What is the process doing to your people?

We often have an inclination to see a problem and get on with putting it right, and certainly earlier in my career this was exactly the approach I took; I would see a problem, maybe have a chat with a couple of people about it and then get it sorted.

As I’ve developed as a leader I’ve come to see the limitations of this. You might end up with the best process in the world and still find the main thing was bringing people along with you; giving people a say and a stake in what is happening. More often than not, having different perspectives and experiences in the room makes the answer even better.

A good example was a team I worked with where the workload always seemed really high, and it wasn’t clear why. There was a lot of talk about people feeling overwhelmed or burnt out, and those are all valid feelings; in my experience, though, it’s rarely a people problem.

More often it’s a process problem, because something in the process is leading people to feel this way, and it can be hard to step back and say, “Right, we just need to understand what’s actually happening here before we try to improve it.”

It’s rarely a people problem. More often it’s a process problem.

So we worked together and mapped the workload coming into the department across the whole year, and what we found was that there were significant peaks and troughs. The team could connect these with the moments where they either felt a massive sense of overwhelm, or the other end, where they had gone from being really, really busy to being really, really quiet, with an expectation they would help others out and nothing laid out about how they were supposed to do this. We used to call it “the hangover”; they were recovering from the busy period and struggling to come back down to earth.

We counted what was coming in, how much of it sat with each person and how complex each piece was, and then we analysed what could be driving this: the environment, the people, the methods, the materials and the equipment which all go into it. We sat with all of this before we looked at any improvements. The ones we made together were a review of how the workstreams were shared out, based on what people’s working hours and patterns were now rather than what they were when it was first put in place, and a handful of other processes to develop so that far less was bouncing around the system or coming back as rework.

You can look at all of this as a process, just as you would with how somebody applies for a job or how something gets automated; the way things happen within a team is a process too. You might want to do this because the sickness and retention figures are heading somewhere you don’t like the look of, or perhaps because there’s a general feeling of unsteadiness and you are trying to get some control back.

How Leading Beyond can help

This is exactly what we do at Leading Beyond. We pull out the process parts and work with you to really understand what is going on. We measure it; in fact you measure it yourselves and we pull it all together with you. You do the analysis, you come up with your own improvements and your own plan for how you want to implement and sustain them, and we are the friendly partner alongside you, keeping you on track and asking the questions which open you up to different ideas about what could be happening in the complex system you work in.

There is often real power in stepping back and looking at it as a process rather than at the people; it is where a team starts to see its own year clearly, and where you get ahead of the next busy period instead of recovering from the last one.