Coach: help people rethink and change the way they go about doing things
It takes many different mindsets and behaviors to make a team hum. I am appreciating a view of collaborative behaviors developed by David Kantor (as part of his work on Structural Dynamics), and am finding it useful as a way to hold up a mirror to a team that is interested in understanding and improving their communication.
Has the team’s daily stand-up lost a bit of freshness? How might you know? See if you can detect any of the following indicators:
No one seems to be listening to anyone else
Someone is giving waaaaaay too much detail
People are just reporting status: “I’ve been doing my job”
Lack of peer accountability
General dearth of energy
Introducing the Itty Bitty Shitty Committee (IBSC): Sometime during my 50th trip around our star, I had a thought, “I should run a marathon before I turn 60.” And then those voices in my head kicked in with a nice chorus of “Yes, but…”
It takes intentional, mindful and consistent acts to create deliberately development organizations, filled with individual and team growth.
Think about your organization or work unit. Do they value innovation and employee participation? If you believe the answer is “yes,” read on.
On the other hand, if your organization is truly cursed by silence, and the risk of speaking up far exceeds the value, if you can’t quite decide between apathy or silent resistance, you can skip ahead to the conclusion!
Breaking the hard-trodden soil of silence at the worker-bee level will not be an easy task. It will take a great deal of courage, resilience, and vulnerability. It will also be tough to plow alone. That’s where alliances come in. Let’s work through all of this, one row at a time.
