Little Changes Can Lead A Team To Greater Results

 

Ori Rotkovitch*

Sometimes, it only takes a small effort to achieve a major improvement that will lead a team to greater results. Many managers tend to believe that achieving better results requires an investment of more resources—adding people, equipment or technology for example. While in some cases additional resources are indeed required, in many cases the existing resources are enough. Sometimes becoming more efficient and more profitable simply requires a different way of thinking of how to utilize the resources you already have.

A client I worked with had a need to improve their back office services. They had received many complaints from different teams within the company regarding slow response times and miscommunication issues in the back office department. At the initial meeting with the organization’s leadership team, a few managers thought the situation required hiring more employees to support the back office team while other managers thought that a technology upgrade would be needed. Once the considerations for additional resources were discussed, we met with the entire team as part of applying Arbinger's Collaboration Diagram.

During that meeting, the management team looked to me to tell them how to “fix” their problem. As we worked through the Collaboration Diagram, one of the secretaries from the back office suggested a new way to manage incoming calls to make their team more efficient. Ideas started being shared and solutions proposed that hadn’t been thought of in the past. Decisions were easy to make once everyone started seeing how they could help things go right in the back office.

A few months later, after implementing new processes, the average response time of the back office team improved by 50% and the miscommunication complaints dropped by 60%. These improvements required minimal effort, and because they were their ideas, not mine, there was no resistance in executing the changes.

Although the changes were indeed small and quite simple, the leadership of this organization wasn’t able to visualize any of those solutions at first. It was only after meeting as a team and applying the Arbinger Collaboration Diagram that they were able to think differently about their problem and therefore find the right solution.

Little changes can make big differences, though they require an out-of-the-box way of thinking and working.

 

 

* נכתב ע"י אורי רוטקוביץ' הזכיין של ARBINGER בישראל.

ARBINGER הינה חברת ייעוץ והדרכה בינ"ל המסייעת לארגונים לחולל שינוי תפישתי לכדי השגת תוצאות פורצות דרך.

www.arbinger.co.il

 

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