The pizza collaboration test

Intro

I've never slept under my desk, but on one of those laughably ambitious IT implementation projects years ago, I did measure it up.

That experience led to a benchmark I use now in my team development work: the 'pizza collaboration' test. When you're up against it and you need to pull an all-nighter to hit a deadline, how ready, willing and able are your team get the pizzas in, lock themselves in the conference room and not leave until the work is done?

What's your real commitment to this organisation, this team, and yourself?

What’s the issue?

1. Sometimes teams don't even know what deadlines they're missing. The problem with teams is that there are cracks between individuals that things can fall into. And they do, all the time.

2. Individuals who aren't fully committed to the wider team won't go the extra mile for anything that doesn't directly benefit them or their own team.

3. People are better at talking about going the extra mile than walking it.

4. Sometimes, even with the best planning, the universe upsets the apple cart and through no-one's fault, large unreasonable but consequential deadlines appear out of nowhere that just have to be knocked over.

5. Those who easily pass the pizza collaboration test are also often the ones who habitually work too hard, too long. The ones who fail the test tend to see their work-life balance as untouchable. Both ends of this spectrum struggle to adjust to a spike in work - both up and back down.

Consider this

1. Change makes strong teams stronger and weak teams weaker. Pulling an all (or late) nighter can be a fantastic bonding experience if it's the exception not the rule.

2. Going into overdrive is fuelled by discretionary effort. And a whole host of great leadership is needed to nurture that, long long before an impossible deadline rears its ugly head.

3. You reap what you sow. Always push people to sprint a marathon and there will be nothing left in the tank - either the head or the heart - to go up a gear. But look after people when you can, and they'll look after your deadlines.

4. Recognise the sacrifice of a pizza night in the office. Give them meal vouchers (for anything except Italian perhaps). Remember also that their partners too made a sacrifice that night.

5. Read the room before, during and after the late night. In a strong team, there can be more energy in the room after the event than before. Before, there was anxiety about the scale of the task ahead and the consequences of failure. Afterwards, you either made it, or you failed knowing you did everything you could, and you hopefully learned something.

6. If you have not needed to pull a very late one at all in recent memory, you're either extremely well organised, operate in a stable environment, are too senior to need such tactical responsiveness, or you're missing deadlines you haven't identified.

Try this

Imagine that sooner or later your team will need to pull an all-nighter. If it was tonight, how would that go? And if you wanted it to go better, what would you do now to bring your team closer together, and closer to your organisation?