Get your spine tingling. Put on your “game face”.
I thought I would share a really happy little story. I was inspired by one of my clients yesterday. I was meeting him for the first time. I usually spend the first meeting asking a lot of questions and getting to know the client. As I was listening, my spine started to tingle. (It always does when I meet someone really talented). This guy was really inspirational and he didn’t even think about it. He just made things happen. Nothing fancy. Just effective. Let me give you a little snippet of our conversation and see if I can get your spine tingling. Here’s what he said.
“We turned this facility into the best facility in the company over the past three years. We were OK before, but now we are so efficient we can run close to the double the material through here with very little change in manpower.”
So of course I am curious as to how he did that. “How did you manage that?’
He said, “There were days I wondered if I could really do it. There were days I wondered if the team could do it. One thing never changed, I always walked in with my “game face”. I just took each problem one at a time worked through it. Somehow they all got dealt with. I tried not to look at the big picture too much and one day we were just there.”
“What else did you do?”
“It wasn’t so much me. My team was really important for me. It brought them together to work through a really tough time. We met every day for thirty minutes and we tackled all of the issues – big and small. We worked on the big things together.”
“Didn’t your team complain about all of the meetings?”
“Probably, but not to me. I don’t know how you get work done without meetings. It was harder sometimes to work on things together but when we did the implementation was easier. There were fewer mistakes. Everyone knew what to do and just did it. There was no rocket science. We all worked hard. We talked a lot.”
“Sounds like rocket science to me.”
Filed under:
leadership,
managing change,
change
Sandra Oliver - May 27, 2010
