There is no pleasure without pain. Stop you sickos.
Now that we have composed ourselves, team transformation doesn’t get the benefit of stopping everything you are doing in order to better establish your foundation; the proverbial building the car as you are driving down the road. The team needs to till maintain high value of productivity and quality during the transformation process.
All and all, this is a painful process for everyone involved, but is necessary in order to reap the benefits. It is important to understand where the pain lies so you can mitigates its affects:
- Identify your leaders. This is where the pain is going to be felt the most, so you better make they all have a strong stomach and are resilient. Some of your leaders may be obvious or required, some might not be so obvious. They need to align to the vision and are willing to support this effort on top of their day-to-day responsibilities. These individuals will have to support the team as well as support the customers through this.
- Codify your customer relationships. Up front in the process, you need to let customers know how things are going to change. Pain will bubble up here. They are going to start hearing different things from the leaders and might all be interpreted as ‘no.’ In reality, you need your customers to buy into the vision as much as the team itself. Embedded in the message is the idea that with more structure, the team will be able to be more focused and therefore be more productive.
- Communicate where the team is in the process. The team’s pain is a large reason why you are making the choice to transform in the first place. Being transparent about the progress of transformation as well as has the vision changed at all because of the learning happening along the way. Highlight milestones and celebrate successes as a form of encouragement that progress is good and things are heading in the right direction. At the end of all of this, you should be able to say that the pain is worth it because the pleasure in the team is now soaked into every aspect of the team and the customer base will feel and respect what has been accomplished.