Here is my takeaway #3 from a book that makes organizational project work worthwhile, “Change Management that Sticks: A Practical People-centered Approach, for High Buy-In and Meaningful Results”:

3) “Sometimes I am brought in to fix what I am told is a ‘broken’ team dynamic, only to find willing people doing their best with broken processes, crappy tech, and out-of-touch leadership.”

Note: This comes from the Introduction (page xxi).

At the organizational level, change management, project management, and knowledge management go hand in hand. All three are fluid processes. The worst thing standing in the way of progress is usually the very same Visionaries who have enough perspective to know when something is wrong, but too many blind spots to know what is gumming up the actual works.

If you don’t read any of my other stories and takeaways, read this one…

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STORY TIME:

Launching a Business Process Outsourcer in another country was like settling the Wild West on America’s frontier. Our home base couldn’t imagine what we were working with and going through until more leaders and managers visited. They couldn’t understand why we couldn’t get groups of new workers up-to-speed as quickly as new individual hires stateside.

There were many differences between the two situations. We were starting a business, not just continuing operations. Not only were we not afforded the luxury of 1:1 training (more like 1:15), we did not have the policies/processes/procedures, the technology, or leadership established throughout the ranks that had dealt with anything like this startup phenomenon before. We ramped up operations full steam ahead from 0-500 more employees in one year’s time regardless.

I learned a ton as I was brought in just a few months earlier to harvest knowledge from 8 US offices and bring my understanding to the new operations. But I was a middleman, just a translator in the knowledge transfer. I was the main boots on the ground to head up night operations those first 2 months.

It took us too long to realize that our processes stateside were broken. We needed to get these offices that were merged and acquired at different times to agree on standard practices between them. And we needed to understand how the subject experts admirably performed their jobs, but differently from one another. They were good at their work, but none of us were good at conveying seasoned operations to a new startup.

We had to give general healthcare training specific to our country before we could ramp up Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) training, we couldn’t work directly on the computers with the phone system until those workstations were up and running, and we facilitated group video calls with our subject experts answering general questions, rather than guiding the discussion into subjects our new team members were eager to learn about concerning how to actually do their job in their location. We couldn’t measure the right KPI’s for our best performers in the states, let alone set standards to point to for our new offshore workers.

We figured things out, but we gained so much more from lessons learned the hard way than we did from how our leadership expected things to go. As a result, I am in a much better position to help organizations experiencing change and high growth.

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It will take a holistic approach to fix it, but most of our organizations are broken in the middle. There is a huge disconnect between leadership and frontline workers and each side is not clearly seeing the gaping holes that need to be filled to bridge these gaps in your business processes. And changing your culture to one that is poised for continuous improvement initiatives takes time!

Middle managers need the help of sound change management, project management, and knowledge management orchestrated across the organization to keep your company on top of best practices.

All workers would be wise to get ahead of business needs by mastering your position’s needs, and stewardships, and cultivating those alliances, and understanding, with cross-functional teams working on similar things.

You don’t truly know a subject unless you can teach another to do it as well as you and your organization doesn’t truly know how to do it together until you work the knowledge as one.

You’re going to want to get this in order before your organization makes any big pivotal/transformational business decisions!