Given how much it bothered me, I bent the ear of more than one college professor that year (and in the years that followed) about my strongly held belief that if you were going to make so much of a person’s grade dependent on how well their team worked together, then there should also be classes offered that were specific to how to work productively as a team. Most of the time they would shake their heads and give me a response that was equivalent to “Changing a college curriculum is about as easy as getting a gigantic ocean liner to do a 180 when it’s a few miles away from shore.”
When I got my first job out of college and was involved in the Process Improvement initiative (Total Quality Management), this topic came up once again. Process Improvement teams were formed based on departments, management teams or representatives from cross-functional groups but no one was there to help them work together as a team. Improving a process then became a fun and easy activity or a goat rodeo, depending on the personalities of the team members and their ability to communicate effectively. (This was where my passion for the human side of Process Improvement originated).
When our internal training organization was preparing to roll out Quality Management training, I kept pushing for things that were quickly ruled out by the more senior people involved. For instance, I wanted to let actual teams sign up for a training class together so they could work on their specific process during the class and get support from the trainer / facilitator to implement the concepts real-time. I was told we couldn’t do that. No matter how much I pushed, I was told over and over “We just don’t do things that way” and “Sign ups would be a nightmare . . . it’s quicker and easier to just put everyone through the training and they can bring the tools back to their individual departments.” My repeated attempts to question the “norm” did nothing, as they just kept shaking their heads as if to say “Alas, she’s so green . . . someday she’ll understand that isn’t how things work in the corporate world.” LOL
I share all of this now, not in an attempt to shame colleges or internal training departments (and given that I began working as a outside consultant almost 30 years ago and have been out of college longer than that, for all I know, things HAVE changed in that regard). I just have this growing sense that the time is NOW to come at this with even more passion and more conviction. The time is NOW to call out the things that aren’t effective and create new ways to get things done. Not to tweak existing ways but to come up with entirely new ways of working.
I know I am not the only one thinking this. Based on the articles that show up in my newsfeed, clearly there are others sensing this need for change. Conversations I have had with my Linked-in contacts are proof that many of them are already attempting to implement new ways of working in their current positions and they are finding great success with these new approaches.
My hope is that by shining the spotlight on this, even more people will begin questioning if there are better ways for us to run our businesses. Quieting the voices that say, “This is how we’ve always done it” – could we think more broadly and more deeply about how we’d like to work? Could we reimagine how we partner with our co-workers? Our customers? Our suppliers? Could we find ways to work where everyone feels valued and appreciated? Where everyone enjoys what they are doing so much that it no longer feels like "work?"
If we gave ourselves permission to look at things with both humanity and effectiveness in mind (in the absence of all limits) could we tap into brand new ideas that could completely reshape the way we do business? My belief is that we absolutely can—the question really comes down to “Will we?”
