How Your Team Becomes a Force Multiplier

**Mickey Anderson** (0:00)
There's a quiet pattern in the return to office debate that nobody's really naming. Now, the workers resisting return to office know what they're resisting. Going into the office to do the exact same thing they were doing from home. Logging in, doing tasks, sitting on updates, and working in parallel to the people around them. The leaders pushing RTO are also picking up on something missing in their teams. But the fix that they're choosing is the wrong one. What's actually missing is a structure that turns those capable individuals working in parallel into a true team, and a building is not going to do that for you. Remote, hybrid, and on-site teams all face the same challenge. Without intentional structure, none of them collaborate. They work in parallel and call it teamwork. In the next 10 minutes, I'm going to show you the meeting that turns parallel work into force multiplication, why it works the same in any model, and how to redesign one meeting in your calendar this week.
Let's dig in. Most of us have been in this scenario where you've got a group of capable people working alongside each other. You're all good, you're all smart, you're all hardworking, you all have KPIs, but none of it really comes together, and you're not really seeing the results you want to. Whether you're the person on the team, the leader of a function within an organization, or the leader of an organization, you've probably seen this pattern. And most of the time, we call it a people problem, or a technology problem, or we throw some other label on it. But the truth is, you just haven't tapped into the potential and the opportunity that you have in front of you. Now, I like to call this a game of telephone, because here's what usually happens within an organization. We've got leadership team at the top. They are setting priorities, setting your KPI targets, and then they break, and the leaders of each function go down and tell their team the plan. Here's our targets, here's our priority, here's what you're gonna do, go.
The team takes that and start to execute, and they hit bumps, and the work gets real, and they're missing a ton of the bigger context, how their work connects to the other work that's happening, who's doing what, how it all fits together, what we're actually working for. Without that context, they're gonna self-protect and just keep doing the task that they know how to do the way they know how to do it, and hope that someone else has the big picture and can put it all together. Now, what happens here is we've got context and priority at the top, and then a version of that split down, distributed into each function, and then a version of that down into each individual. And we're missing the gaps between each of those and how they fill in together. And each person's goals, priorities, and tasks are filtered through their own reality. This game of telephone happens regardless of how you work, whether you are fully remote, hybrid, or on-site. I see it in every different organization regardless of how they're structured. You've got great people doing their thing, but the only real meetings that you're having are updates, our here's where we stand on our KPIs and the problems we're facing, and accountability meetings. We're not actually collaborating and getting that force multiplication of putting those heads together to create something bigger than the sum of its parts. We've got information losing fidelity at every handoff, and the teams are operating all without any context. Now, this is all about how priorities and context move from the top down within an organization, and the bottom up, as well as cross-functionally across the organization. The team ends up sticking their head in the sand, because they only know what they know, and they're hopeful that someone else has figured it out. But honestly, not my circus, not my monkeys. I know what I'm paid to do. This is my role here. I'm going to do it. And so we have this lack of ownership and accountability that many leaders feel and can name, but they can't quite figure out how to address the problem. Maybe they hire new people. Maybe they work hard on accountability meetings. But none of it seems to really produce that ownership and accountability and drive that we want to get out of our people. And so we think, hey, we'll throw them all in the same building and force them to work together. That's not solving the problem. Workers are resisting this because they know what they're walking into.
The same situation as it was before, just in four walls. Now, there's another effect that this has, where every problem, every decision that's out of context or the team ends up escalating to the leader, who they assume has more context, who only has a silo of that and may have to escalate again and again. And we end up with this leadership decision-making bottleneck syndrome that creates resistance, that creates friction, that slows down work and reduces capacity of our leaders to do what they should be doing and frustrates everyone from every perspective within the organization. Now, a force multiplier is a team that produces more than the sum of its parts. And I'm not talking metaphorically, I'm talking literally. It's when you've got the output of five people collaborating and working together is going to be larger than the five people than what they would typically produce alone because they are working together. Here's what it looks like in a practice. We've got a head of marketing, a head of sales, a head of customer service, and a head of engineering in a room together reviewing the customer journey.