How Familiar are these Situations to You?   

• An organisation adopts a new strategy.  While paying lip-service to the change, key staff are still resisting the new direction, complaining and hoping that things will go back to the way they were before

• A team regards itself as a group of individuals who ‘happen’ to report to the same person.  Though they are each doing their own job effectively, the synergies, economies of scale and innovation that it was hoped would come from bringing them together are not happening

• A layer of management is taken out of an organisation to empower the next level of managers to make quicker decisions, interface directly with their own customers and produce enhanced results.  However, they aren’t stepping up to the new challenge, and are waiting for direction and seeking permission, just as they did in the old structure

• Two functional heads whose roles require that they work together closely, clash to the extent that they do their best to avoid each other.  When they do have to work together there is friction, resulting in inefficiency and poor outcomes

• Conflict and ‘fingerpointing’ are arising because team members are not clear on the exact boundaries of their roles, and tend either to ‘tread on each other’s toes’, or to miss targets and deadlines altogether because it is not clear who is accountable for their achievement

Sound Familiar?

Do you see similar issues in your own business?  They cost hassle and sleepless nights.  But have you ever stopped to calculate what they are really costing you (see our article on how to calculate the cost of such issues to your business)?  The real cost is a brake on business results which, if not tackled head-on, becomes permanent because it becomes the norm  - ‘just the way things are round here’.

Typically, the knee-jerk reaction is to fire people, move them ‘sideways’, re-structure, tell ‘them’ to get their act together, hope it gets better by complaining enough, put them on ‘special measures’ at appraisal time, or call a ‘cards on the table’ meeting – all expensive, risky and ultimately ineffective.

What does not usually happen is that all the people concerned with the issue get together and surface it fully in a series of face-to-face conversations in which they explore in depth how things got to be this way, and agree new actions and behaviours which permanently prevent the issues from arising again.  This approach to creating great, results-producing teams, in contrast to the knee-jerk response, is inexpensive, very fast, and if done properly always produces outstanding long-term results.

Why does the Approach Work?

The approach works because it creates a necessary forum, managed by a facilitator, to identify and surface issues that have not been expressed before.  If the platform for doing this had existed before, organisational issues would have been resolved already, or would probably never have become problems in the first place!  A valuable outcome of this approach is the creation of a long-term organisational process for dealing with team issues whenever they arise in the future - ‘just the way we do things round here’!

The second reason the approach works is that it is based on consistent research findings showing that, with very few exceptions, individuals are always capable of producing outstanding results given the right skills and mindset.  If individuals don’t have the necessary skills, organisations are very familiar with the process of identifying and addressing skill gaps through training.  However, people quite frequently still don’t produce the results they are capable of.  This is because what gets in the way is not just their level of skill, but equally importantly their mindset and the groupthink in the team – this approach tackles these head on.

What Is the Key to Success?  

The key to the approach’s success is the toughest bit: telling the truth.  The experienced facilitator encourages participants to uncover and face up to key, relevant truths that will unstick the team and enable it to move on. They might otherwise shy away from these issues, leaving them forever buried from view, but causing unacknowledged blocks to progress.  The team cannot do this without the impetus from an outside facilitator; it would be like doing brain surgery on yourself! 

You may or may not have the ‘right’ strategy, the ‘right’ product, the ‘right’ appointment, the ‘right’ new computer system, but as a business leader, whatever you give your team to work with, you need their full, unconditional commitment.  The process we outline uncovers very quickly any barriers in the way of every member of the team providing this, and leaves the team with a new ability to surface and resolve issues quickly and permanently in future. 

We hope you find the topics we cover thought-provoking and useful to you in your work, developing your organisation and producing results.  Do contact us if you'd like us to come and talk over any of your issues with you, to let us know your views on anything you read, or if there's something you'd particularly like us to cover.  We look forward to hearing from you.

Gil, Kate & Steve   

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