Last week I wrote about the myriad of ways that productivity is destroyed at the workplace – both intentionally via an OSS manual from World War II as well as my own observations.
Reader Anne McGrath – who used to consult with non profit groups and now does organizational assessments, offered these additions to the list that I thought were well worth sharing.
- Assume no one has ever attempted to do what you’re trying to do, and start from scratch.
- Hide mistakes along the way and don’t bother collecting or sharing ideas for your best-practices or lessons-learned folder.
- Spend no time identifying & recruiting effective partners or participants for your project, just invite anyone and everyone, regardless of what they’d bring to the table.
- Have murky or never discussed vision, goals, purpose and values. Assume everyone has the same identical end goal in mind.
- Don’t evaluate leadership capacity. Just use the leader you’ve always used for every project.
- Don’t engage the people you are trying to help. For example, If in a school, leave students out of the equation re: all decisions that will directly impact their lives.
- End meetings with no clear action plan for things to accomplish and bring back for next meeting. This helps create meetings that go on forever with nothing changing.
