Teamership: Red Arrows

If your teams are overcommitted but underdelivering, look at your red arrows. Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

The traffic lights between my daughter’s daycare centre and our house used to let me turn left – even if the lights were red. It had a sign…“Left turn on red permitted after stopping”.

That makes sense. Why would I need to wait at an intersection if it was safe for me to proceed?

Unfortunately, in Australia, “left turn on red permitted after stopping” is not the default. It’s the exception. In fact, before we moved, that sign was removed. It was replaced by a red arrow.

I had a conversation about “red arrows” with Melitta, who is a Senior Executive in Organisational Development. She wants leaders across her organisation to take away unnecessary red arrows. I clearly loved her metaphor enough to riff on it and share it with you this week.

Red arrows are about improving safety and performance through control. They are based on the assumption that the best way to keep the roads safe is to remove ambiguity. When it’s a red light, stop. When it’s a green light, go. And if you’re my mum, when it’s yellow, floor it!

The obvious metaphor I’m going for here is what we do in our teams.

We talk about what Stanley McChrystal calls “empowered execution”, but we put in rules, processes and signals that make it difficult. We micromanage (even if none of us ever think that we do), we create standard procedures for things that happen very occasionally, we have approval processes that make managers bottlenecks.

If your teams are overcommitted but underdelivering, look at your red arrows.

A few questions to consider this week:

• What are the red arrows in your teams?

• How many of them are serving their purpose vs. costing you?

• Which red arrows could be removed?