As well as coaching, I assist a financial institution with continuous business improvement.  Usually my coaching life and my CBI lives are quite separate. But seeing how getting into the nitty-gritty of how processes hang together can be detailed and…Well…quite dull I decide this week to combine my worlds.
This week, I started working with a new team on a continuous business improvement project.
Instead of producing acres of boring process charts to go through, we drew pictures, talked about our hopes and wishes for the improvement and, at the same time, identified some of the competencies we as the team will need to get buy-in and drive these changes.
The results were amazing.
At 8:30am a crowd of nine, low energy, beaten down administrators entered the room. Honestly? My heart sank ΓÇô I had just ninety minutes to get this team up to speed with the processes, technology, obstacles and frame work of a complex business challenge.
Summoning up my bravest smile I got to work with the team. With coloured pens, gold stars and lot of laughs we worked through what they hate about the current status quo, what could be and how they could go about making changes.
We didnΓÇÖt get to design the detail of processes. I didnΓÇÖt even get to show them the research thatΓÇÖs already been done. So in the sense of immediate outputs it definitely wasnΓÇÖt as productive as a traditional project scoping session. Not by a long shot.
So why am I so happy with the outcome?
The reason is that at the end of the session nine administrators didnΓÇÖt leave the session. The people who walked out at 10 OΓÇÖclock are CO-CREATORS. The people who walked out of the session had taken their first enjoyable step at becoming a high performing team.
The team I am now a part of, for this project, showed me (and themselves) that they are creative, intelligent, knowledgeable and imminently capable of implementing the trickiest of projects. AND they can do this displaying respect for one another and compassion for their colleagues who were not in the room.
So the question that sits with me is how often do we go to a meeting wanting to get in and out as quickly when spending just a few minutes could result in a long term solution where we can co-create as equals?