The Problem: A manufacturing and sales company with five U.S. plants and 1,000 employees had one big problem – a major communication barrier between plant management and production-line teams. Productivity was low, defects were high, and both sides were in denial.

The Solution: This company needed a riveting, mindset-changing, do-or-die example of great teamwork in action. No tepid teamwork training video would do. CRM Learning’s dramatic, true story, Teamwork in Crisis: The Miracle of Flight 232 was right on the money.

The Success Story: Plant managers and front-line teams together attended training events at each location, which began with the Teamwork in Crisis video and progressed to open, honest and sometimes difficult dialog about the obstacles that stood in the way of success.

But the preparation for these events actually took place several weeks before, when management met with production line supervisors for frank dialog on what was needed to improve efficiency and quality. Both sides felt this advance work was absolutely critical to build the trust necessary to make the company-wide training events meaningful.

On the day of training, after participants watched the Teamwork in Crisis video, the discussion turned to the unique situations at each plant. Facilitators wrote their own training plan around real-world facts. Plant management and production leaders recognized and admitted that a problem existed, showing that management had bought in to breaking down walls.

And most important: In order to facilitate open discussion, managers were asked to leave the room so front-line employees could be honest about their assessments of product quality and productivity, including their own.

Facilitators took notes, brought the problems, ideas and solutions back to plant managers, who in turn went to the shop floor to begin implementing ideas they were able to. The physical results from training were fast and obvious. Improvements, cooperation and communication flourished, and team members felt that their ideas were heard and acted upon.

Most important, team morale improved immeasurably and pride of workmanship became standard operating procedure. From a defective material rate averaging around 6 percent a day, defects shrank to under 2 percent – a number that has been sustained for the past six years!

The company reports that Teamwork in Crisis was partly responsible for the company’s own miracle turnaround. A company spokesman says: “Training videos provide a dimension to our learning events that we would otherwise have not had. The many films we have purchased over the years have provided inspiration, laughter (and some tears), and improvement to our everyday work lives.”

Watch a free full length preview of Teamwork in Crisis:
http://www.crmlearning.com/teamwork-in-crisis-the-miracle-of-flight-232

By Linda Galindo, President, Versera Performance Consulting.

Nothing is more energizing than having great ideas fly around a meeting room and everyone is engaged in solving problems and getting things done. In tough economic times, seeing employees express ideas about how to keep the business booming is especially rewarding. “We should put this on the website!” “We can get advertising to highlight this feature in the next marketing campaign!” “Customers will love the ability to download this information!”

You want to keep these great expectations moving from one meeting to the next and ensure that the best ideas are not allowed to stall. It’s important that the great ideas “we” need to act on are not lost. Those ideas are gold and the miners of that gold are in the room.

The Problem with “We”
To get to the gold, you must eliminate the Nothing Has Been Done with the Great Ideas We Had in the Last Meeting syndrome. And why does nothing get done? Because “we” were going to do it.

To harness the power of every employee you must remember that the pronoun “we” doesn’t do anything or get anything done. When a person says “we” should do something, that’s great! What’s even greater, though, is when everyone is led to move a “we” to an “I”… with an accompanying “by-when”.

Imagine how the results of your team will skyrocket when individuals begin saying things like…“We have come up with some great stuff! I am especially excited about customers downloading this information. I’ll own that, and by the next meeting I will have an outline for you.”

Grab and Go
Full-out brainstorming is fun and productive so long as “we” know that each “I” will have an opportunity to grab onto something they can be enthusiastic about and follow through on. This requires leaders who possess an ownership mindset and take responsibility for a successful end result before the meeting begins. They must encourage employees to listen for things they can “own” and ensure that the best ideas (the ones that generate enthusiasm, energy and a winning set of strategies) are snatched up.

The skill is to recognize the potential in the room and not shut people down with a You Say It, You Own It approach. Employees are much more likely to emerge with their best thinking when they know they’re not going to get stuck doing something they don’t want to do. (And, you can always circle back to address any un-owned “we” or missing “by-when”.) A meeting becomes a gold mine when employees can pick the idea they see the most potential in, grab it and say the three golden words: “I’ll own that!”

Versera offers a top-down consultative approach to building accountability within organizations through a powerful assessment process, one-on-one coaching and facilitated accountability workshops.

Training Solution: Accountability That Works! The accountability model in this video will help you create a workplace where employees take ownership and achieve results.

I have a theory that if I listen well enough, everything I need to know about business I can learn from my kids.

The latest example involved a simple truth about why adults hate business meetings, and it inspired me to share some thoughts on how to take the pain out of corporate get-togethers, including training sessions, and turn them into gatherings people leave saying, “That was a fabulous use of our time, money and energy.”

When my daughter started high school, she came down heavy on one of her teachers in critiquing one of her classes for me: “All he does is talk. He never lets us do anything.” Keep in mind this is a course she wanted to take and a subject she wants to master. The pain is complicated by disappointment.
I’ve felt the same way when leaving many seminars and training sessions - well-intentioned affairs with too much talk and too little do.

So I developed a process I call LOOP Learning (Linkage, Obstacles, Opportunities, Plans) because it helps create sessions designed with real-world business issues in mind, and because it actively involves people learning about and dealing with those issues.

First, I abide by the need for good meetings and training sessions to be built around a well-developed agenda, an agreed-upon schedule and a group commitment to keep on track. But I’ve discovered four things more fundamental that, if accomplished, create high-energy, highly productive meetings:

Linkage. A vital early step is to make sure the session creates a sense of ownership in the participants about why they are together, and to assure the agenda connects to a specific business issue. Help people answer the question, “Why is this important - to me, to our team and to the company?” Linkage lifts responsibility for the challenge off the shoulders of “the boss” or the trainer who called the session and shares it with everyone in the room.

Obstacles. Sometimes the most important thing you can do in a meeting or training session is identifying what´s blocking your goals. Acknowledge there are barriers, and examine the risk in not overcoming them and of not challenging the status quo.

Opportunities. Once people understand the challenge and the barriers, turn them loose on generating ideas for improving, changing and innovating current successes and creating new possibilities for growth and success. An important element of identifying opportunities is to challenge the mindset that there is only one right way to do things. It’s critical to keep asking questions, knowing that solutions always will be a moving target.

Plans. The final step is to clarify priorities and to make plans and commitments for what must be done to achieve the desired business results. Determine who will do what and by when, to move toward the goal. Commitment and accountability built into the learning process help to achieve sustainable results.

The length of a session influences what can be accomplished and how, but in almost all sessions this model allows for a blend of interactive exercises, stories, activities, video vignettes, music, metaphors and illustrations related to the business objective. Perhaps the only “rule” for using LOOP Learning gets back to my daughter’s lesson: Give people plenty of chances to talk to each other and share ideas about how to deal with the challenge.

The objective in designing worthwhile meetings is to create an environment that encourages people to think differently, build on each other’s ideas and develop high levels of communication, commitment and collaboration. Think about a classroom full of teenagers. Energy and intelligence abound, as in every work team. When we bring people together, the challenge is to tap them, not to turn them off.

Reprinted with permissions from effectivemeetings.com