

How?

When a team keeps its customers and stakeholders front and center, its every action points at value. The team no longer has to deliver a set of ideas it had no input into, by a deadline imposed on it, for a customer it doesn’t know. They co-create their pursuit of a meaningful goal. They own it.

The commitment is no longer to deliver by a deadline, and this changes everything.

Instead, the team commits to:

• Making people great (customers, stakeholders, and teammates).
• Iterating what is built and how it is built based on evidence to reach value with less wasted effort.
• Focusing effort on value and delivering the simplest thing that harnesses it sooner.

My team and I bravely pleaded with stakeholders and made this shift. Value became a beacon for them, and achieving it built team pride. They no longer suffered through the deadline fallout. And this opened the door for what they had to do next.

With the fake deadline pressure at bay, I next had to help my team slow down so it could speed up.

You might be also interested in the article:

4 Crazy Leadership Moves for Better Team Outcomes: Interview with Todd Lankford, Agile Coach

Crazy Move 2: Finish One Thing As A Team Before Starting Another

Keeping people busy is the fastest way to slow down the work.

Yet, many managers scramble to keep everyone busy in their specialized skill. And this has many unsavory side effects.

• Turfs take over: “That’s not my job.”
• Defects remain hidden in long feedback loops.
• Specialized know-how remains with the worker.
• Team members stay too busy to help each other.
• Testing gets delayed until all tasks are completed.
• Interruptions and context switching are guaranteed.
• Tasks become the measure of success, not solutions.
• Bottlenecks emerge from single-specialty team members.
• Tasks pile up, waiting to be integrated into a working whole.
• Decision quality goes down as only one mind makes the choice.
• Blocked tasks get parked, and new tasks get started (to stay busy).

All these add massive risk and delays to getting things done. And my team was experiencing each one of them.

Most don’t realize this pile of problems is the natural end-state for keeping people on a team busy in their lane. When team members are nothing more than a collection of individuals, the power of the team is lost. Everything is harder and takes longer than it should.

True teamwork is so rare these days, I’m starting to feel like it’s folklore and no longer practiced in the wild.

But it’s precisely what we need to do.

The crazy solution is to slow down to speed up by achieving a state of collaborative, singular focus (as a team).

Here’s the rub: working solo and staying busy is easy, but working together is hard.

As a result, many will choose to ease into teamwork and lowering work in progress. It goes something like this:

1. We have five team members and five separate solutions in flight.
2. Let’s now only have four solutions in flight at once.
3. Two of us will team up on one of the solutions.

This change is too timid (weak) to make a difference.

Most of the team remains busy working in the old way, while two team members are collaborating. All the ill-effects of busyness remain. The team sees no difference and slowly falls back to everyone working solo.

The longer your team works on more than one thing at a time, the longer you’re practicing staying busy.

So, I recommend you instead rip the Band-Aid off (this is the crazy part). Go straight to one thing in flight at a time as a team and start practicing the art of deliberate focus. It’s an art because every team is different. You have to find the way it works for your unique team and context. And you can’t just dip a toe in the water. You must dive in.

If you take this leap, your results will be dramatic.

• Less effort
• Lower stress
• Fewer defects
• Sooner delivery
• Better decisions
• “How can I help?”
• Higher transparency
• Stronger momentum
• Increased team pride
• Knowledge cross-pollination

I know these results are possible. My long-ago team in trouble found peace through teamwork and focus. They reaped these rewards. You can, too.

But focus was not enough: my team was incomplete without its customer.

Crazy Move 3: Forge A Direct Team And Customer Connection

“We must protect teams from distraction, so let’s isolate them from customer noise.”

This is a big mistake I see all the time, and it creates a factory-line mentality.

• Dampened autonomy
• A diluted team purpose
• Blindly following the plan
• Solving the wrong problem
• Loss of joy in knowing your customer
• Over-building past the point of usefulness
• Not knowing if their work makes a difference
• Untapped potential of collective team problem-solving

My team who was struggling did not know its customer. The lead acted as a proxy in between. The idea was to allow the team to stay heads down while the lead did all the customer wrangling.

But not knowing the customer was holding my team back.

The crazy solution is to connect a team directly with its customer.

A team who knows its customer delivers simpler, useful solutions, sooner.

This creates a conflict in your mind. Gut instinct tells you the customer interaction will leave the team with less time to work. But in fact, the team gains time as customer engagement goes up. They start with good. Engage with customers. Evolve to the simplest solution that solves the need.

Here’s how it works.

1. Talk to the user. Observe and understand needs.
2. Start with the essence of a solution, no adornment.
3. Get user feedback.
4. Relentlessly pivot based on feedback. Throw out what doesn’t work. Keep what does.
5. Evolve detail where needed, no more.
6. Get user feedback and refine until desirable. Stop.

Finding a solution that makes a difference requires trial and error.

The team starts by accepting it doesn’t know the answer. It then engages with the user before, during, and after it builds a solution. The team evolves from a place of good, and stops when good enough to delight.

This happened when my team began to know and work with its customer.

My team realized the best solution it could imagine may not be what the user needs in the time that it’s needed. And as a result, they delivered better outcomes with less effort.

So, my team was now free from deadlines, focused like a laser, and juiced on customer delight.

But one critical ingredient was missing. They required a habit to ensure they would not find themselves in a state of peril again.

This brings us to the final, crazy move.

Crazy Move 4: Fix It Now If It Doesn’t Work (Right Now!)

Many see stopping to solve what’s broken as an unwelcome cost.

But the cost of sweeping a problem under the rug is the biggest cost of all.

• Working around problems requires extra work.
• Apathy sets in (“That’s just the way we do things.”)
• One problem not fixed attracts other problems to join it.
• Unfixed issues repeatedly return and interrupt progress.
• A wound left untreated creates more problems (festers).
• As your problems age, so does knowledge on how best to solve it.

My team had learned to delay fixing problems (mostly because the deadlines left no space to do so). So, they experienced each of these flow-killing side effects. It was strangling their progress.

So, with deadlines gone, they had to unlearn their problem with facing problems.

The crazy solution is to stop and fix every problem as soon as it surfaces.

Immediate problem-solving has many benefits.

• Progress is more transparent.
• You don’t have to work around it.
• You move faster without the weight.
• The problem does not keep resurfacing.
• Downstream related issues are prevented.
• You don’t stress about the weight of unfixed problems.
• You don’t have to debate about what to do. You just do it.

This model keeps the ship running smooth. My team never got into trouble again from letting issues pile up.

• Deadlines started creeping back in: they stopped and fixed it.
• Team members started carving off work and working alone: they stopped and fixed it.
• Proxies started coming in between the team and customer: they stopped and fixed it.

When you see solving a problem as an investment in your future effectiveness, you make time for it. You stop immediately and fix it.

And you avoid contact with perilous code-red moments.

Bonus Tip: Here’s A Little Secret About Being Crazy With These Moves

Don’t fear, you won’t be seen as crazy for long.

The crazy moves above have a secret ingredient. They each reduce risk. And when taken together, they make it harder for teams to fail than to succeed.

In the end, the success they breed makes them not seem crazy at all. These moves may be the most sane things you can do in the perfect storm of complexity and uncertainty you face. So, if you can live with being different and being seen as a bit nuts, be patient. Your time will come.

You will become indispensable, not crazy.

Todd Lankford is an experienced consultant with over 20 years of experience, helping managers and product teams maximize outcomes while respecting people. He has worked with over 75 Fortune 500 companies, government entities, and startups. Todd is dedicated to improving organizational efficiency through his writing, speaking, products, and coaching services. We encourage you to follow Todd on his website or LinkedIn profile.