Empowering Teams

Over the last year, we spent quite a bit of our time helping groups of departments understand each other and develop a common understanding towards building a winning team. During this time, we left our "real world" personalities behind and work together on equal basis to identify and resolve issues that we all feel are hindering our ability to become a winning team.
What do we need to learn?
1. we all belong to a team, but its not always the "right" team. Sometimes we commit ourselves to the immediate team and forget the existence of the larger team. And sometimes we have to give way and embrace the larger team.
2. We sometimes forget the larger team and forget that management (i.e our bosses) are part of the team; we readily demand our needs against them fully forgetting that they are part of our team just as much as we are part of theirs. As a result we demand solutions rather than to work with them to resolve the issues we both face.
How may times do you ask yourself if management decisions are for the benefit of the greater group and not at your own disbenefit? How often do we find ourselves asking management to "right" their decisions rather than convince them of a better solution to benefit all of us?
These are some of the things that I learn from the team sessions. I wonder if other people also learn some of these things. Its interesting if we can share our learnings.
Empowering teams doesn't necessarily mean that teams get to decide on what's best for them, but more importantly they get to understand what the greater whole needs from them and decide accordingly.

Learning from Mistakes

Every time we facilitate for clients, I make it a point to come back with a retrospect.
A retrospect form is a simple tool where we list things that either went very well or didn't. Then we list the things that caused it to turn out that way and finally decide how things should be done differently the next time. At a recent workshop, we reviewed previous reports and found it to be quite useful to prepare for the next one.
As always, its the content that matters. Sometimes, Some people have such high expectations that they are unable to see the good things they do and events are lumped together such that its not easy to see which aspects can be improved and which need to maintain. Others can be so pessimistic that they think everything went beyond their expectations and nothing much can be improved.
All said, but that the most important part of the exercise is being able to look at the expectations objectively and identify the causes. For some its always reported as someones' fault i.e. "so and so did not..." which the actions to prevent recurrence becomes "so and so should not..." Tone others look at methods and propose controls, which is a good way to go.
Its important that we avoid blame, but to Step back and look at processes objectively. At the end of the day, blame doesn't help improve. Processes can be changed, not actions.
All said, Sometimes improvements like this can only be pointed out during reviews. I guess I'll just have to grit my teeth in the meantime.