BNH Book Review: Organize Your Team Today

"Organize Your Team Today"
by Dr. Jason Selk and Tom Bartow with Matthew Rudy
2018
Da Capo LifeLong
$26/223 pages

Yesterday, your desk was piled with paperwork.

But not today. Nope, you delegated most of it to your team, along with a list of things that absolutely had to be done ASAP. So the paperwork pile has been dispersed and you’re feeling so much better now—and in the new book Organize Your Team Today by Dr. Jason Selk and Tom Bartow with Matthew Rudy, you’ll see that this was the worst thing you could’ve done.

It’s an age-old business question: How can you get the best performance from your employees? The answer, say the authors, is counterintuitive:

Ask for less.

If you take away nothing else from this book, remember that its most important point comes from science: channel capacity—which describes the brain’s ability to “hold only three things in working memory at one time”­—is a biological fact. By giving your employees a pile of paper and mandates, you overload their capacity for productivity.

“Great leaders,” the authors say, “don’t pile on.”

Here’s the second important point: manage your expectations, which creates trust, fosters dialogue among your employees, and builds relationships. Without relationships, your team “cannot work together effectively.”

Guide your employees, but don’t direct them. Allow self-evaluation; they’ll learn better and self-corrections last longer. Start with the positive: Ask them to write down three things they did well yesterday, and teach them how to avoid PCT—“problem-centric thought.”