Process improvements with a focus on team alignment.
It looks like your team is giving you pushback about your current processes. You might need a fresh look at your systems, tools and workflows to surface insights for your adaptive journey. We recommend starting here.
- Since your team members are the ones voicing frustration and concerns about processes, you'll need to dig deeper into their challenges and ideas for improvement.
- We recommend starting with a survey or pre-work questionnaire that asks them to specify the processes that are causing issues.
- Prompt them with questions across a wide range of work streams, such as prioritization, approvals, time management, briefing and tools. Include space for them to share their ideas for addressing each challenge.
- Once you've gathered this input from your team, group the issues into categories that enable you to address them systematically.
- Rank each item with a simple weighting system based on frequency, urgency or impact to the business.
- This will give you a picture of how your team members are experiencing their work and provide you a frame for understanding the relative severity of each issue.
- Review the results of the pre-work with the team and lead a facilitated discussion about the themes that emerged to gain further context into each one.
- Whenever possible, use probing questions to get past surface-level frustrations and identify deeper issues that might be at play within the team.
- Empathize with your team without feeling the need to agree with them.
- Next, adjust any items that need to be reworked based on the discussion. Then work as a team to sharpen the groupings by moving items from one category to the next as needed.
- The goal is to identify a shared list of systemic issues, clustered into groups that everyone understands. Remember that it's not about solutions yet; it's about identifying the problems to start solving.
- Once you have clarity on the issues that need attention, facilitate a prioritization exercise to identify which problems to solve first.
- We like using a weighted scorecard system. Individuals score items on their own. Then everyone's scores are combined to create a prioritization. Finally, each person gets a set of bonus points they can use to alter the final weightings.
- Keep these bonus points low so they only have value if team members can convince colleagues through debate to put their points toward the same items.
- Based on the scores, create a backlog of the issues from highest to lowest priority. Spend time as a group assigning owners or committees to tackle the top issues.
- For each process change, create a timeline for when it should be addressed.
- Then prioritize your team's time depending on the size of the issues they are solving. Ask them to research possible solutions and put together a proposal for how the issues should be addressed and which processes they recommend for implementation.
- Keep it light. Use the planning and proposal process to ensure each item has been given enough thought, but don't make it a heavy lift for projects to get going.
- Provide your team with the support they need to pilot the new processes. Be mindful of your prioritization exercise and refrain from introducing too much change at once.
- Make one team member responsible to oversee the rollout and adoption of each new process. This team member should check in with colleagues and groups to collect further feedback and ideas on how it can be refined.
- As your team rolls out and implements each process change, be sure to include time for reflection, socialization of results and revision.
- Remember that when it comes to change initiatives, how the change is communicated and supported is just as important as the change itself.
It looks like your team is giving you pushback about your current processes.