A lesson in how not to communicate.....

Over the past few months my colleagues in the CSI team and I have been working alongside external consultants on a department wide review of processes. I've taken the lead in a key service area -I'm its "champion". This has involved facilitating the redesign of the existing process to remove the waste, aligning it to meeting customers' needs and reducing frustration for staff.


Post redesign an action plan was compiled to map the route from the existing process to the new and improved one. The aim is to initially work through the action plan in one region only. Once the new process is stabilised there it will be rolled out to the others.


In my eagerness to get things moving I handed this action plan over to the staff in the region so they would take ownership for it and begin working through. No problem there, except I failed to place myself in their shoes and anticipate how such a massive amount of work seemingly being dumped on them in one go would make them feel.


I returned to the region today to see how things were progressing and the daily meetings seemed a little flat. At the end of the day it became clear why: people were overwhelmed with the scale of the work required for the action plan and simply did not know where to start (I referred to it colloquially as a monster, and they agreed it was!)


The action plan currently extends to four pages of excel spreadsheet with all likelihood that this will expand further as more things are added or existing actions are broken down into more detail. The issue is, faced with such a mountain to climb, where do we start? I admit this was something that I had wanted to talk to the teams about before. It was certainly not my intention to hand it over then walk away without further input, although that seems to be the impression I gave.


All is not lost though. I had a lengthy chat with the regional director about the action plan (and other changes) and we have resolved a way forward to tackle this monster! I feel happier now afterwards for two reasons:


1. This was the engagement with the teams I had hoped for - a positivity and commitment to working through the plan earnestly; and
2. That honesty helped me understand where they were struggling and show what more I could do to support them through it.


My failure to clearly explain the next steps confused and possibly demotivated the teams, but from that I can take a valuable lesson in communication. And today has now paved the way to progressing the action plan by breaking it down further, focussing initial efforts on a few key changes.


I hope they feel as positively now as I do!