This article is part of a larger series. Read the previous post.
Let’s have Rob explain TeamPlay and what it did for them.
One of the tools included in the PlayBook is called “TeamPlay”. The “TeamPlay” process is a key part of helping change happen, getting teams involved quickly, and creating some immediate wins.
It is a short-term initiative designed to address a short-term team challenge or opportunity and is a structured in a way to help the team address this issue. It required them to develop the play, determine goals, develop a scorecard, determine action plans, and establish a reward for addressing the identified challenge or opportunity.
Ray introduced this early in our work in order to get everyone involved and be able to create some initial wins. At first everyone was unsure about this, but one of the teams said they had something they wanted to improve and asked Ray to facilitate the development of their “TeamPlay”. It was really fun to see what they came up with. I found out that one of the members of the team was a pretty good artist and he drew up this scorecard with a road from our facility to one of our customers facilities. They named it the “Road to Green”. As they made progress on the initiatives and items turned from Red to Green, they moved down the road to the customer. They came up with milestone achievements at 30, 60, and 90 days and agreed on rewards for achievement of the milestones.
Susan, one of the team members, said it best. “I was really impressed. We owned our “TeamPlay”. We determined what needed to be improved, how to do it, designed the scoreboard, determined the goals, and determined the rewards. I found out that Mike was a great artist and was impressed at everyone’s enthusiasm. I was also impressed that Rob did not tell us what to do, although I could see he was having to hold himself back, and had no problem supporting the rewards and giving time to work the issue. It gave me confidence that this will work and made work more fun.”
Susan was right, I was having to hold myself back, but I was impressed with what they did. They came up with a very innovative and simple solution to the problem. Much simpler than the solution I would have told them to use. And they came together as a team and started more effectively supporting each other.
Once one group did it, there were other groups that wanted to implement their own TeamPlay in order to address some long-standing issues. The most amazing thing to me was the enthusiasm and fun people had working on these issues. Ray made sure I was out there encouraging them and giving them the support they needed.
We were getting short term wins that were improving our results. What could be better than that?
