When you’re operating in a world where more and more things feel unpredictable, that uncertainty puts pressure on how your team functions. You can’t shut the door on that chaos and uncertainty, but there’s one surprisingly simple thing your team can do to reduce stress and anxiety.
https://swiy.co/go-the-dependability-gap
A few weeks ago, a Tesla driver driving across Australia got stranded half-way across the Nullarbor. He knew there were charging stations along the way, and had planned his trip carefully to use them along the journey. Unfortunately, three charging stations in a row – hundreds of kilometres apart – weren’t working. Usually, they are reliable, and he had even built in enough contingency for one to be broken, but not all three. Suddenly, he was stuck!
This often happens in times of change and uncertainty (like right now!). Sometimes the biggest stress doesn’t come from new things, but from old things that just don’t work anymore.
This is the dependability gap, and it causes a lot of stress and anxiety.
You know this now, right?
You go to your local servo and it’s out of petrol.
You want to change a flight, but it’s double the price.
You want to pump up your tyres, but there’s a massive line of people following the government’s advice.
(OK, maybe that last one isn’t happening everywhere!)
Your regular café is probably one that reliably makes your coffee the same way every time. It doesn’t have to be the best in the world, but it’s reliably good, and that’s good enough. You wouldn’t go there if it’s the best in the world today, but tomorrow it’s terrible, then the next day it’s just OK, then back to the best again.
It’s not reliable, and you can’t depend on it.
You don’t need 100% precision – just dependability. If the last train home at night could be 5 or 10 minutes late, OK – you can work around it. But if it sometimes doesn’t turn up at all, you can’t rely on it.
We depend on dependability.
You might call it reliability, but I’m using the word “dependability” because it’s the word Google used in its Project Aristotle research to identify the factors that high-performing team share. Google thought the best teams must logically have the smartest engineers, but in fact they discovered something five other – very different – things. I won’t share them all here (just look up Project Aristotle), but one was dependability.
In other words, people in the team could depend on each other.
This happens in the smallest everday things.
You ask somebody to send you a report by 2pm, and you know they will do it – not at 2.15pm or 2.05pm (which means you can’t present it at the 2pm meeting).
You ask people to do some pre-reading for a meeting, and you know they will do it, so you don’t have to waste time in the meeting waiting for them to catch up.
You ask somebody to reply to a customer and you know they will do it – without you checking in on them every hour.
Google found that teams with high dependability perform better. And when you think about it, it’s obvious. But would you have guessed it’s one of the TOP FIVE factors?
Dependability matters even more when there’s a lot of external change and uncertainty. When you can depend less on what’s happening outside, building depending inside becomes even more important.
So how do you build dependability in your team?
It starts with small things – like in the examples above. It’s tempting to think they don’t matter. But they do.
For more examples, download the worksheet here and use it as a starting point for building more dependability in your team.
Download the worksheet: