Rowing Together: How to Win with Responsive Working

I love many sports ... rugby, soccer, the NFL. But one of my favorite sports is rowing (I know, I know. How very British!)

Physically demanding and highly competitive, its beauty lies in the pursuit of perfection. And sometimes, perfection happens:

A crew of eight, smoothly and powerfully gliding atop a glassy lake, each oar slicing through the water in unison, the racing shell exploding forward rhythmically, stroke after magnificent stroke.

Rowers call these rare moments of athletic bliss “swing,” when harmony reigns, effort is optimized and the crew is its most productive and efficient. 

Swing may be difficult to achieve in rowing, but it does happen – when a team works together, independently yet in harmony, in pursuit of the same goal.

It can happen in business, too, and without the need for bulging muscles and physical exertion! Small teams, carefully chosen for their talent and diversity, self-managed and collaborative, can be more productive and effective than the swarm of workers we too often throw at a project.

At PepsiCo, the swing is the thing. It really works. And here’s how:

Grand SLAM

We call it “responsive working,” a framework of practices and policies that enable us to work faster and produce better results. It is a workplace imperative at PepsiCo, co-created with our transformation partner August Public, without which we would we lack the ability to compete at our best in a fast-paced environment where – in recent years – innovation has been led by clever, fast-moving outliers.

Large companies, like PepsiCo, too often move slowly. We frequently get in our own way.

Consider again our rowing metaphor. Imagine if each oarsman is rowing at his or her own pace, out of sequence. They ignore the calls of the coxswain, pleading for synchronization. And suddenly, even more rowers jump into the boat, to bring more power to the fledgling crew.

That would be, of course, ridiculous. And a spectacular failure.

But think how often we take similar action in the workplace.

No more, at PepsiCo. With responsive working, we’re rowing in harmony. And it’s a lovely thing to see.

For projects of every size and scope, we create a SLAM team. SLAM stands for Self-Organizing, Lean, Autonomous and Multi-Disciplinary – and each SLAM is a small, disparate matrix organized around a specific challenge.

In recent years, we’ve used it to plan for, organize and manage our Super Bowl activations – and the work has never been better. A core team of eight – down from the dozens who once were involved – that is collaborative, nimble, fast and adaptive has produced groundbreaking work.

But SLAM needn’t be limited to large-scale projects. We employ it across the enterprise, and our people love it because … they are empowered and unencumbered by needless interference from above.

And they love it because it is successful.

The idea is to eliminate the barriers than needlessly hold us back, the friction that can stand in the way of breakthrough thinking. Here are just a few barriers that we insist on breaking down:

• Meetings. My challenge to our teams is to reduce meetings by 20 percent. Not only does that restore the luxury of time, but folks find that those meetings that go on without them are just fine in their absence.
• Presentations. Yes, we need to look good when presenting to the board or shareholders. But most of the time, what’s more important is not the quality of the presentation, but the quality of the thinking. So, I insist on five slides or less, which forces teams to consolidate their ideas and get to the point.
• Access. Here’s where IT must help. Teams must have easy access to resources, and the best collaboration tools available. Otherwise, we’re back to waiting for weekly update meetings to see where we stand, and that’s just not productive. We must share and learn in real time, make decisions and move on.

Good ideas – like good athletic results – seldom come from homogeneous teams. They stem from diverse groups of people, with a variety of expertise and perspectives, joining together to tackle a task on their own terms and in their own way.

Now it’s your turn. How do you find the “swing” harmony in your business?