Net een reorganisatie achter de rug of gepland? Ja laten we dingen anders doen omdat onze klanten dat van ons vragen. We moeten meer AGILE worden,.. onze COMMUNICATIE en SAMENWERKING moet verbeteren !

Ik geloof dat we allemaal graag mee willen werken aan een verbetering, aan tevreden klanten die ons vaker bestrooien met complimenten dan met klachten.

Wat ik te vaak nog zie na een reorganisatie is dat teveel medewerkers achterblijven met de gedachte ‘ik vind dat ik dat al heel goed doe wat nu gevraagd wordt door het Mangement! en dus …. gebeurt er niets.

Oh ja … vergeten we soms niet ook nog te vertellen wat we allemaal wél goed deden? En wat we dus zeker moeten blijven doen?

We verzanden in container begrippen. Begrippen die goed bedoeld zijn, vaak erg actueel klinken, maar wie weet nu wat zij/hij anders moet gaan doen?!

Zolang we deze uien niet afpellen tot concrete voorbeelden hoe het eruit ziet in de praktijk kunnen we ze ook niet omzetten naar concrete acties. ‘Agile, hoe herken ik dat? Hoe ziet dat eruit’? ‘Samenwerking, wanneer is daar we of geen sprake van?’. Zolang verschillende mensen verschillende antwoorden geven zit het team niet op één lijn. Hoe kunnen we dan verwachten dat ze dezelfde kant uit bewegen en het ‘gewenste’ gedrag laten zien?

Zou jij dat ook willen met je team dat ze van een goed team een uitstekend team worden? Ik kan je daarbij helpen door samen ‘uien te gaan pellen‘. Met #OnsTeamKompas en #VolgJeKompas maakt je team een transformatie door waar jij als manager echt blij van wordt!

En wie wil er nou geen #HighPerformingTeam leiden (over containers gesproken … 🙂 )?

Het bericht Verandering ….Ja, maar ….. WAT dan..? En HOE dan…? verscheen eerst op Flow How.

So let’s start with today’s session number 1: ‘high performing’ sport teams do not start their game with injured players, makes sense, doesn’t it? So now my 1st question to you: how many players with a physical or mental ‘injury’ started to play in your team today? What?! You don’t know? So how can you expect your team to be ‘high performing’ today?

I believe and experienced that LEAN can become a very interesting means of improving your personal and team performance in your organization simply by applying this analogy (and understanding the differences).

Interested? Contact and challenge me please or keep reading my posts.

Het bericht How many injured players did your team have today? verscheen eerst op Flow How.

Many teams suffer from URS! The ‘Unknown Result Syndrome’ is pretty frustrating for people in the team as well as for the manager. fighting rumors, complaints or negative feedback is a pretty tough activity. Assuming we play 20 games a month (20 working days) how often do we know whether we had a good or a bad day? Did we win or loose? Too often teams simply don’t have a clue and why? Because we don’t measure, that’s the simple answer to it. Of course your team does measure it by looking at monthly KPI’s… aha monthly… so your team performs 20 games and only every 20 games they know how they genuinely did perform? Turning it around I would argue that you then missed 19 opportunities to give quick feedback, taking the opportunity to improve as an individual as well as a team. Apply it with care though because pushing a button immediately could also destabilize the process itself, so right-balance the data and your response to it and remember there is no team that can win every game, so accept your losses, try to minimize the impact of those and learn from it!

So let’s start measuring the team performance: just ‘feeling-tired-because-we -worked-so-hard-today’ is not the strongest indicator of a team’s performance. Start putting the goals on the pitch and agree with the team what scoring means today. This is possible and can be done for ANY team, don’t fool yourself saying it can’t be done for your team. Of course applying measurements need to be done efficiently (including the frequency) and with a higher goal in mind, not just to do it. And measurements have to relate to the team’s performance, but that speaks for itself.

Het bericht Did we win or loose yesterday’s game? verscheen eerst op Flow How.

Now imagine you are not always on time on the right spot or your skill set is not good enough to do things right 1st time? The natural respond of a high performer would be to compensate for it. We start to tackle to get the ball, putting ourselves on the ground, whereas the game really is designed to play upright if and where possible. It costs more energy to make a tackle and puts you in a disadvantageous position (on the ground) and on top if you are not 100% successful with your tackle…to compensate for it you again you would have to get up very quickly, make a sprint quicker than your opponent to catch up with him and so on…. quiet stressful for you muscles!

