If it feels like your team is growing faster than its output, it might be time for a top-to-bottom productivity assessment. Chances are, you can find opportunities to make non-drastic changes that significantly improve your team’s performance and help it achieve its goals faster, without burning out its members.
These sorts of opportunities often hide in plain sight. Let’s take a look at five that come highly recommended by entrepreneurs, executives, and workplace productivity experts with deep experience building high-growth teams.
1. Leverage the Power of Generative AI
In the few short years since LLM-based generative AI tools like ChatGPT appeared on the scene, the technology has significantly improved the productivity of teams that use it well.
“When it’s used effectively in the right use cases, generative AI can greatly boost teams’ productivity,” says Kris Duggan, a serial tech entrepreneur and workplace efficiency expert.
However, generative AI is not yet at the point that it can replace human expertise. It’s important that your teams know how to use it, and that your organization has guardrails in place to ensure relevant, high-quality output.
2. Filter Hires for Growth Experience
Staffing your team with high performers who’ve already excelled in high-growth environments won’t guarantee you hit all your targets, but it will probably increase the odds. Place these individuals in close proximity to other team members without similar experience so that they’re well-placed to share their knowledge. Who said productivity couldn’t be infectious?
3. Hold Every Team Member Accountable for a “Number”
High-performing teams enforce accountability. Of all the different ways to do this, the “objectives and key results” (OKRs) method popularized by legendary entrepreneur John Doerr is arguably the most effective.
Workplace training expert Ryan Panchadsaram describes an example of an OKR as “I will fix the website for the vast majority of people as measured by 7 out of 10 people being able to get through, a 1-second response time, and a 1% error rate.”
In short, an OKR is measurable, relevant, and realistic to achieve. You’re certain to be able to find them in your organization’s work if you look.
4. Set Realistic But Achievable Goals
Realism should also define your team’s longer-term goals. This is not to say that your team should not pursue ambitious, even aggressive targets, only that it must also have a plausible pathway to achieving them. Draw on your personal experience and that of your co-leaders, board members, and other trusted stakeholders as you try to strike this balance.
5. Don’t Overload Team Members
Whatever your team is building, it’s going to take a while to reach the destination, even if the work feels as if it’s made up of many little sprints.
This sort of entrepreneurial journey requires pacing. With that in mind, closely track your team members’ work to make sure you’re not overloading them.
“Even if you’re following traditional project management best practices, it’s easy for invisible, untracked work to sneak in,” says project management expert Alex York. York advises looking at the previous month’s workload to get “an idea of what a typical workload includes” over a longer period of time and reduce the potential for burnout on your team.
Do More With Fewer Compromises
Every team, no matter how well run, experiences setbacks from time to time. It’s simply unrealistic to expect otherwise.
However, seasoned leaders have the right to set their expectations high and aim for as few hiccups as possible on the road to growth. And for that to pan out, they need to implement productivity-boosting strategies like those detailed here.
Unusually productive teams tend to do certain things better than others: leveraging generative AI, adding the right talent in the right places, enforcing accountability, setting realistic but achievable goals, and maintaining ambitious but manageable workloads over time. Yours should too.
