You plan to drive your car from Boston to Denver. It’s a long trip so, before departing, you take your vehicle into your local service center for a tune-up. You have them check your tires and battery, top up the oil and brake fluid and take it for a spin on the highway listening for any rattles that should not be rattling.
Then, once on your journey when you stop for gas, even if everything seems fine, you do a quick check on how your vehicle is operating. If you don’t perform these maintenance checks, your car may overheat, stall or completely break down somewhere out there on the great plains. At best, you will be delayed. At the worst, you never make it to your destination.
Your team is like your automobile. Instead of taking you from “Beantown” to the “Mile High City,” however, your team is designed to do something else: make decisions, perform tasks, achieve a specific goal. But, just like your car, your team needs maintenance checks, both at the outset and along the way. Otherwise, the team risks becoming stuck, limping along and under perform, or even breaking down completely and failing to accomplish its goals.
The true potential of our teams and departmental work groups is seldom realized. If only more teams had the wisdom (and the guts, let’s be honest) to attend to the maintenance of the group, especially when its ability to solve problems, make decisions and produce results hits an obstacle or gradually becomes degraded. They would remove the obstacle, reverse the degradation to their capacity and head directly toward a highly desirable destination…called high performance.
More about this in my next posting, on team process.