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.