Collect and Connect: Map Team Assets to the Work Ahead
Years ago, a woman on my team (let’s call her Sara) wanted to do process improvement coaching and innovation work in the network of primary care clinics our team served. So I assigned her that work. It was exciting work. It got Sara and her colleagues who were doing it out of the office to meet with clinic leaders.
Once Sara started working with them, though, the clinics drove her crazy. They wouldn’t do what she told them to do in their projects, to the exacting level of detail she instructed. Or, horrors, they were a few days late in turning in project work to her.
Sara drove the clinics crazy. Clinic bosses complained to me that she was rigid and pushy, and didn’t listen to their ideas. They said that her commitment to their success was clear, and she knew what she was talking about. But she didn’t have that coaching mindset, and never grasped it, no matter how much I coached her on how to be a good coach.
So I decided to change Sara’s role. With her reluctant agreement, I put her in charge of regulatory compliance. She was unsure about moving away from the cool projects to something nobody on our team wanted to do. But once she completed the first clinic site audit with her clipboard full of dotted I’s and crossed T’s, and the clinics told her how much they appreciated her detailed assessments, she thrived. She was now the expert in clear-cut rules, not wallowing in the squishy one-step-forward-two-steps-back world of innovation work.
Today, like actually today on a Wednesday, I just finished a meeting with two executives in a health care organization. We were grappling with the Big Issues of 2022: staff roles, staff retention, and the erratic and iterative emergence from Work-From-Home to an evolving hybrid of in-person and WFH. People are moving jobs.
I think of it as the Great Job Shuffle. People are all over the place, in-person and at home. Who is on the team is changing, as many people move to new jobs. You now have to keep track: Who is in the office, on what days? Who wants to continue to work for our organization, in general??
The Great Job Shuffle is a stressful time. Here’s something that will help, that grew out of my experience with Sara. We do in my leadership courses: Team growth mapping.
Team growth mapping is a way to help people feel satisfied in their work day-to-day because they are using their strengths and pursuing personal learning goals. It’s a way to get better results. And, not least importantly, it’s a chance for a team leader to feel equipped for the next phase of the work, and even to feel less lonely in the leadership role.
To do this analysis and potential re-assignment work for a whole team, there are four steps.
Step 1: Capture team members’ strengths and learning goals.
Ask your team members two questions:
What are your main strengths and skills?
What do you want to learn and do more of over the next three to six months?
For strengths, find out what people think about themselves. You also have your own ideas. Write them down. The, after you hear what each person thinks about themselves, take the opportunity to tell people the strengths you see in them. Use both lists for the mapping.
Step 2: Write out the team’s current and near-future work.
List programs and projects. List ongoing operations work like writing reports and managing meetings. A three-month look into the future is *plenty far ahead* these days, with so much change happening. Or focus just on new work that is coming up soon. List the kinds of expertise and skills needed.
Step 3: Sort the strengths and learning goals across the roles and expertise needed.
Sort with fresh eyes. Pretend that you and everybody else on the team are brand new. At this step, you aren’t committing to making any changes.
Step 4: Decide if you want to make changes to team member assignments and roles.
Can you swap work around among team members, to get better results and a better match to strengths and learning goals? Without causing chaos? Check for workload balance. If you are considering a change of any size, like I did for Sara, check with HR or your boss or both. Then, if it seems like the change will be better for the team and for better results, talk the person through the change you want to make for them, and explain how the change sets them up for success.
The matching of strengths and goals to the next phase of the team’s work won’t be perfect. The work at hand may not provide a perfect match for each and every person’s learning goals, for example. You may have to help them with those goals individually, through training programs or other means. But if you can relate some part of each person’s current or potential new role/s in the team to their strengths and learning goals, it might just lead to a breakthrough in work satisfaction and results. And to a feeling of confidence, strength, and mutual appreciation in your team. Go get that feeling!