Now back to our business reality where we seem to like tackling a lot because we compensate for what others forgot to deliver to us. Just an example: you start gathering information that should have been delivered to us on a form but wasn’t (’the tackle’), spending time on this information gathering that you can not spend somewhere else (’takes energy away’) which forces you to do the things you should do quicker (’the additional sprint’). How stressful, but be aware that you created the situation yourself by accepting the incomplete information. In fact you were not ’timely-at-the-right-spot’ by accepting the input as it was provided to you. If you would have rejected the input you would have saved a lot of energy avoiding quiet some stress.

And for those that still believe that saying no is not an option….it is the most service oriented approach there is, because it will make sure I spend energy efficiently allowing the team to focus on the goal of the game and deliver rather than being exhausted due to all the ’tackling’.

Certainly in Service Organizations our customers are very often also the providers of (wrong or incomplete) information. Take the example of vendors sending incomplete invoices to me: as long as I tell them what information to deliver to me so I can pay them timely they would be perfectly happy with the rejection,wouldn’t you?

Just by taking a look at your ’tackling’ you can already identify a lot of waste that could be eliminated or at least reduced.

Het bericht Compensating behaviors is a waste! verscheen eerst op Flow How.

Oh yes , the average companies do have managers, plenty, responsible for budgets, strategy, purchases and so on, and indeed once every while (monthly?) they look at the results of their team….. 20 games (days @ work) playing without a coach, at least 19 missed opportunities to give immediate feedback…and 19 missed opportunities to steer the team’s direction during the game before the result is there; using ’the break’ in order to improve the performance day by day as from day 1, but still expecting high performing teams? Seems rather optimistic I believe.

Similar to TOP performing sports organizations we do need managers as we do need coaches (and good players of course). Is it a matter of money that we believe we can’t afford it? My answer for those believers that business can’t afford coaches next to managers would be that teams without a coach will not survive at the top (if they would get there at all!) because the competition will improve faster and next to it consider the costs of non-(top)performance.

Coaching is not one-time thing it is an ‘continuously’ required activity, knowing that if you stand still your competition will take over and become better than you are today. Let’s take higher frequent opportunities to steer and coach our teams, they need it and they deserve it, because goals are made by the players as will products and services be delivered by the teams, not by the managers…. And isn’t it about ‘scoring goals’ ?!

Het bericht Playing the game without a coach? verscheen eerst op Flow How.

Now try to stand up, tense your leg muscles to the max and try to run 100m. Cumbersome isn’t it?! Our brains work similar, too much tension (stress) on our thinking muscles (brain) will slow us down. Too much pressure on people or focusing too much on the end result will create unnecessary stress. Well designed process and focus on the right relaxation will avoid ‘sprinting the marathon’. We started to use the LEAN mindset to get closer to this ‘right relaxation’. Avoiding the things you shouldn’t do anyway will generate the room to focus on the things you should do, will bring the right relaxation (fit for purpose) and will boost the individual and as a result the team and so on…

Het bericht Sprinting the marathon verscheen eerst op Flow How.

Now back to business, are you mentally prepared to make the comparison to your own team? So who is on your bench? What…?! Empty…?! Continually saving costs made our benches empty without bothering about the value of the bench. So what happens in case your team is suffering from ‘injuries’ (sickness, long leave or alike)? The team has to compensate for it by working harder or longer or the team’s performance will drop pretty rapidly. Even if the team could compensate for a while they would become exhausted and what happens to exhausted people? Indeed, they get injuries! So this approach becomes a self-fulfilling-prophesy … for disaster. Working without a bench is in fact a design for ‘failure’ or ‘low performance’.

So how can we design for success? How would a bench look like in business? Building the team capacity slightly above the average demand (load) will help the team in performing high. With the small ‘over’ capacity it will be easier to reach high performance and because of the high performance your team will experience less stress and for that reason they can perform longer at the same level with less customer complaints, in fact with higher customer satisfaction! Doesn’t that sound attractive enough?

In fact there is only one single question to be answered: do you design your team to be the cheapest or the best?

Het bericht The team is as strong as its bench verscheen eerst op Flow How.