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Back Talk by Robert T. Yokl One of the biggest challenges that healthcare organizations face after they establish their value teams is how to constantly grow the team’s people, performance and purpose. Most organizations believe this can be accomplished through the old paradigm of command and control, ("you do it because I said to or else"), which will just push and pull your value team members in the wrong direction.
Coaching for peak performance A much more productive way to grow your value team’s people, performance and purpose is to coach them to peak performance by having your value team aware and responsible for: • Setting goals to insure your value team(s) is heading in the right direction, and that team members are accepting mutual and individual ownership for the success of your supply value analysis program. As Yogi Berra once said about goal setting, "If you don’t know where you are going, you might end up somewhere else." Worse yet you may get lost even before getting started on your journey. • Keeping a laser focus on the work at hand to increase the team’s motivation. This is the primary responsibility of your team leaders to keep your value team focused. • Promoting awareness of what’s really happening so that team members and team leaders can make positive changes as required. • Taking responsibility for their individual and team results, so no buck passing can happen on your watch. • Frequent reality checks along the way to insure clarity in judgments through formal assessments, feedback, questioning and peer review. • Continual feedback for learning and performance improvement should be an integral part of your value team culture. • Asking effective questions so that team members can think for themselves and thereby avoid the disease of "group think." • Developing options and functional alternatives when individual team members or team leaders are stuck to improve the quality of the value team’s decision making. • Supporting decisions to move tasks and processes forward, as opposed to procrastinating and postponing every decision that is contemplated. • Promoting action steps so that timely change can happen now, rather than being delayed and deferred for another day. As these goals suggest, coaching is a new way of managing to get the job done and develop your people and your value team at the same time. It is necessary to be supportive, non-threatening and mentoring versus dictatorial about what you want done. To do so, you will need to boost your people and leadership skills. Who should coach? Team coaching is similar to any team sports (e.g., baseball, football, hockey, basketball, etc.) in that there is always more than one coach on a team. In baseball, you have batting, pitching and fielding coaches (to name just a few coaching positions), in addition to the team’s manager. Just like a baseball team, a value team has multiple coaches (team leader, administrative representative and facilitator), who should all be acting as team coaches, just like a baseball team’s batting, pitching and fielding coaches. However, the primary responsibility for coaching your value team lies with your team leader (or manager) and facilitator. There are four tools that a team leader and facilitator coach should have in their toolbox to raise awareness and engender responsibility in their value team members. They are: Effective questions, homework, repetition and active listening. When used expertly these four tools build awareness, responsibility and self-belief with your value team members so that they have the aptitude, talent and capacity to master the art and science of value analysis and project management. Forget carrot-and-stick tactics If you are looking for a new and better way to dramatically improve your value team’s performance, productivity, learning, quality, creativity and adaptability, then you must consider the benefits of adopting a coaching management style to grow your value team’s people, performance and purpose. As I see it, the alternative is for you to continue with your command and control methods, which use a carrot and a stick philosophy, and with which you will never move beyond meager savings and quality gains. Until you decide to coach your value team to develop their own goals, understand their own reality, search for their own options, and choose to take responsibility for their actions, your value team won’t improve their people, performance and purpose, no matter how many carrots and sticks you give them. HPN
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