By Terry Nawrot
How much are issues from dysfunctional teams and miscommunications costing your association each year? The subject of team alignment was the focus of a session I co-presented with Cheryl Sadowski, Senior Director, Communications and Publications, with the Society for Interventional Radiology (SIR) at the 2014 DigitalNow Conference held in Nashville, Tennessee.
As we prepared for our presentation and from the discussions with attendees during our session, we learned that, regardless of industry, the impact from misaligned teams and communication issues is something that all executives deal with at some point.
During the presentation, Cheryl shared her challenges at SIR and how it worked to formalize a process that would start with the people first, then the process, followed by the technology. SIR defined roles and responsibilities and mapped out individual strengths and weaknesses. While Cheryl and her team are at the infancy stage of SIR’s new process, they are excited about how things have progressed this far.
Throughout the nine years I’ve been with Informz, we have been through both good and bad changes, experiencing the growing pains that many organizations—both for-profit and nonprofit—go through. We had communication breakdowns, inefficient processes, and teams that weren’t aligned.
The first step I took as Chief Operating Officer was to step back and look at our management team. During this time, I had the opportunity to attend an executive management program. In this program, I was introduced to several executives who helped me with many of the issues we were experiencing. I read the book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni. As a company, we worked through the program that accompanies this book. This exercise helped our managers break down some of the issues and create more alignment. We also restructured our team, defining our A players and removing our C players. The managers needed to realize they were a team themselves; it wasn’t the team they were directly managing. This created alignment.
Over the years, we’ve established many different processes and procedures. Some tools we now use have helped create accountability and improve those grey areas of responsibility that are often faced with growth and change.
One tool we implemented between teams within the organization was a Service Level Agreement (SLA). The SLA was designed to help align teams, create accountability to each other, and create an understanding of who was responsible for various pieces of the process. The SLA was created in a Word document format. We defined the terms within the SLA to ensure everyone reading it understood what the terms meant. A communication plan was included to make sure everyone knew how the teams would communicate with each other and at the meetings that were planned. Finally, we defined the process for how each team and its members were accountable for the various areas of the process.
A key objective in creating this agreement was to make it simple. We knew if it were too complicated, no one would follow it. We also committed to reviewing it often to determine if the process needed to change. The SLA was created first by the managers of our teams and then reviewed by the team members to make adjustments as needed. Once the final SLA was established, the teams met as a group to review the process and commitments to each other. Each person signed off on the agreement; this made each team member accountable for doing his or her part to make the process successful.
Another tool we produced was a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed) Matrix, also known as a Responsibility Assignment Matrix. This is a tool used in managing projects. Since we were finding that teams were overlapping in responsibilities when it came to specific projects, this tool helped outline exactly who was responsible for what task for each project.
We used an Excel worksheet, creating a horizontal line including the roles within the project. This included the team member names, whether it was at the management level or an outside external contributor. The vertical column included the deliverables or tasks of the project. Within the aligning cells, an R, A, C or I was placed in the cell as it related to the role of that person for that deliverable. For example, the person could be a manager of the team, the deliverable was to create content, and that person might have an "A" next to that deliverable. Meaning, they were Accountable for the completion of that deliverable, however they were not responsible for completing the work.
We found by implementing these two tools, we not only aligned teams but we uncovered a few issues with individuals on these teams and we were able to take the appropriate steps needed.
We haven’t mastered any process, as there are always ways to improve, however we have a better working environment and improved team performance overall. What are you doing at your association to make sure your team functions effectively?
Terry Nawrot is Chief Operating Officer, Informz, a provider of digital marketing solutions to engage members. She can be reached at 518-691-0071; nawrot@informz.com; www.informz.com.