4 actions to get your team to solve problems
You invest hours of your time and energy in an improvement project. Only to realize later that very little has actually been achieved.
You want to find out why failure has happened. This time you change approach, and your team gets insight in what went wrong. Some positive results arrive, but all in all, it is far below expectations.
At this moment, the confidence level of your team plummets. Doubts arise regarding the sense and feasibility of the entire project. The blaming game starts. The team believes that there is not much they can do in their specific situation.
In these circumstances, regrettably, people sometimes say or think the following de-energizing phrase:
“Solutions come and go. Problems, on the other hand, remain.”
It does not need to be this way.
Sooner or later every team faces difficulties. But we can give support, and create the right environment that enables everyone to persist on the journey of operational improvement.
The following 4 specific actions help your team to move forward, even if some things go wrong.
1. Coach your people
“Confidence is people’s greatest friend.”- Lao Tzu
Last year I had the opportunity to help my 13 year old daughter. She was getting bad grades at school, and believed she could not do any better. I helped to make her discover a better study method for each matter (grammar, maths, sciences etc.). Her school results improved gradually.
But after one year things got really exciting. My daughter started to get excellent votes! She surprised everyone, especially herself. She did not really know the reason for this impressive improvement. She just felt confident in her new self image of being a person who studies well and gets high grades.
This experience shows us the essence of coaching : make people aware of their capacity to change, and let them experience they can actually apply what they have learnt.
The same situation can happen on the workplace. First we help our team to develop better actions and a positive attitude.
When positive results kick in, people make a switch in their head. As their confidence increases they will :
- take on bigger challenges
- be more intrinsically motivated to move forward
- be more successful in whatever they do
- bounce back from failures.
2. Build self-optimizing processes
“Where you find quality, you will find a craftsman, not a quality-control expert”- Robert Brault
People should not only execute orders.
We can organize work and the entire process in such a way that everyone has the opportunity to look critically into the daily work their team is performing.
Empower your people. Treat them as skilled craftsmen.
Over time they will know by themselves the answers to the following questions:
- What in the process is broken?
- Which steps in the process create roadblocks?
- Which step requires the most time to complete?
- Which step causes the most delays?
- Are there any steps that cause cost/resources to go up?
- Are there any steps that cause quality to go down?
At this stage your team is capable of defining the root cause of the problems. They will implement the decided countermeasures. Just make sure that the process provides them the necessary tools and time.
3. Improve the whole organization
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”-Socrates
Often it is the organization that causes your team to get stuck in operational problems.
These 6 organizational actions strengthen our processes, and encourage everyone to improve continuously :
- Develop a shared vision and a social structure that provides focus and energy for learning and improving.
- Teach and promote problem solving techniques that are common to everyone.
- Define clear goals and measure the performance of the organization as a whole and of its various components.
- Develop cross-functional teamwork without barriers between departments.
- Listen to your team and give them power to decide.
- Make progress visible in the whole organization
4.Act consistently, always and everywhere
“If values matter in organization, you have to be prepared to act consistently.”- Carly Fiorina
The success of operational improvement is based on the interdependence between the three dimensions of a company: the people, the processes and the organization.
Interdependence requires coherence between what you do on these three levels. Your teamwork and problem solving activities will benefit from it.
Conclusion
“ The true measure of success is how many times you can bounce back from failure.”- Stephen Richards
All too often we make hasty and wrong conclusions when our team does not solve its operational problems. People just “don’t get it”. Or the problem is too complicated.
In reality every situation can be improved. Be persistent. Coach your people, Facilitate their job at process level. And make sure that the organization really encourages the kind of behavior we want to promote.
Do you want to find out more?
You may want to read this previous article to discover more on performance improvement and how people, processes and the organization influence each other.
Thinking about new ways to create competitive advantage and improve your organization? This PDF describes the 4 pillars that increase enterprise performance and helps you to apply them in your company.
