The "Working With Me" Exercise, Processes, and Excellence
Business Strategies: Improvement Strategies for Design and Construction
Effective teamwork and consistent processes are essential for achieving excellence, even in complex or unpredictable environments.
Main Ideas
The “Working With Me” Exercise: An actionable tool for team building.
Great Processes Enable Excellence: If projects are unique, our processes are less reliable.
1: The “Working With Me” Exercise
Teamwork is sometimes ambiguous. How do we actually work better together? What does that look like? How can we communicate better? How is that actionable? In Claire Hughes Johnson’s book, Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building, includes a great tool called a “Working With Me” document that makes teamwork more tactical. (You can read more about a “Working With Me” document here.)
We went through this exercise and enhanced it by transforming the insights into actionable commitments.
Here was the workflow:
Each team member wrote their “Working With Me” document.
Each team member presented their “Working With Me” document in a team work session.
In a final session, each team member committed to two actions that would better support their colleagues’ working preferences.
We took this one step further and added these actions to our goals for the year to hold one another accountable.
The final product was a table containing the actions for each person. For example, to accommodate my working style, my team members would:
Use email sparingly (I prefer phone calls over email).
Not give me public praise (I prefer coffee gift cards for praise).
Tell me before a conversation if they needed time to share all the details and context so I can help them brainstorm (my default is assuming there’s action to be taken - it’s helpful for me to know if the need is just to listen and be heard).
Examples of actions I would take to accommodate the working preferences of my team include:
Be more tactical than philosophical.
Respecting their focus time.
Small actions like these have a big impact.
(Claire also did a great podcast with Tim Ferris. Here’s the link.)
2. Great Processes Enable Excellence
Just as clear communication improves teamwork, well-defined processes improve project outcomes—even when those projects seem unique.
I came across an article on The Art of Manliness which talked about professional kitchens. (You can read the article here.) What resonates most was:
Professional kitchens rely heavily on checklists and standard procedures, recognizing that good processes enable excellence. Excellence arises from constantly refining these processes, asking: “How can I do this better, easier, or with less waste?”
It made me think about our industry perspective that all projects are unique (You can read more of my thoughts on this here.) The more that we think of our projects as unique, the less we can rely on processes to enable excellence. Many believe that processes should help us build unique things, but how can they if the product is truly unlike anything else we’ve ever produced?
There’s a second point here regarding organization.
[I]t’s about following consistent processes that maintain that organization.
Organizing a project consistently helps us realize that projects are in fact not unique. This aligns with my proposal to use the Definable Feature of Work (DFOW) as the means of organizing projects. The DFOW is a structured way to break projects into manageable, repeatable parts—enabling teams to apply consistent processes without sacrificing creativity. A consistent method of organization allows process to produce the right results.
The key takeaway is this: While every project may seem unique, success comes from recognizing what isn’t. By embracing consistent processes and organized frameworks like the Definable Feature of Work (DFOW), we create structure that drives excellence—even in projects that feel one-of-a-kind.
Good processes don’t limit creativity or innovation; they enable it. When we focus on refining those processes, asking “How can this be better, easier, or less wasteful?” we position ourselves to deliver exceptional results—not by reinventing the wheel, but by making the wheel turn more efficiently every time.
Excellence isn’t the result of grand gestures—it’s the outcome of refining small actions every day. Whether improving teamwork or refining processes, small, intentional actions compound to create lasting excellence.
Thanks for reading. Make it a great week!
Other recent posts include:
I posted Book Notes for Juran’s Quality Handbook. Those notes can be found here.
I wrote about conviction, technology, and critical thinking, which you can read more about here.