The backbone of any project or change effort is the team that’s been entrusted to make it happen. The typical agreement process you’ll find for almost any organizational team looks a lot like this…
Stage 1. The team comes together to have the conversation that a decision needs to be made. Through a process of gathering information, getting to know each other, exchanging ideas, agreeing and disagreeing, they are driven to some kind of behavior-change decision and action during that meeting.
Stage 2. The meeting comes to a close, often with a heady buzz of enthusiasm and anticipation about moving forward on the agreements made.
Stage 3. Everybody goes back to work, gets busy with other demands, and the things that need to be done to execute those agreements start to get pushed to the back burner – and may eventually disappear. Progress starts to lag, focus diminishes, miscommunication begins to occur, and leadership detects the warning signs of conflict that could potentially derail any team efforts.
As a leader, this is a rabbit hole you never want to get near! You want the momentum sustained to successfully achieve your objectives – on time and on budget. So, how do you head off this common phenomenon that has ambushed so many change-effort leaders?
What you need is a solution that enables you to monitor progress throughout the life of your team agreement process, helping keep the team adaptive and nimble, accountable, and on-track. And, so importantly, to keep your people engaged and happy in their contribution.
Implemetrics™ is an example of a tool that can help your team. For teams to improve their effectiveness, they need a data-driven and field-tested accountability tool, which monitors the decisions a team has made, the progress made, the dynamics of the team during execution of the agreements, and then reports it back.
Most teams get off track in that critical time between Stage 2 and 3 – after they’ve left the planning/agreement stage and move into the actual execution of the project or change effort. To keep things on track, it is helpful to take individual “pulse surveys” (just 45 – 90 seconds), then average them so the entire team, rather than individuals on the team, views itself. It respects the team as a unique, organic system (and nobody gets called out for expressing their candid opinions).
This technique normalizes perception and behavior change. You find out how there could be different perceptions of how things are going. One member might think, "Hey, this is going just great! We’re OK, we’re following up, moving ahead." But then they look at the survey and realize that, "Boy, 9 out of the 10 of us think it’s really not going that great."
Research shows that the highest-performing teams have clear accountability measures. Using Implemetrics™ normalizes accountability. There’s a reminder every time the pulse survey comes out and a reminder of the agreements that have been made.
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