Unbound with Chris DuBois

teams can fail for a variety of reasons. But these three are the most common. So I'm going to give you a system to get ahead. Are you a leader trying to get more from your business in life? Me too. So join me as I document the conversations, stories and advice to help you achieve what matters in your life. Welcome to unbound with me, Chris DuBois. Welcome to unbound where today, I want to talk about the reasons teams fail. Now, there are a ton of different reasons, right, there's really endless possibilities for why a team could actually fail. But generally speaking, there are three specific reasons that are going to pop up time and time again. And you're going to be surprised with how common sensical these are like, once you hear them, it becomes super obvious that you could actually resolve a lot of your problems just by handling these. So first, I'm going to share what they are, then I'll explain how you can create a system that actually stops them from having such a large impact on your organization. Okay, the first is communication. Often teams don't know what they should be doing, because it wasn't properly communicated. There isn't clarity around what's happening, or you know, what the end results going to look like, or what else this project is tied to things just aren't being sent across in a way that they can they're properly transmitted and properly received. Okay, second, motivation, if your team doesn't understand the purpose behind what they're doing, they're not going to be as driven to get it done, because they just don't understand why we actually need to do this. Now, it's really important to differentiate that purpose is more important than the task itself. An example I like using from the army, if if I was told to take a hill, and you can imagine yourself doing this, right, if you get told to take a hill. And the purpose of you being on top of that hill is that you can provide Overwatch for another unit who's walking through, right, so like they're going through a valley or something, and you just need to have that position on top of the hill so you can see them and you can kind of protect them. Now, if he gets to the top of that hill, and there are trees everywhere, you can't really see in that valley, right? You can't actually fulfill your purpose. And so you could take one approach, which is to call up to your higher headquarters, say, Hey, this is what's up, what do you want me to do? Or you can say my purpose is to get this done. And you'll find another hill nearby that does the same thing. And you're still notify people still let everybody know what's going on. But you're going to be able to take immediate deliberate action, without needing to go through a whole chain of command. The same with your teams, right? If you can give them the motivation, give them that purpose, then they can say, Oh, actually, that tasks might not be the right one, because I see some opportunities here. You hire this team to have experts around you. Right? Let them actually be the experts by giving them a clear purpose so that they can go figure out that task a little more clearly sometimes. Okay, finally, the last is your skill set. Some team members just don't know how to do it yet. It might be something new, it might be something that they just haven't been exposed to. Right. So if they have no idea what done looks like or what parameters they need to work within, it's just going to be way harder for them to actually get there because they don't know how to do it. And so those are three communication motivation skill set. Now, how do we fix it? My recommendation is to add three things to every task, and make it unbelievably clear what needs to happen. So I would recommend grabbing whatever project management tool you have. Or even if you're using slack, even if you're still on some antiquated system, like email, like make sure everything you are sending includes these three, and it's going to add a lot of clarity and ensure your message is getting across appropriately and that the team has everything that they need to be successful. So you're going to add a what, why and how to every task, the what gets after the communication. Right, this is creating clarity around the actual task. And so for example, and we'll use this example throughout it, we're not building a landing page, we are building a landing page for this specific offer that goes live on this date. We're including everything that we need, so that they know exactly what they're trying to do. Next is the why. Right the why provides the motivation. And so following this example, right, this landing page is part of a campaign to drive people into this bigger offer. We need the leads to generate from here so that we can fill the rest of the pipeline, right, we're getting a lot more specific. And so if they see an opportunity while building this landing page that helps facilitate the generation of more leads to fill that pipeline, then they can take that opportunity or they can bring up these opportunities to someone else so that we can make sure the team is fully in the know and we have all these opportunities captured. If finally we have the how now the How gives instructions it gives examples, the processes any additional info, right? So we're saying, Hey, here's our list of our highest converting landing pages. So you can see some great examples. Here's some copied that we have from other offers. Here's some pages that we love. And here's some of the we hate veterans from other brands, right, and we just want to make sure we're not doing this on the page, that goes a long way in helping someone actually create this landing page. And so the how for someone who maybe has never done one of these before, you have literally shown them what your best landing pages have done. What, you know, the competition's best landing pages, obviously, we don't know the numbers, so we don't know. But like, just from an aesthetic perspective. And then we also know the ones that we really don't like. And so anyone should be able to pick this up, they should be able to grab that process you've provided and just walk through step by step to make sure they're actually doing the things that are needed in order to make this happen. And then it doesn't matter if they're the least experienced person on the team, they've been given everything that they need to be successful. So every task in your project management tool should include these three items, I would strongly encourage you not to hand off a task without them, tell your team if they get a task and it doesn't have a what line how clearly articulated that they need to send it back to whoever, whoever gave it to them in the first place. So that they can get that information, your entire team will become more productive if you do these things. Now, I don't like saying you have to do something. But this is one of those few things that's like this will add immense clarity to your organization. And really, these are the three things that cause teams to fail. And so if you can knit these and just get ahead of them by doing something as simple as adding a what, why and how to all of your tasks descriptions, you will see an immediate improvement. If you enjoyed today's episode, I would love a rating and review on your favorite podcast player. And for more information on how to build effective and efficient teams through your leadership visit leading for effect.com is always deserve it