July 2006 Deep Insights

Midyear Team Calisthenics

Everyone is accountable for their own performance but often team support is necessary to hold each other accountable. Ambidextrous roles played as a provider and customer of information requires both positive and negative feedback. Teams and team members must embrace both. Three exercises will keep everyone focused on facts not anecdotal conversations.

First, teams must visit goal measurements and determine their progress or lack of progress, once determined, celebrate successes and commit to analysis of current obstacles. Analysis should be carried out through open team dialogue reviewing individual skill capabilities, process partnership collaboration and outside influences that may require goal adjustments. Everyone must be fact friendly.

Second, teams complete their analysis and then determine necessary action. Skill capabilities require acquiring knowledge through learning, outsourcing, personnel changes or hiring. Process partnerships require determining what is there to understand and what is understood. Once completed, a critical path must be established to understanding process partnership collaboration. This path is best established through questions: What should we continue doing? What should we stop doing? What should we begin doing? Answering these questions together will re-energize partnerships and keep the focus on fixing the process not the problem. Last in this second step, teams must revisit what current events influence their goals. Innovation moves faster than execution on many occasions. Teams must be sure they have not been passed by.

Third, our analysis and actions must be tested for their accuracy before execution. Questions we should visit are: What have we learned? What are the implications of our learning? How must we adapt our provider and customer mentality? Have we determined the needs of each customer and are we prepared to meet those needs as individuals and as a provider? Are we still committed to our team goals?

Completion of the above calisthenics will RE-ENERGIZE team members and teams. By allowing team members to be a part of the process, partnerships have been reactivated with enhancements and outside influences have been visited. The team has reestablished common goals and collaborative action with transparent customer and provider personal commitments.


Deep Insights
July 2006