Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 19 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Communication Overhead
— From The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business by Josh Kaufman
Business guru, Josh Kaufman, recalls working at Procter & Gamble on a project that needed the input and approval of dozens of people. He spent three months trying to put together a workable proposal due to juggling different ideas, arguments over different approaches, and people wanting credit without doing much work. And in those three months nothing else got done! Almost all of his time was spent on communicating with other members of the group.
“Communication overhead is the proportion of time you spend communicating with members of your team instead of getting productive work done.”
Kaufman says, “There’s a reason high-performing surgical teams, military units, and sports teams tend to be small and focused: too much time spent in communication and coordination can kill a team’s effectiveness.”
The larger your team, the more you have to communicate with each of its members to coordinate action. “As the number of people you work with increases, Communication Overhead increases geometrically until the total percentage of time each individual must devote to group communication approaches 100%. After a certain threshold, each additional team member diminishes the capacity of the group to do anything other than communicate.”
What’s the solution?
Work with the smallest possible team: “Studies of effective teamwork usually recommend working in groups of three to eight people,” says Kaufman. “You’ll be leaving people out, but that’s the point—including them is causing more work than it’s creating in benefits. Removing unnecessary people from the team will save everyone’s time and produce better results.”
Finally, Kaufman shares Derek Sheane’s “8 Symptoms of Bureaucratic Breakdown” which appear in his book Beyond Bureaucracy. They are indicative of teams suffering from Communication Overhead:
1. The Invisible Decision. No one knows how or where decisions are made, and there is no transparency in the decision-making process.
2. Unfinished Business. Too many tasks are started but very few carried through to the end.
3. Co-ordination Paralysis-Nothing can be done without checking with a host of interconnected units.
4. Nothing New. There are no radical ideas, inventions or lateral thinking-a general lack of initiative.
5. Pseudo-Problems. Minor issues become magnified out of all proportion.
6. Embattled Center. The center battles for consistency and control against local/regional units.
7. Negative Deadlines. The deadlines for work become more important than the quality of the work being done.
8. Input Domination. Individuals react to inputs—i.e. whatever gets put in their in-tray—as opposed to using their own initiative.
ACTION
TODAY: Do you work with a team? How big is it? Take a moment to think how can you break it up into smaller units/teams to be more efficient.
FUTURE: As you embark on new projects that require teamwork, think of ways in which you can make the teams as lean as possible.
Be a good teammate and please share this post via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!