Dirty Laundry

6/25/12...In teaming, there are always challenges, as The Toil is a constant force reckoning our idealism. Therefore airing the dirty laundry is a good thing because I know dirty clothes smell bad...especially my hiking socks. I also know I sometimes lose sight the comfort of clean clothes brings me. I remember wearing the same jeans in China for seven days. The jeans could have walked on their own. How refreshing though when a local Chinese merchant washed them for me and I put them on for the first time. I think I literally let out a sigh of joyful relief.

There is dirty laundry in teaming. I know one of the challenges facing us at the moment is the movement of people across teams. In work requiring ergonomic breaks, our challenge is moving people around without them losing their identity on the functional team. After all, one of the strengths of functional teams are members taking ownership of all decisions, unlike with cross-functional teams where decisions are made for others who have no say or little opportunity to say. Teams require identity. When a team member changes, identity is lost, and teams go back to Stage 1 called Forming. Although this is a dirty laundry item, I have also seen this as a blessing. Over this last year I see poor performing teams get a boost of energy when new members are rotated on. With good performing teams, changing members does not seem to disrupt the flow as much. Good teams continue to perform. Poor teams seem to get stuck. However, when new members rotate into a poorly performing team, the team dynamics change, usually for the better. So from now on, if a team is performing poorly, air the dirty laundry, change the lineup, and keep moving. An analogy would be baseball coaches who change their lineups if poor performance is occuring. Changing lineups is not always a guarantee for better performance, but it is much better than letting the team flounder.

There is other dirty laundry we have, such as movement of Star Points across teams and not using basic problem solving tools so instead of identifying the correct root cause, the tendency is jumping to results. Teams struggle with these. Another one is keeping teaming fresh and fun. The challenge is how to keep the team engaged, encouraged and motivated to continue pursuing change. If not careful, the team will continue wearing the same pair of jeans for seven days. After a while, the freshness is gone. Staleness in teams is a reality especially when teams do not have a finite end. Keeping it fresh requires diligence, perserverance and creativity, not to mention a little bit of Tide...and maybe some Bounce.

Mini-Business Anonymous

6/21/12...I went out to lunch with the teaming coaches today. At times it felt like a support group meeting, which actually was a good thing, because the coaches need to know there is support for them and an avenue for them to share. Of course ordering Turtle Cheesecake and Cocunut Pie for dessert definitely helps the mood as well...but I digress. I picked up some good tips today to keep in mind for the future so I thought I would share them, and also write them down as future reminders:

Meeting on company grounds is not always a necessity. In fact, to keep teams fresh, let the teams decide if they would like to meet offsite somewhere. One coach tells the story of their team meeting at a local park. Even with people all around and Intersate 81 traffic right across the river, the team enjoyed more relaxed conversation and there was more participation by members who were usually more quiet.

Another coach shared the story of how a Minute Taker wanted to resign their role after diligently serving for eight months. However, nobody on the team wanted to step up. The Team Leader asked the Minute Taker to leave the room until the team made a decision. Why? because, and I have also seen this, is the team will "wait" out the person until they cave in to continue to do it, or they will "wait" out the Team Leader. In the future, the good practice is to have the Role person such as Minute Taker and the Team Leader step out, and then have the team make a decision on who will do it. Make sure the team knows they cannot leave until a decision is made. By approaching the role decision this way, the team no longer has the person in the current role or the Team Leader to literally look at to make a decision or cave in. Indeed, a stroke of genius...

Along the same lines, if a team is not having people step up to do tasks, proceed with a regular meeting. While the meeting is ongoing, have the team list tasks needing to be done on a post-it-chart as the tasks present themselves, like a running Kaizen newspaper. Then, towards the end, the Team Leader leaves and asks the team members to take on tasks with the rule that each team member can only take 1. The team cannot adjourn until this is accomplished. Sequestering is a powerful dissuasion to non-participation.

Back to the cheesecake. Between bites of the Turtle decadence, which by the way was absolutely delicious, I learned a few other tips. One, with our structure, it is important to have job descriptions for the Maintenance role on the team. I am not sure we communicated effectively enough on the front end the expectations of this role. Also the other coaches reinforced another tool, the Effort/Impact grid. Using this grid to help stay within scope is vital for the teams. Every idea should be run through this grid so the team is not working outside what they can influence or make decisions on. Through using this grid, it is also vital to challenge repair items, and instead of filling out a work order to repair, turn the repair into an improvement so the issue does not reoccur.

Last of all, the last tip I learned was always eat the last bite of Turtle Cheesecake. Trust me, you will never regret it. You may have to join another type of Anonymous group, but I think it is well worth it.