Photo by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash
I worked recently with a team that had been through some tough times. Staff turnover, unrealistic expectations from other parts of the organization, and internal disagreements about their priorities had left them with a lot of frustration.
But in the space of a few hours, this team made a remarkable transition. From feeling stuck, they found their way to a place of agreement around clear actions they would take together.
How did they do it? This team embodied several critical principles to unlocking organizational wisdom in an organic way.
FIND THE PASSION
It’s helpful for teams to start by reconnecting to their shared commitment their work and to each other. For this group, we used an exercise that reminded them of their strengths and their effectiveness as a team. Feeling empowered helped them to feel connected, making it easier to identify common ground when they sat down to confront their challenges.
The conversation around challenges helped unearth an important and often overlooked power within the team. They wanted things to change because they cared deeply about their work. This energy was showing up as frustration because they knew they weren’t doing the best job they could. As they talked about what they hoped to see change, they began to coalesce around their shared passion for the work. This shift helped seed their movement into the next phase.
LOOK FOR OPPORTUNITIES
One of the challenges the team had faced was feeling that they didn’t have the time or the influence to make change. All the issues they had listed seemed overwhelming at first. But from this place, as often happens, a team member offered a reframing that helped redirect the conversation. In their case, the reframe was “Change What’s Possible.”
The wisdom in this statement emerged as the group began to talk it through. First, it helped them quickly distinguish among “what we can change,” “what we can influence,” and “what we won’t worry about for now.” Second, it encouraged what I sometimes refer to as “small bites”—they didn’t have to take on a whole, overwhelming challenge. They just had to start with what was possible.
DESIGN A PROCESS AROUND TEAM STRENGTHS
The team quickly separated the issues it wanted to address into those it could take up directly, within the group, and those that it might be able to influence with other parts of the organization.
Energized by the possibility of change, team members sorted themselves by who cared most and had the time for their highest-priority challenges. These ad hoc mini-teams allowed staff to apply their individual strengths where they could have most impact, while relying on the team for collaboration and accountability. They created a plan to check back regularly on progress, recognizing that it might take some iterations to land on the most effective strategies.
This kind of organic emergence of shared goals and strategies is possible when a group can recognize and build on the common ground driving their desire for change.
A leader can facilitate this work by noticing and supporting the underlying energy their teams have, helping them frame it in positive ways, and creating openness for the group to explore pathways to move forward.
As groups gain confidence in this approach, they are building an organizational culture that values taking responsibility for change and finding out what works best to put it into practice—tools they can use across all their work.