Kickoff workshops - overlooked and misunderstood
When I look back at all the big post-mortem retrospectives I have facilitated over the past decade (there were a lot), two topics came up over and over again:
1) People were agreeing that “we should have done retrospectives earlier” and
2) “I wish we had had a proper kickoff for this team/project.”
While I believe these two statements are related, I will focus on the second one in this post: kickoff workshops¹.
Often projects are started and teams are formed without taking the time to align on important questions like: Who is a core member of this team (and who is not)? What are their roles and responsibilities? What are each of the team members´ strengths we should try to leverage? What are the norms and ways of working for this team? And maybe most importantly: What is the purpose of this group?
What we really want to achieve with a proper kickoff is summarized nicely in this statement by Ruth Wageman:
“When team members first come together,
they need to get oriented to one another and to the task.”
The reasons why leaders often skip this exercise are understandable:
They are under time pressure and want to start working on the “important” stuff right away.
For the leader who initiates a team, all the questions that are outlined above might seem obvious - so why spend any time on them?
Folks might have had negative associations with previous kickoff workshops, where too much emphasis was put on getting to know each other, so that people ended up just “playing games” and “holding hands”.
While these points often have some merit, it’s worth recognizing that kickoffs can accelerate a team’s effectiveness drastically, or, put the other way around: skipping a team kickoff often bites us in the tail in the long term.
The 60-30-10 Rule
Through their research, Harvard professors Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman established the 60-30-10 rule². The numbers give an indication of how leaders should spend their time when engaging with teams: 60% of the time should be spent on designing the team, 30% on launching them and only 10% on coaching them (these are recommendations rather than hard numbers). The reason for this is simple: their research indicates that the design of a team has a tremendous impact on team effectiveness, the launch a quite big one, while coaching interventions have a quite small one³. One metaphor that is often used is the one of a rocket ship: If our goal is to fly to the moon, the rocket ship needs to be designed to do exactly this. If we have the right design in place, it has to be launched into the correct trajectory, or else it will fly in the wrong direction or even crash. And only if a suitable ship is on its right trajectory, should we fine tune the course and coach the astronauts to really reach their destination.
Ironically, a lot of leaders spend most of their time with coaching interventions⁴, because they want to support teams that are struggling. This is not only ineffective, but it also leads to a larger number of struggling teams in the future, because more and more teams are formed without a proper design and launch. What leaders should do instead, whenever they recognize a team is struggling, is to think about a re-launch and / or re-design of the team.
Takeaways
If we want effective teams, we need to focus on their design and a proper kickoff. We should resist the temptation to skip the kickoff for the sake of short term efficiency. Kickoff events are not about playing games and singing songs, they are about aligning on important topics that will benefit the team greatly later.
And (shameless plug) lastly: If you are responsible for setting teams up for success, you should consider getting help from an expert who can support you in thinking through the design and launch of a new team.
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¹ For the rest of the post I will focus on kickoffs for teams, but I am confident that all my points apply to project kickoffs as well.
² Here’s the link to Ruth Wageman’s article on the 60-30-10 rule.
³ I am oversimplifying a bit here. Coaching can actually have a quite big impact, but only if a team is designed well and sent off to a good start.
⁴ It’s worth noting that we are not talking about 1:1 coaching / mentorship here, but rather trying to “repair” a team through coaching interventions.
Strukturen moderner Unternehmen
Am 18./19.12.2024 gebe ich mit meinem Bruder Stefan eine Schulung in Hamburg. Dort werden wir mit vielen Praxisbeispielen erörtern, wie man Unternehmen auf Effektivität, Flow und Innovation ausrichten kann.