Meeting Feedback

1/7/11...Ahhh, communication. Us human beings require it. We are not meant to work in isolation of one another or be in relationships apart from one another. God created us for relationship. With that said, communication and relationship goes hand in hand. Stay with me for a minute as I ramble a thought. I just logged on to the blog to capture this thought in its raw form. That is how important I think this thought is.

Currently our teams are meeting to work on improving their work and manage their work area. This is a tall task, especially when the history of the plant was more of a dictatorship versus engagement. Now we are asking our people to come together as teams and collaborate to make their work better. Some are in roles such as minute taking, team leading, reporting out, and devil's advocating. These are foreign roles to them and do not necessarily come naturally. So the question becomes, how do we help them through these roles and help the team come together. Team building events are good and necessary but in our current format there needs to be more. Since they are meeting every 2-4 weeks for 1 1/2 hours, our time to coach them is limited. Here are the bullet points:

• In early team formation, the coach/faciliator position is in a tough position. If they disengage and let the team learn by failure, this may lead to excess floundering. If they insert themselves too much in a leader role because they see floundering, they risk the team not ever growing and them becoming the defacto team leader. All of this rests on having effective team leaders, but when we are asking our people to lead teams with no prior experience, it presents this dilemma. We are not making the time to send team leaders to 6 month training classes therefore we have to address the issue here and now.
• The coach/facilitator position becomes a quasi role of coach/faciliator and team leader mentor, meaning to keep things moving they have to insert themselves ever so often. Also with them ensuring the technicial side of the meeting is flowing smoothly, i.e. staying on agenda, questioning whether something is an improvement, placing on effort/impact grid, entering in work orders, etc., this leaves little time to really do the pure coach/facilitator role, at least in our current format. The issue falls back to an inexperienced team leader not knowing what to do even if they have natural abilities.
• In the forming stage of teams, it then becomes important to do something different. Here is what we are going to do. The coach/facilitator will continue their role. We will have another coach/facilitator attend the meeting with a totally different role. We will use a form to assess how the meeting and team is working, i.e. testing 4 consensus, leader holding opinion to end of discussion, everyone participating, understanding the metrics. This person will make notes in key areas where we think behaviors need to be reinforced. Then we will schedule 5 minutes at the end of the meeting to give the feedback, to all team members. Before we were just providing feedback to the leader after the meeting, but I think it is more impactful to do in during the meeting. Reinforcing positive and negative behaviors during the meeting and communicating this feedback we believe will help the inexperience side of our people working in teams. After all, this is a somewhat foreign concept to them, especially after years and years of just being asked to work on their own.