Welcome to Friday 411, issue #153. In 4 minutes, with 1 insight and 1 action, you’ll learn a 60-minute exercise that will save your team from hours of frustration.
1 Insight
Team alignment requires planning. But the time you take now will save time later.
A few months back, we walked into a room full of leaders from a manufacturing company. Six departments were represented, with sharp people and years of experience between them.
And they were drowning.
Not because they weren’t working hard. They were working harder than ever. Sales was chasing new bids. Operations had a big inventory count coming up. Finance was buried in audits and budgets. IT was being pulled in five directions by multiple projects expected of them.
Everyone was busy. Almost no one knew what the team three feet away was actually focused on. The left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing. It was creating chaos, confusion, and conflict.
In our latest book, Unleashed Leadership, we make the case that every problem in a business starts as a leadership issue. Fortunately, there are only seven issues that create most company problems: Character, Competence, Capacity, Clarity, Community, Culture, and Consistency.
For this company, all of that chaos resulted from a complex set of issues.
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- They had a lack of Clarity about the most important priorities across the company.
- As a result, people got frustrated with each other, causing Community issues.
- They struggled with Capacity because so many departments were spread thin from competing priorities.
You’ve certainly experienced this before. Sales doesn’t tell Operations what it promised a customer. Operations doesn’t know what IT is building this quarter. Finance is waiting on a vendor while another team thinks the project is already done. Marketing is making decisions in a silo because nobody told them the company is moving a different direction.
Every team is running. Almost none of them are running together.
We’ve watched this play out in companies for years. The instinct is to schedule a weekly meeting, add another dashboard, hire another coordinator. None of that works. The real problem isn’t communication. It’s that none of the teams actually decided what matters most and named it out loud where the other teams can hear it.
That’s what we set out to fix in 60 minutes.
The First 30 Minutes
Each team met on their own for 30 minutes. In that time, they looked at the next quarter and answered five questions:
- What could we do this quarter?
Each team listed all of the work they could do. They cast a wide net with no filtering.
    2. What should we do this quarter?
They took the list of all their Coulds and determined which ones had real pressure behind them. They either had a hard deadline this quarter or needed to make progress to set themselves up for success next quarter.
    3. Which three musts do we do this quarter?
They identified three or fewer items that they absolutely must accomplish. This forced them to choose what they believed was most important for their team.
Before moving on to the next questions, they took time to do two additional steps:
   1. Identify the actual objective that they had to accomplish this quarter. This way, they could know if they succeeded.
   2. Put times on the calendar for their team to work on these projects. This step helped them build their schedule around their priorities.
   4. What can we delegate this quarter?
Looking at their Could and Should lists, they determined what they needed other people, vendors, or departments to do.
   5. What won’t we work on this quarter?
By answering this question, they committed to not do some things. This helped free them up psychologically to focus on the few items that they must complete.
The Next 30 Minutes
After each team answered their questions, we brought everyone back together for the part most teams skip.
One person from each team shared their Musts, Delegates, and Won’ts out loud. Just those three columns. While they shared, the other teams listened for one question: Does what they’re sharing affect us?
That’s when the room woke up.
Sales heard that Operations had a major inventory count happening over two specific days. They had no idea. They had bids going out in that same window that would’ve required Ops to be available for last minute conversations.
IT heard that two teams were each planning to bring them a new system in the same month. They knew that this wasn’t possible, so the departments developed a new plan together.
Finance had a vendor change on their Won’t list. IT had the same vendor change on their Must list. Before the meeting, both had assumed the other team was on the same page.
These weren’t strategy failures. They were misalignments. And they were invisible until people had to say their Musts, Delegates, and Won’ts in front of each other.
That’s the gold of this exercise. Not the lists themselves. The conversations the lists force you to have.
Use It for Individuals, Too
What we did with a group of teams can also be done with individuals. Every person will walk away knowing the three things that matter most for the next 90 days—and the projects they won’t do.
That’s what alignment actually looks like.
1 Action
Block 60 minutes with your team on the calendar in the next two weeks to walk through the Could, Should, Must exercise together.