The simplicity and power of checklists

Enabling team effectiveness through a checklist

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

I love lists and I love checklists. They help me remember all the things I need to consider about an issue. I see it as an easy to read ‘how-to’ manual. If there is a problem, I know what’s already been done and then go looking for what’s missing. Yes, I did read The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande and loved it. His book talks about the value of checklists to (in his words)

• Help with memory recall and clearly set out the minimum necessary steps in a process
• Establish a higher standard of baseline performance
• Catch the mental flaws inherent in all of us — flaws of memory and attention and thoroughness
• Make sure people get the stupid stuff right
• Protect against failures

I’m sure you can find a good synopsis of the interesting case studies in his book online, so I won’t go into it here.

But what caught my attention was his finding that checklists weren’t just a job aid to help one remember but also fostered communication and teamwork. These industries that he researched use checklists, sometimes a task and a communication checklist to make tasks explicit and force individuals to come together and talk to each other.

Having a checklist decentralized control even in the most complex of industries and got team members to see each other as equals. By making information transparent everyone on the team knows what needs to be done and why. This distributes responsibility but also gives members the power to question.

Organizations have procedures and use checklists too, but they are usually confined to administrative or production functions. There are other areas of organizational governance where a checklist can help a leader fulfill minimum requirements, share knowledge and avoid simple problems.

For example, checklists can be used for setting up a team whether permanent or temporary so that the minimum design requirements that support team effectiveness are not missed out. Now, there is more to team effectiveness that just ticking off check-boxes, but if you see the research on team effectiveness you will notice that much of it can be planned and designed. Also, the checklist if used properly can foster a culture of teamwork and discipline.

You might remember Google’s internal research project, which was basically answering the question — What makes a team at Google effective? There have also been many team effectiveness models that date back almost 40 years. Each model is slightly different but to me almost all models mention the following elements for what makes a team effective even if they use different words:

a. A shared purpose, aim or objective

b. Talent

c. Clarity about roles

d. Trust and psychological safety*

e. Commitment and accountability

f. Supportive organizational context

*Psychological safety is the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking — contributes to team learning behaviors, such as seeking feedback, sharing information, experimenting, asking for help and talking about errors. Trust is seen as necessary for psychological safety and understood to exist in one to one relationships, whereas psychological safety is viewed as a group dynamic.

There was one model that actually looked into what makes teams dysfunctional — The Lencioni Model by Patrick Lencioni. He claimed that these 5 reasons would cause a team to be dysfunctional:

1) Absence of trust — not asking for help or being vulnerable

2) Fear of conflict — avoiding conflict so not producing ideas

3) Lack of commitment — not following through on agreements

4) Avoidance of accountability — not holding others accountable because of fear of conflict

5) Inattention to results — no one watching results or even planning to improve results

Models don’t quite tell leaders the steps to follow when setting up a team. Models only provide the key areas that the researcher has found to have most influence on the subject being investigated. In my study of Sociocracy I found the requirements to set up a circle (their term for team) covered most aspects of what’s given in the models above. If a leader wants to create a new circle, they bring the circle to life by defining certain dimensions or requirements; all of which put a team on the road to being effective.

Using effectiveness models above and the some cues from Sociocracy and the training firm SociocracyForAll, I tried to imagine a checklist that could be used to bring a team to life and then supported. These elements will have to be worked on at different stages of the team’s development. Here’s what a ‘read and do’ checklist would like —

Checklist to set up a team

• Aim — what will the team be doing?
• Domain — what authority does the team have to carry out its aim?
• Name — what will be team be called?
• Measures — what results must the team deliver?
• Members — who should be in the team/what talent do we need to fulfill our aim? Is membership open or closed?
• Roles — what roles does the team need? Define the roles.
• Team agreements — what agreements do you want to make around commitment, communication, learning, conflict and other issues?
• Decision-making — how will operations and policy decisions be made?
• Meetings — how often will the team meet? What meeting protocols will we follow?
• Record keeping — How will the team maintain records? Who will be responsible for this role?
• Information flow — How will the team share its achievements and updates with the rest of the organization?
• Coordination with other teams— Which teams do we interact with and how will we coordinate and share information? i.e. dealing with hand-offs and hand-overs.
• Organizational support

— Technology — what tech tools will the team be provided?

— Training and guidance — what trainings and coaching will the team and leader need for team processes?

— Relationship building — what activities can be designed to support the team to get to know each other better?

Such a list would need to be tailored to each circumstance and tested within your particular setup. Such a list would be available for everyone to see what needs to be done so their team is set up for success.

As Atul Gawande puts it in his book, the act of having a checklist for stakeholders to see and follow spreads responsibility and power to question.

A simple checklist by enabling openness and candor automatically builds psychological safety, the belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.

We all follow mental checklists often while cooking and also at work. It comes to us naturally, but the discipline to create and follow a written checklist is seen to improve outcomes without any need for increase in skill.

Using a checklist like the one above doesn’t make it a cookie-cutter approach; teams will naturally have their own differences and style. With a checklist you are just making sure the dimensions necessary for effective team formation and interaction isn’t overlooked. Where team effectiveness models are too diverse and you can’t afford to conduct your own research like Google did; I find a checklist like this both simple and powerful tool to build a project team, management team, department or even your employee engagement group.