How to introduce a culture change to your team Part 1
Building our team… The Mother of All Meetings!
OK… so you’ve had your meetings with your apprentices,
hashed out where you are, where you need to be, how to get there, and who is
going to do what. You, you are the Team
Leader after all, led the process, however you did not steamroll through it
pushing your agenda onto everyone, right?
‘Cause if you did you will put a lot of effort into something that is
not going to achieve the desired results.
I’ll take your word that you did it the way I told you to in the
building our Leadership team series of posts, starting here… Before we talk about how we are going to
bring your new ideas and proposed changes to the team as a whole…
Please read this…
And listen to
The Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast and the 2 podcasts on
Defining Your Organizational Culture.
You will listen to all of them, and for now you need to listen to those
two.
Each member of your Leadership Team should be reading the
same book from this post, read the article above, and listen to these 2 Andy Stanley
podcasts. You will all talk about them
together. Some of your apprentices will have
questions, and/or need to talk about what they read and heard. You will listen. Your job is to listen to understand what is
being said, as well as how the person who is talking feels about what they are
saying. Allow your other apprentices to answer
questions if they can. It should be a
group discussion, NOT you telling everyone what they heard and what it means. You can and should add what you heard, and
what it means to you, however you should wait until the end of the
discussion. If you weigh in on anything
at the beginning, your voice as the Leader will influence the others in the
group, even without intending to. Just
being the Leader means you will be influencing others with every action and
with every word, every day. Remember
that!
Remember, your team/workplace has a culture. Part of the reason you and your apprentices
were meeting together was to decide how to redirect/restructure/recreate your
team culture. There is no one right
answer. Like we talked about before, your
personal answer may not be the best answer… remember that the best answer is
the one that the most people will gather around and get excited about.
It’s possible that after reading and listening, the group
might want to rethink some of your values and goals. That’s great!
Please do not shoot down any ideas from your apprentices if they want to
go through part of the process again. It
is NOT a personal affront for them to disagree with you. Allowing, and participating in this will
reinforce their trust in you, and their buy-in not only to the process, but
also to whatever the group comes up with.
The odds of your team accomplishing their goals will be much better if
you follow this through. Trust the
group, and allow the process to happen.
It might be helpful to invite a trusted peer or mentor to sit in and
moderate the process. This will be most
helpful if you have, in the past, been perhaps a little overbearing, or perhaps
not been as transparent as you could have been.
Ask the moderator to use his or her voice to make sure everyone is
heard. If you’ve been reading along
here, you know that means more than everyone hearing the words that are spoken. It means every person involved actually
listened to understand what was said, and often more importantly, how the
person speaking felt about what they were saying. That includes you… doing the listening I
mean. If the moderator is there to make
sure everyone listens to what you have to say, or to help you get your agenda
across, you will be wasting your time and energy. Nothing good will come of this whole process,
so please do not play that game.
We good?
Ok, so you now have to plan a team meeting. Yes, a whole team meeting. If you absolutely must you can break it up
into two meetings, but only if absolutely necessary. If you end up with two meetings they must be
as identical as possible. I’ll speak
about this as if there is only 1 meeting to make it easier (on me). You and every apprentice must attend as a
team (and you all must attend both meetings if you have two), and this includes
the best team members who took part in the process so far. You are speaking as one voice. You will stand together, and work together to
get the message across as powerfully as you can. If you have regular whole team meetings and
they are more like organized chaos, you can have a few of your apprentices around
the room to get people to pay attention and be quiet enough so that everyone
can hear what is being said. This is
arguably the most important meeting your team has ever had, so let’s make it
good.
As part of your meetings with your apprentices, you will
work on planning this whole team meeting.
This meeting is about introducing the desired culture shift to your
whole team, as well as introducing the goals you have chosen to take on right
now, so take your time. I think most of
you can plan on a majority of your team members going along with whatever you
bring up, as long as the expectations you set are reasonable and clear. So… in this meeting you will, in my opinion,
be best served by being mostly positive.
You can address those few people with whom you will get the most
pushback individually, and set very clear expectations of the behaviors they
need to change.
I know some of you are balking at the length of this
process, the time and energy, and getting everyone together time and time
again. I would ask you again how
important is this to you? How important
is it to change the culture on your team?
Do you want to continue working the way you are, always putting out
fires, and feeling like you are always playing catch-up? Or are you ready to start hiring the best
people, developing your team members into Leaders, and being part of a hard
working, high functioning team? Yes it
takes a lot of time and energy, especially in the beginning. Once you get some good hires on the team, get
your Leadership team on the same page, introduce and uphold your new higher
standards, and develop strong relationships with both your apprentices and team
members, you will find yourself with so much more energy! Your new team will give you energy instead of
draining you. You will go home and talk
about all of the great things that are happening, instead of bitching about all
of the bullshit you have to put up with.
This is not rocket science, and it does take a real investment of your
time and energy, along with a commitment to see it through, so let’s not stop
now!
This is going to take several post, since every part, from
what we have done so far, to preparing for the whole team meeting, to actually pulling
it off is all so important…
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