Case I: Strategy Team Struggles
Original Situation and its Impact
The strategy we developed essentially failed. We spent numerous months leading workshops to develop and design a strategy what would succeed across teams, yet it was never implemented.
Our strategy team, as well as other functional teams were frustrated. Each team was doing their own thing, which impacted the teams' projects, creating delays and tension that was never resolved. We were reactive to what was happening, instead of following a strategy that would guide us in the right direction.
What was wrong?
We reached out to the Leaders for Good team to help us figure out how to get the strategy implemented.
Fact Finding
We followed the Leaders for Good pulse check to find out that our values were being implemented in different ways by each team, creating confusion and conflict that intensified frustration. A big insight was our frequent use of criticisms/judgments/blame (CJB) -- we had not preivously noticed how often we used it in our meetings and discussions, which created a miserable team feeling and took away our attention from our real problems.
HCL Tools in Action
We went through multiple workshops to explore our habits and processes. Through them, we realized that we were using a defensive mindset that made us fight each other instead of work together.
Mindsets
We used the HCL tools to learn how to change our mindsets so that we can change from feeling frustrated to in-control of our destinies. This mindset helped us respond (vs react) as a team and focus on ways to align our actions with our values instead of blame each other.
Emotions as Data
We engaged in an exercise around identifying the source of our frustration and defensiveness, which helped us identify what we needed to do to feel more calm and resourceful. We were surprised that we could use emotions to help us solve problems!
Needs and Perspectives
When we stayed in a calm and resourceful mindset, we felt better and could see new solutions that we had not seen before. We decided to align our values with our actions across teams and created a habit of checking our values against decisions, which worked well. We also developed a program where each month, a team takes a value and starts promoting it throughout the organization to ensure that everyone understood it the same way, embedding it into the culture. This allowed us to make decisions more quickly, ensuring they implemented our values, and also solve conflict according to values instead of who could yell the loudest.