Community discussion on improving productivity

In the paper policy entrepreneurship at the white house a whiteboard of productivity ideas was presented as a way in which to promote effective teamwork. The motivation is that the ideas on the whiteboard can be used as a thought provoking resources and also as a means to understand what resonates with your team. By presenting these ideas and finding out which ones are important to each team member this can help you to better understand your team.

This article is my coverage of the community discussion on improving productivity. This is my attempt at covering the majority of suggestions from the discussion. The main motivation for me covering this discussion in such detail was to develop a worksheet which I have used to gauge the management style of various teams I have worked with.

If you are interested you can see just my personal favourites from the extensive list in this post.

Originally Proposed

This is a list of the ideas that were proposed as part of the original paper.

• Schedule is your friend
• Steer, don’t row
• Hours you contribute/Hours overall
• Have an opinion
• Think of the end at the beginning
• If you had 15 minutes to pitch [to CEO/Manager], what is on your list and are you working on it?
• Entrepreneur = someone not limited by the resources directly under their control
• If you want people to do something, make it easy
• Write it down. Make it happen.
• Strong relationships are built on trust, mutual understanding, and reciprocity
• People never follow up
• Find your doers
• Talk to who owns the paper
• Better to light a single candle than cry out in the darkness
• You can get more done if you don’t care who gets the credit
• Don’t be a bottleneck
• Water on stone
• Just add talent
• We are all captives of our experience
• Do you have escalation dominance? (control pace of escalation)

Community Discussion

This is a list of the ideas that were mentioned as part of the community discussion with links (if available).

• There is no other meeting [source]
• Get out of judgement and into curiosity [source]
• Give praise, take blame [source] .
• Change moves at the speed of trust [source]
• Wonder with people [source]
• Get excited about other peoples ideas as you do about your own [source]
• Does it make the boat go faster? [source]
• Stay on mission, not on task [source] .
• Its ok to say “I don’t know” [source]
• Don’t equate experience with knowledge [source]

…

Further reading

You can check out my personal favourites from the community discussion and also the worksheet that I developed and proposed to understand the management style of your teams.