How to Achieve Sustainable Change

To bring about radical improvements in how teams operate, it is important to focus equally on what they are doing and how they are doing it.  Focusing purely on behaviour, without linking it to business process and performance leads to poorly focused development.  Focusing on processes and systems without considering behaviours leads to unsustainable or poorly realized improvements.    It requires a number of things to occur:

Engaging Leadership

Coaching and engagement is essential to sustainable change.  Coaching allows for a frank and timely exchange of views about their leadership style and the interventions in a safe and confidential environment.  It is only by having the space and opportunity to do this, that leaders can learn how to set the right tone and follow that through in their own behaviour, to maximize impact with their team.

Developing a team identity and goal

Bringing the team together to explore how they work together and how that can be improved is a powerful exercise in galvanizing efforts and overcoming resistance.  A key output is a ‘team charter’ that articulates the goals (performance results), in-year milestones, dependencies and how individual roles will contribute to the achievement of those goals. 

Defining Individual Roles

After defining the team charter, individuals then develop their own team role.  It is defined in terms of contribution to team results, but also behaviours and team expectations of each other. 

Defining Processes & creating service standards

Part of the challenge for teams is how to get a shared picture of the end-to-end process, the hand-offs and where performance might be compromised.  By involving all team members in the process mapping and identification they buy-in to the improvements that are identified.

Creating a performance management framework

One of the big reinforcing tools to embed and then maintain new behaviours is a visual performance management framework. The team need to be engaged; not only in the data gathering, but also in understanding and responding to the data as it is reported.  Performance dashboards can lead to lively team discussions, because everyone understands what is required and their role in achieving it. 

Maintaining momentum

It is important, once the changes have been made, to maintain them.  Leaders play an important role here in ensuring that weekly and monthly team meetings are given the priority that they deserve and that data is regularly reviewed.  Praising good performance is just as important as highlighting and questioning poor performance. 

Who we are

Agents2Change has an unblemished track record in delivering significant improvements in key business results: profit; production; reliability; safety; to large scale process industries.    Our team of highly experienced consultants have the knowledge and skills to help you tackle the most daunting of behavioural change agendas informatively and effectively.  For more information, comment here, or email us at:  feedback@agents2change.com.

Comments

[United Gold Direct]

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