What is the main message of Smart Teams?

The main message of Smart Teams is to improve team collaboration and communication for greater productivity.

Who is the author of Smart Teams?

Dermot Crowley is the author of Smart Teams.

Productivity

Smart Teams Book Summary - Smart Teams Book explained in key points

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Smart Teams summary

Name: Smart Teams
Rating: 4.2 (124 reviews)
Author: Dermot Crowley

Dermot Crowley

How to Work Better Together

4.2 (124 ratings)

21 mins

Brief summary

'Smart Teams' by Dermot Crowley is a guide to improving team productivity through effective communication, collaboration, and task management. It provides practical tips and tools for creating a culture of efficiency and shared accountability within teams.

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Table of Contents

Smart Teams
Summary of 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Learn how to work together to overcome the daily obstacles to productivity.

We all know that personal productivity is important, but there’s more to the ability to get things done than just our own individual working style. No matter how well we work on our own, our environment and our interactions with other people can either drag us down or help our productivity soar.

And the same is true for companies. If we want to improve productivity at the level of an organization, we need to think beyond the individual. And this means looking at how we work together, by paying close attention to the culture of our organization, the communication styles we use, and how we manage projects and the examples that we show when we lead.

In the following blinks you’ll learn about the practical strategies you need to improve the quality of your interactions with others and avoid productivity pitfalls.

You’ll also find out

why reacting to urgency is a bad idea;
what a useful productivity principle looks like; and
how a pizza can help you decide whom to invite to a meeting.

The right company culture is key to building more productive teams.

Do you find yourself spending most of your working day dealing with unexpected interruptions or wasting time in unfocused meetings? Is your inbox overflowing with unread emails? Are your priorities constantly derailed by last-minute requests?

If you recognize your workplace in this picture, you work in a culture of friction. Friction is the loss of productivity that happens between people, like when your plans for the day are disrupted by having to pick up the pieces of someone else’s unmet deadline.

It’s a fact of life that emergencies can happen, and it’s natural that your productivity takes a hit as a result. But a lot of the time the slump in your productivity comes down to a build-up of little things that you don’t even notice until you realize how little you got done. It’s things like meetings always running late and too many irrelevant emails arriving in your inbox happening day in, day out that are a clear sign that there’s too much friction in your working life.

Fortunately, most people mean well and don’t deliberately set out to work in a way that disrupts others. But if poor practices are widespread in a company, it can really work against those good intentions.

For example, your colleagues might invite you to their meetings because they value your opinion, not realizing that you might have other priorities. But if your company culture pressures you into saying yes to every invitation, this can prevent you from being as productive as you could be. Instead of focusing on the real purpose of your role, you’ll spend too much time half-listening to irrelevant discussions.

This means that to really increase productivity, we need to pay attention to how our actions could inadvertently be making other’s lives more difficult. It’s a question of taking a look at our working lives and pointing to behaviors that create the friction. They could be something very specific – perhaps it’s a norm in your company not to bother with a clear subject for emails, making it hard to prioritize your inbox. Or it can be something more general like a lack of empathy and respect for each other’s time.

Once we know what the problematic practices are, we can start to change them.

A productive team member is purposeful, mindful, punctual, and reliable.

If you’ve ever played a sport or game of any kind, you will have learned the importance of having good team players. Dig a little deeper, and you will see that what really brings the team together is the focus on a common goal – like winning the game.

The same is true when it comes to work culture. And the only way to guarantee that your team is working towards a shared goal is for it to be purposeful and mindful.

To change disruptive behaviors and create a new culture, get together with your team and come up with specific productivity principles.

So now you've learned how important purposefulness and mindfulness are for a driven team. But it's one thing to work on your own levels of purposefulness and mindfulness – how do you encourage them in your team?

This is where productivity principles come in. Productivity principles guide behavior by combining a desirable quality that you want to encourage and a situation where it applies. Once you develop a solid set of principles together with your team, you’ll be well on your way to a more productive working style.

Make your communication more productive by getting clear about the why, what, and who behind the messages you send.

Most of us send countless messages on autopilot every day, and as a result, everyone’s inboxes are constantly overflowing.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can take steps to increase the quality of our communication, so that our messages are not permanently dragging each other’s productivity down.

A more thoughtful approach to meetings will increase productivity.

Remember all those project meetings you’ve sat through that dragged on and on beyond their scheduled time, only to leave none the wiser as to what your next steps are supposed to be? Well, luckily, there are specific things you can do to avoid this waste and make your meetings more productive.

The first thing to do is simply decrease the number and length of meetings being held. Consider if you really need a meeting or if the same goal can be achieved in another way. Would a phone call between the main decision makers work instead, with a follow-up informational email to a larger group? And if a meeting is required, does it need to last an hour or would 45 minutes be enough?

Successful collaboration on projects is crucial to working together productively.

Even if the words “project manager” are not in your job title, chances are, you spend most of your professional life managing projects. A project doesn’t have to be something huge – any piece of work that takes a few steps to complete counts, from writing a report to organizing the company Christmas party.

And the success of most projects hangs on how well the people involved work together. Even a seemingly solitary task like writing a report usually means that you need to cooperate with colleagues to get their input on time and in a format that makes sense. So to achieve your goals, better collaboration is essential. But how can you ensure successful cooperation on projects? There are three main ingredients to consider.

Become more productive by actively responding instead of passively reacting to urgency.

Do your clients or bosses expect you to drop everything and react immediately every time they get in touch? If so, like most people, you live in a world ruled by urgency.

When urgency is the order of the day, you’re constantly losing focus and being taken away from the priorities you’d planned. As a result, productivity tends to sink. But the good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, most urgency is completely unnecessary.

People working at all levels can take a lead on creating a more productive culture.

You may think that if you’re not the CEO, or at least a very senior manager, you have no chance of making any real difference to your organization’s productivity culture.

But change doesn’t need to come from the top. In fact, it’s often much more effective to start local – by bringing in new ways of working in your own team. If you focus on your immediate team culture, you’ll be able to set achievable targets and reap the rewards more quickly.

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What is Smart Teams about?

Smart Teams (2018) is a practical guide to enhancing your team’s productivity. It gives you tools and strategies that you can use to help you and your team communicate better, collaborate effectively, and stamp out the disruptions that stop you from achieving your goals.

Smart Teams Review

Smart Teams by Dermot Crowley (2020) is an essential read for anyone looking to enhance teamwork and collaboration in their professional lives. Here's why this book stands out:

With its practical strategies and techniques, it equips readers with the tools they need to build and lead successful teams, resulting in improved productivity and performance.
By incorporating real-life examples and case studies, the book illustrates the concepts and principles with relatable stories, making it relevant and engaging.
Its down-to-earth approach and emphasis on fostering effective communication and problem-solving skills make this book a refreshing and valuable resource for team development.

Best quote from Smart Teams

Our challenge is the unproductive friction we create for others when we cooperate, and of course the friction they create for us.

—Dermot Crowley

Who should read Smart Teams?

Business leaders who want to create a more productive company culture
Professionals seeking to collaborate more effectively
Anyone who wants to know how team productivity works

About the Author

Dermot Crowley is a trainer, speaker, thought leader and productivity expert with more than twenty years’ experience in the productivity industry. He is director of Adapt Productivity, a Sydney-based training company he founded in 2002. He is also the author of the best-selling personal productivity guide Smart Work (2016).

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