If I was in charge I’d get people joined up

For those working hard right in the middle of an organisation it’s difficult to notice the gaps or overlaps or when things are not joined up. Here’s an example: you are in a busy café for lunch. You eventually catch the waiter’s attention and ask ‘excuse me, what’s soup of the day?’ He hesitates for a moment and says ‘I will go and check with chef’ and then you wait for at least five minutes to find out. You sit there thinking he ought to know and feel slightly unimpressed. You are on the outside of the café’s workflow and it’s easy for you to notice when things are not joined up; even more so when you are in a hurry or hungry.

Your customers see your lack of joined up, your staff feel it though most can’t put their finger on it, they are too busy. You ask your customers for feedback, though ask the wrong questions. You ask your staff for improvement suggestions though get few meaningful responses. So what do you do?

Many years ago when I was a young civil engineer the managing director asked me ‘Dave, if you were in charge what would you do different?’ I didn’t know, was too inexperienced and too close to the action though the question inspired me to start looking.

If I was in charge now I’d get people joined up. Before the start of every new bid, project, initiative or week I would get the people together and facilitate a conversation on: purpose – why are we doing this and then goals – what are we setting out to achieve and contributions – who is doing what and when. I would also enable communications planning (RACI is a decent tool – who is Responsible and Accountable, who needs to be Consulted or just Informed) and arrangements for performance review and learning for improvement. People can then make their contribution “on purpose” confident they are headed in the same direction as their colleagues and more joined up. It probably won’t be perfectly joined up though if this is a weekly team discipline, competently facilitated, you can expect some dramatic improvements fairly quickly.

When I was a project manager my boss, Jeff, taught me a great weekly team discipline – The Six Point Focus Plan. On Friday the team looks ahead to the following week and agrees the six things that [have] to be achieved and who is counted on (accountable) for each. Back in the day I would then hand write the six goals with accountable names on a sheet of paper, photo copy it 30 times and stick in each office and around the project so that everyone knew the plan for the week and who to speak to about their contribution. At the end of the week the team reviews the six point focus plan and calculates team effectiveness, for example – two of the six goals complete equals 33%. Learning and improvement is explored and the team then develops the 6P Plan for the coming week. Tracking the teams effectiveness, actual divided by planned, is a simple though powerful performance measure and improvement tool.

Maybe you are thinking “we do all of that or something like it and yet ……. “

Facilitation is a real skill. If I was in charge I would not be able to facilitate all these bid, project, initiative start up, review and debrief sessions. So another of my priorities would be to help and develop all department, project and team leaders to become better facilitators.