As a director of service with 35+ years clinical/administrative experience my style is to work hard, complain little, be solution based and in times of stress or frustration I “suck it up.” As a result of my own style I allow other staff little time to ventilate or express feelings of frustration. They are asking for a forum for their frustration and I believe the time has come to give them one but I am unsure how to proceed without the forum becoming a complaint session. Please advise.
The Team Doc Says…
Congratulations for considering an approach to building your team that can help move them to higher performance. I understand your concerns about turning this meeting into a complaint session.
Complaints don’t get anyone anywhere, action does. But in the US, we’re pretty conditioned to voicing our complaints rather than voicing our solutions. Just pick up a newspaper or turn on TV news any day of the week and you’ll find plenty of negativity. That’s the way a lot of people start their day. It’s no wonder our employees come to work and focus on complaining about what’s wrong.
When you conduct your meeting, you’ll need a structured process to help guide your team to solutions. You’ll want to make it clear to each team member that along with identifying team issues, they’ll be responsible for defining (and probably implementing) solutions. Although contrary to the way some team members think, it is not management’s job to fix every single issue in an organization. Organization and team culture is the result of the way all the people behave, not just a select few. The key is building your team with a focus on accountability and responsibility.
So what process should you use? I recommend using an Appreciative Inquiry (AI) process. Using AI you will place your focus on improving your team by leveraging their strengths rather than their weaknesses.
But first, let’s look at a traditional problem solving model.
- Define the problem.
- Fix what’s broken.
- Define the next problem.
- Fix what’s broken.
- Etc…
With traditional processes, we focus on “What problems are you having?’
Now let’s take a look at the AI process.
- Define what’s going right.
- Determine which “right things” your team can beef up.
- Create an action plan to move forward.
Quite a different approach, huh? With AI, you look at “What’s working well around here?” So how do you guide your team building discussion? You’ll want to use the AI assumptions from the Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry
- In every society, organization, or group, something works.
- What we focus on becomes our reality.
- Reality is created in the moment, and there are multiple realities.
- The act of asking questions of an organization or group influences the group in some way.
- People have more confidence and comfort to journey to the future (the unknown) when they carry forward parts of the past (the known).
- If we carry parts of the past forward, they should be what is best about the past.
- It is important to value differences.
- The language we use creates our reality.
Set up your meeting using the AI assumptions as your guide and your outcome will be one your team will be proud to carry forward.
My team building special reports could come in handy for you too. There are currently four available.
- Special Report #1: How To Conduct Meetings That Achieve Results
- Special Report #2: How To Make Team Decisions That Stick
- Special Report #3: How To Improve Team Member Accountability
- Special Report #4: How To Keep Your Team From Drowning During Business and Organizational Change
You can take a look at the special reports by clicking here.
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