Last Wednesday an interesting development occured in my workplace. Based on our annual climate survey results disturbing trends emerged. There is essentially a deep mistrust of upper management, as well as structural problems, communication problems, and a lack of clarity in vision, leaving us prone to mission drift. Because these same issues were present in surveys for the past two years our CEO took a step (in my opinion a brave one) towards empowering the staff to work through these challenges. He proposed that staff create the recommendations for change. So many people on our small staff decided to run with it.
Yesterday we met as a group without senior leadership for an intense half day session. What emerged was surprising - everyone saw the problems in very similar ways! What was really revealing for me though - and as I reflect on what I have learned in this course was the true importance of teamwork and collaboration. As we discussed the issues there was some finger pointing at senior leadership, some even at our CEO - but a number of us, me included, saw that part of the problem was the staff itself. Essentially everyone is at fault for the failures that we complain about in the organization. We talked a lot about managing up as a part of the solution.
This morning, as a way to help organize my thoughts about the meeting I referred back to the Lencioni article "Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team" and it took on a new relevance. As a staff we continually ask ourselves why do the things the organization tries more often than not fail. My big revelation came - we focus on specific results, rather than the larger context - as a staff we do not practice effective teamwork. Because of our work culture's failing to encourage innovation we tend to focus on indivudual results - when we undertake group tasks we hyper focus on making the individual contributions succeed that we loose sight of the big picture - and the larger goals, and what results is a tendency to become apathetic when things fail, and also because things do not look the same as when they started - original intentions get lost! For me this is where we as a staff fail in promoting a successful, effective, and wonderful work culture.
As we continued our discussions we came to the conclusion that what we need to focus on are action oriented results - in other words - the recommendations we make to our senior leadership should be specifically focused on concrete actions that they as well as ourselves can take to improve the culture. For instance, we are a global organization, with field offices, and everyone feels like there is not enough of a grasp on what is happening across all departments, that we sit in "silos." So, let's not say we are going to communicate more effectively, or more often - we must focus on the specific how we communicate more - how do we structure our monthly staff meetings in a concrete way to best distill relevant info clearly, and do we mandate that everyone attend - these traditionally have not been mandatory, but it is strongly encouraged that everyone attend. A newsletter was another idea was suggested - we compile a newsletter in such a way that provides everyone with enough of an overview that everyone stays informed, but who becomes responsible for that and how do we structure to make that happen? And, how do we hold people accountable to ensure that it does?
The more I reflect on the unfolding events of the past week the more I realize that this is what our CEO has asked us to do - make real concrete suggestions on how we think it will work. Of course, the question does remain - will we also have permission to fail? I think the solution to that is to make one of the suggestions - we need permission to fail and try something new, as well as ask everyone to be a little patient with the process. I think we all have a tough rough ahead, but it is exciting to be undegoing a process like this after taking a class that provides some tools to assist with this kind of thing.
Anyone have any advice?
-Ken
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