You’re not seeing business results where they need to be, whether it is delivering outstanding guest service, patient-centred care, or sales. Your team members are doing “their job”, but not really looking or thinking forward. You find yourself spending too much time and energy trying to get them excited about delivering at a high level. It’s just not working. So, what do you do?
1. Gather your front line team members and leaders in a room to share successes, challenges and their vision for what is possible. Allow them to share their stories – good and the bad, and encourage them to share their voice. From the stories and challenges come opportunities, and from successes come pride. The sharing is essential for engaging your team to get excited about what they do.
2. Deep dive into values. Have your team members tell you what is important to deliver outstanding service or exceed client expectations. These become your values. Too often, as leaders, we feel we have to tell them what is important…often this just doesn’t work.
3. Agree on how to deliver the values. What do they look like? What do they sound like? How do you deliver on them? Have the descriptors come from the front line so the language is real, and the language is theirs’. People don’t argue with their own data…so instead of telling your employees what to do, again, have them tell you what needs to be done. A skilled facilitator helps to ensure that people are aiming high enough, and forming an observable representation of the values.
4. Equip your leaders to deal with difficult conversations, confrontation, and uncomfortable change. Work with them to accept and layer on ideas without squashing them. Leaders don’t always like what they hear from the front line and that can be difficult. Help them lead so that others will follow.
5. Help your leaders to let go of some of their hard earned control and let their team members make key decisions (while mitigating risk), generate solutions to organization wide challenges, and identify new, exciting directions.
MOST EMPLOYEES WANT MORE RESPONSIBILITY, AND ARE CAPABLE OF DELIVERING. YOU WON’T BELIEVE THE DIFFERENCE IT WILL MAKE TO ENGAGE AND RETAIN THE BEST PEOPLE ON YOUR TEAM. AND THINK OF THE COST SAVINGS!
6. Involve leaders at the ground level and at the strategic level, in front line and board-room conversations, all aligned with the culture change. Hold your leaders accountable for informing the culture change.
7. Build an action plan and commitment. During the idea generation process, leverage the energy by building a launch plan on the spot. It doesn’t have to be perfect – you will have time later to refine it. But get it started. Have the team identify key actions, owners, and measures of success. And then check in often to make sure you are on track.
For the team at Learn2, helping clients jump-start their culture transformations through an engaging learning experience is what we do best. Don’t let your values collect dust as they sit on a shelf. Take them down and explore them. Engage your team to define them. It is only when you encourage your team to develop these foundational pieces together, and develop the plan to implement them and measure them that your culture transformation will begin. Bridge the Gap is one of the solutions that Learn2 offers that can help you engage your team to jump-start your culture transformation and deliver “outrageously excellent performance”. (This was the slogan adopted by one current client). You deserve it. Your organization needs it to retain its competitive advantage. Let us help you get there.
