How To Lead Teams To Effective Decisions In 15 Minutes Or Less

Business teams regularly have to make quick changes in tactics and strategy. They must adjust to new conditions and competition. So too do sports teams.

Perhaps the quintessential quick change that confronts teams that play on grass or hard courts is what happens at halftime. Be it soccer, football, or basketball, the number of stories where a deft midway adaptation turned the tide are legion.

Whereas many team meetings can afford some delay, halftime is critically short. There is not time to set up a strategic planning retreat that then takes a full day. You might have 15 minutes to save a season. That mere quarter of an hour can be a viable goal when looking at any team’s ability to make sound decisions, even in settings that don't involve a ball or the roar of a crowd.

The Leader vs The Team

There is a tendency for a team’s leader, be it a coach or the CEO, to single-handedly assess the situation and then make adjustments. That might be a new formation, substituting a player, or the like. There are obvious parallels with a team at a software company or manufacturing firm.

Being in that hot seat is supposedly why the boss earns that big paycheck. However, this top-down approach means that the other knowledgeable people on the team are reduced to being witnesses rather than collaborators. Those might be the players, assistant coaches, or perhaps the equipment manager standing in the corner. Beware of thinking that the one guy in a suit is smarter about the work at hand than those in cleats and shorts—or work boots and coveralls.

The reality is that the wisdom of the crowd can outperform the smartest individual in the room—and do so faster with more buy-in. After all, a team’s players inevitably have a ton of aggregate experience and knowledge that a head coach does not have.

But how do you distill the collective wisdom from a group so that the best ideas and solutions can be acted on quickly? Here are a few collaborative team exercises that are drawn from effective meeting facilitation practices. They’re used to effectively harness a team’s knowledge in less time than it takes to consume all the orange slices at halftime.

Collaborate With the Team

As an overall directive, look for ways to bring in the full team’s expertise rather than go it alone as the executive figure. Yes, a halftime re-organization isn’t a lot of time, but it still provides enough breathing room to bring in other voices and expertise. And, by comparison, with hours-long business meetings, there suddenly seems to be a luxury of time to work in others’ input.

Time to Reflect

It’s true that a halftime meeting only provides a few minutes to assess what's going on and then react. Still, if you give people as little as 60 seconds, it can pay real dividends rather than demanding an immediate answer and moving on. Allowing team members some time to think is a tough instinct for managers when meetings are so geared for immediate speak-up-now action rather than reflection. Try asking a question and then telling people to think quietly for a short amount of time before then asking for ideas and answers.

Pair Up

Often when a leader attempts to get feedback from everyone, it just means going around the table, one by one. Hopefully everyone gets a chance to speak for an equitable amount of time, but that’s rarely the case in actuality. And just letting each of the players on a World Cup squad speak for 30 seconds would run out the clock on halftime before anyone could synthesize those thoughts. Getting feedback from the players on a larger NFL roster would take twice as long.

Instead, multiply the amount of discussion and thinking that can happen with parallel processing. There are a variety of riffs on a method called Think-Pair-Share but, in essence, you'll ask each player to think of a good tactic to change; this might take a minute. Then people pair up and quickly bandy about their ideas to generate the ones that they most like and agree on; this could be as short as two minutes. Those get filtered back to the full group to decide on. This commonly used facilitation technique that brings in many voices can be done in the time that it would otherwise take two or three people to prattle on about their own thoughts in a big circle

Give Guidance

If a leader asks the members of a team for input, it’s often harried and unfocused with little time to prepare. The meeting starts and the leader asks, “What do you think?” When this is met with blank looks, the leader believes asking the team was not helpful.

People will provide valuable feedback, but the results will be better with some preparation. First, instill in the team that you really do want ideas; establish that pattern over multiple meetings. Then make time to solicit ideas and set the expectation before the game—or before the quarterly sales meeting—rather than only asking for extemporaneous thoughts when it's crunch time.

Also, while blue sky thinking is fine where you're open to any possibility, giving people lanes to think in can be beneficial with limited time. So rather than a very open approach like, “What should we do?” ask pointed questions more in the vein of: What are their defensive weaknesses? How are they exploiting our formation? What's the one tweak we could make with the most impact?

Simply giving the team suggestions about what to consider is helpful, but you can also provide a cheat sheet where they can actually write down ideas and be prepared at a meeting. People are not great at juggling lots of ideas in their heads at once. Imagine, for example, the players on the bench taking focused notes and talking strategy with an expectation that their ideas will affect the eventual outcome during the halftime meeting rather than passively watching the game unfold.

Visualize the Information

Are you likely to see a big collection of sticky notes in a locker room today? Typically, no. But it's an easy facilitation technique that helps teams quickly make sense of complicated issues and decide on outcomes. There are many different approaches to this, but each team member could be asked to put a suggestion on a sticky note and post it on the wall. The notes are then clustered into categories. The process provides a really fast, valuable insight into what everyone is thinking and saves a lot of what could actually be unnecessary conversation time.

If the coach then makes an executive decision based on this collaborative visualization, there's still probably more buy-in and cohesion within the locker room, knowing that at least everyone has been heard.

Consensus and Multi-vote

Especially when time is short, groups resort to a quick vote to choose a path. Should we do X or Y? One wins and the other loses. Instead of a binary choice, it might make sense to use multi-voting or a variety of consensus-based approaches to find solutions that really reflect the full group rather than what comes from a simple up or down process. That might mean that there are four options and everyone gets two votes. Or it might mean that those in the minority camp have the opportunity to propose an alternative that would win their vote rather than be shut out completely.

Luckily, most teams do not have to compress important changes into a 15-minute commercial break. But being able to make good decisions quickly is a game-changer for any organization. And even adding a single one of these tactics can be a winning move for your team.