Public Displays of Perfection
By publicly airing your schedules, you can reap great business benefits.
My mythological coaching client Sam called, desperate to find out how to get their project team working more efficiently. I shared my most powerful teamwork secret: One of teamwork’s most powerful forces is one of the least appreciated. It dates back to your teenage years. Yes, I’m talking about peer pressure.
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Some peer pressure can be bad. My mother would ask, “If all your friends jumped off a building, would you?” Well, duh! I was a teenage boy and they were my friends. Of course I’d jump.
Peer pressure can also be good. I packed a parachute and took out life insurance policies on my friends before jumping. I was a *smart* teenager.
When it comes to teamwork, everyone in a team unconsciously follows everyone else to decide acceptable levels of performance. Then teams look to other teams to decide what is and isn’t possible.
Use External Benchmarks
I ran a business simulation at Harvard Business School where teams students ran pretend companies. I was CEO of one “universe” of 6 teams. Coincidentally, after the first round of the simulation, every team had dramatically underproduced what teams usually did during the first round. For the rest of the two-day simulation, all 6 companies delivered extraordinarily poor results. They used each other to decide what was possible, and because of the lower initial scores, all six teams were performing at a fraction of the level teams usually performed.
I had Sam go out, gather external benchmarks, and share them with the team. Everyone would know up front how much time and money other teams needed to did similar tasks. If Sam’s team is budgeting $100 million to build a spaceship and they find out Richard Branson just built one for $1 million, that knowledge might spur them to a completely different approach.
If You’ve Got It, Flaunt It
You know what else spurs people on? Public disclosure. When the NSA is secretly tracking your clandestine affairs, you don’t care. But when the NSA publishes that knowledge, suddenly you care a great deal.
The same is true of project management. Sam understood how to use a visual timeline to plan a project and created a simple GANNT chart for the team. The chart listed all the team’s major milestones. But rather than circulating the chart just within the team, they posted a big ole copy of it outside the team’s cluster of cubicles. Every week when reporting status, the team would note on the chart whether or not the schedule was on time or slipping. Schedule slips were marked out with big red lines.
Thanks to years of childhood training in schools, the moment we see a red mark, we feel shame, guilt, and worthlessness. And so it went with Sam’s team. The pressure of publicly announcing their schedule slips inspired them to examine delays carefully, learn, and work smarter in the coming weeks.
Public Schedules Encourage Coordination
Publicly posting the timeline accomplished a lot more than public shaming. Other teams and areas of the company could see what was being planned. A customer support team member noticed Sam’s chart one day and casually asked, “I notice there’s no entry in your schedule for training the phone reps on your new product. Is that handled elsewhere?”
BOOM!!
The team realized they’d completely overlooked support issues. Fortunately, the public timeline raised the issue and support training was put in place with plenty of time to spare.
Use Public Declarations Deliberately
If you’re starting a project, find external benchmarks and share them with the team. Then post your project timeline in a public place.
Between departments, public timelines can help you find overlooked issues. Within a department, public timelines can help different teams and groups establish the kind of standards that the HBS students so drastically miscalibrated in our business simulation. When teams can see how other teams perform, it sets a new standard for what’s possible and achievable. It also means that people know who to go ask for suggestions. “Hi, member of Super Successful Team. I see your project is early and under budget. I don’t think I can transfer to your team quickly enough to share your bonus, so maybe you could teach my team how you were able to get such good results?”
Showing your entire GANNT chart publicly—rather than just the deadlines—has the added bonus of informally sharing some of that working information. Sam’s team could look at another team’s GANNT chart and notice, “Pat’s team developed the product _before_ writing the instruction manual. There could be some advantages to that. Want to try it?”
If you’re starting a project, do what I had Sam do: find external benchmarks and share them with the team. Then post your project timeline in a public place. It will help establish norms throughout the company. You’ll pull together more tightly to deliver on time. You’ll engage in learning from other groups simply by seeing how they structure their time differently.
And lastly, when your competitors visit the office, they’ll see your astonishing project plans, be completely intimidated, and offer to sell their company to you for ten cents on the dollar. Say Yes.
Check out more of Get-it-Done Guy’s awesome project management tips.
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
