Book Extract | Team: Getting Things Done with Others by David Allen and Edward Lamont

Book Extract

Excerpted with permission from the publisher Team: Getting Things Done with Others, ‎ David Allen and Edward Lamont, published by ‎ Piatkus/ Hachette India.
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What, specifically, can you do as a leader to help drive a culture of healthy high performance on your team?
It isn’t necessary that a leader be a black belt in all the aspects of Getting Things Done (GTD) to succeed with what we are proposing in this book, but using—and demonstrating—some of them will certainly help. As a leader you cast the longest shadow in terms of working culture, and people will notice and copy what they see.

Whether you lead a large or small team, here are some relatively simple things you can do to communicate your intent about the new way of working, and to maximize your investment in offering GTD to your team:

• Bring paper or some other means of capturing commitments to every meeting and demonstrate capturing them as they are made.

• Protect thinking time. As the leader, more than anyone on the team, you are the eyes and ears of the team with senior leadership and the outside world. If you’re stuck in tactical meetings all day, you have no chance to think strategically. Some leaders protect the first hour of their day for reflection; others block thirty-minute slots for clarifying work. While conferences and emergencies will occasionally disrupt this, protecting time—even if it’s rearranged—is vital for keeping perspective.

• Maintain complete Agenda and Waiting For lists for your one-to-ones with team members. This makes meetings much more effective and allows for quick, meaningful conversations between scheduled sessions.

• Maintain an overview of what the team is up to. To do that you must have clear and complete dashboards that let you know exactly what has been committed and when the deadlines are. Without external support there is simply no way for your brain to handle the sheer volume. You don’t need a larger, more colorful screen, a more powerful computer chip, or a better piece of collaborative software. All you need are up-to-date lists that you consult when needed.
• Use "town hall" and "client meeting" lists to collect items for upcoming wider forums or external meetings. Capturing ideas early gives you a head start preparing and ensures important points aren’t lost.
• If you have an assistant, schedule five to fifteen minutes daily to review Agenda and Waiting For items with each other. By answering small questions throughout the week, you prevent bottlenecks and enable smoother delegation and support.
• Aim to respond to emails within twenty-four hours. Even a quick, “I’ll get back to you” demonstrates seriousness about inbox management. A study by Duncan Watts found that faster leader email responses correlated with higher team satisfaction.
• Respect work-life boundaries. As a leadership gardener you should also be aware that the same study identified that out-of hours emails were associated with lower satisfaction about work-life balance. Whatever standards the team develops, you’ll want to respect them. Independent of that you’ll want to give a bit of thought to when you are sending communications. In our observation, even when a leader feels they’ve been clear that, “I’m sending them over the weekend/in the evening, but don’t expect you to respond then,” most people can’t not look and respond if they are receiving mails from their boss out of hours. Work when you want, but think hard about what cultural signals you are sending—and what implicit standards you are proposing if you are seen to be working at 2:00 a.m. on a regular basis. There is no right or wrong here, but if only from a personal brand perspective, this is a double-edged sword. You might get an admiring, “Wow, what an animal” response, but you might also simply become the object of pity or resentment, as someone who can’t get on top of their work without working through the night.

• Integrate GTD ideas and terminology into team meetings. Take a few minutes at the start to clarify the desired outcome, and close by capturing who has the next actions and projects. Let people know when tasks are added to your Waiting For or Project Delegated lists—this language helps establish a new, more structured way of working.

• Underline current priorities consistently. One senior manager in a major high-tech firm shares his personal mind map of all current projects and initiatives with his staff weekly. It helps them see what’s most important and why decisions are being made, allowing them to adjust their own work accordingly.

• Do a weekly review. Many leaders believe they can't be strategic because they’re trapped in tactical demands. But just one hour a week, reviewing and updating dashboards and projects, places you ahead of 95 percent of leaders in strategic clarity and decision-making.
• Be visible doing your weekly review. You can’t force your team to do theirs, but you can encourage it by protecting time for it openly. For example, set 2:00–3:00 p.m. on Fridays for undisturbed review time. Even if people choose another slot, they’ll know it’s expected. The key is that you visibly do yours—it will make it harder for team members to ignore theirs.
• Offer different spaces for reflection. In open offices especially, having quiet rooms where staff can pull away to think, plan, or do weekly reviews without interruptions can be a game changer.
• Negotiate and agree on simple working standards. This may take more upfront energy but has the greatest long-term payoff. It’s usually up to the leader to initiate this work, but the benefits for clarity, trust, and performance are huge.
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David Allen and Edward Lamont, Team: Getting Things Done with Others,‎ Piatkus/ Hachette India, 2024. Pb. Pp.336

A groundbreaking book about how to harness the power of collaboration and work most effectively in groups - coauthored by Getting Things Done's David Allen

When Getting Things Done was published in 2001, it was a game-changer. By revealing the principles of healthy high performance at an individual level, it transformed the experience of work and leisure for millions. Twenty years later, it has become clear that the best way to build on that success is at the team level, and one of the most frequently asked questions by dedicated GTD users is how to get an entire team onboard.

By building on the effectiveness of what GTD does for individuals, Team will offer a better way of working in an organisation, while simultaneously nourishing a culture that allows individuals' skills to flourish. Using case studies from some of the world's most successful companies, Team shows how the principles of team productivity improve communication, enable effective execution and reduce stress on team members. These principles are increasingly important in the post-pandemic workplace, where the very nature of how people work together has changed so dramatically.

Team is the most significant addition to the GTD canon since the original, and in offering a roadmap for building a culture of sustainable high performance, will be welcomed by readers working in any sized group or organisation.

The book excerpt is an abridged version of chapter 11 that is entitled “The Structures of Leadership”.
In Getting Things Done, David Allen revolutionised individual productivity - and now, he and Edward Lamont show us how to transform teams and organisations. This is a masterful guide for any team striving to navigate the complexities of collaboration in today's fast-paced world -- Dorie Clark, bestselling author of The Long Game and executive education faculty, Columbia Business School

Ed Lamont and David Allen have captured the best practices for working with people to produce the best possible results. Team is a no-nonsense manual for doing just that, no matter what your goal is or who you're working with to achieve it. If you're invested in making good things happen, and need others to assist, this is a must-read -- Arianna Huffington, Founder & CEO, Thrive Global
The world needs this book . . .This is not a book to read once, and extract a few ideas. Team is a guidebook, outlining the step-by-step process to team effectiveness. My advice is that you keep this book on your desk. Use it and re-use it, until Team structures your day-to-day activity as a team . . .and get amazing things done, together -- Tony Crabbe, business psychologist, author of Busy

If you regularly get things done with others, here's your new productivity bible. In Team, David and Edward masterfully break down how the principles of GTD work for all team settings - whether you have a corporate, sports or family team. At its best, working in a team feels effortless. This book helps get you to this magical place, so you can accomplish more with others while actually enjoying the process -- Chris Bailey, international bestselling author of Hyperfocus, The Productivity Project, and How to Calm Your Mind

David Allen is an international best-selling author who is widely recognized as the world’s leading expert on personal and organizational productivity. Time Magazine called his flagship book, Getting Things Done “the definitive business self-help book of the decade”.

Edward Lamont is co-founder and Senior Partner of Next Action Associates, the GTD partner for the UK and Ireland. He has over 25 years of experience in executive coaching, training and consulting in the areas of leadership, productivity, and motivation. Since 2009, he has founded and grown the most successful GTD franchises worldwide by using the principles in this book. Before moving into consulting, he worked covering commodities markets, and was a freelancer for the Financial Times.