glamorizing the BTS with your team

made w/ midjourney

Whatever thing it is you produce for your customers, community, or company, that thing likely represents a fraction of the team’s end-to-end action and output. Nearly every product and service has a comparatively large behind-the-scenes operation. 

It’s easy for the on stage, for-the-customer stuff to get all the glory. This misallocation of attention can distort the team’s incentives. Those doing the behind-the-scenes stuff can feel forgotten or resentful. The quality of the vital BTS work can suffer.

Leaders and managers can prevent this distortion, cheaply. Tracking progress toward on-stage success and celebrating milestones on that path can be done with tools you probably already have: a spreadsheet, eg, and email/Slack. Shout out people doing excellent BTS work; draw the team’s attention to the completion of key phases of that work and explain to them why it matters. 

A K-12 example: One of my favorite leaders ever, Margie Scribner, is a master at making teachers find meaning in and feel appreciated for mundane processes. These processes are essential for student success but they usually happen when students aren’t in the room. One of those processes is decorating the classroom and building big data trackers on chart paper in July, before kids are even in the building. Margie turned her routine assistant principal audit of classroom design into an iPhone shot mini-show called “MTV [S]cribs”: teachers with the most inspiring, edifying, and student-friendly designs gave tours of their rooms and pointed out their best features. She turned something that could have been a low morale, compliance-y drudge into a high engagement co-opetition.

-eric