Turning Your Team Around: Step 6

It's time for Step 6 of Turning Your Team Around -- testing the solutions that you came up with in Step 5, or going straight to implementing them if they are simple and obvious.  

Whether you're testing or going straight to implementation, you will increase your chances of success significantly by making it clear to everyone what the steps are in the process, including:

• Who
• Will do what
• By when

Create a "standard operating procedure" (SOP) or "standard work" document. By specifying who will do what by when, you let people know their specific role and expectations. 

This gives you a process by which to track progress. Design a visual management tool that people use to track each step, checking them off when they are completed. That way you can know where things went off track. 

And, equally important, you can quickly get things back on track when that happens. 

It won't be perfect on the first try. This document should first be done "in pencil" so you can easily edit the steps that cause problems. 

One key point in this process -- when things go wrong the question to ask is not, "Who made the mistake?" The question to ask is "What is is about the way we designed the process that isn't working?" 

You won't improve the process by blaming people. If you do, you risk people developing work arounds to the process that they may not tell you about, inadvertently sabotaging the project. 

You improve the process by identifying, and fixing, the steps that don't work. 

If you’d like to learn more specifics about such a process, or have started and run into a road block, feel free to reach out to me. Schedule a free discovery call during which we can discuss your specific challenges.