Sunday, August 03, 2008

Passion and Tools, Part 2

I wrote recently about passion for a topic and the tools to excel in that topic. Here’s an example.

GTDtimes is a blog surrounding David Allen’s excellent book “Getting Things Done.” GTD is a wonderful system to help us deal with the crunch of “stuff” coming our way. In mid July one practitioner published Cool GTD Gear to Motivate Everyone in your Organization. A very good post, well conceived on tools for doing GTD.
In the comment section of the post, one reader said:
I was enthusiastic to the point of trying to mandate GTD among my team of 20 about two years ago. I only had spotty success and found myself doing what you have just described here…REMINDING people to follow the program. I have found that this road is a tough one. A different road I chose was to have everyone work on projects together in a group collaboration system. At least for those projects, we were getting things done and communicating about it. if they were not working on a project for me, I learned to let them do what worked for them.

There you see it. A leader gave out tools and sought to motivate his team. Yet it didn’t really take.

The passion never took. And, left only with tools, the implementation was spotty.

Last week I heard a consultant present on the change process. He described two needs. The first was for alignment; getting all folks to understand the direction of the organization, in the right spots, equipped to achieve organizational results.

Yet, a second need remained which he termed atunement, the ability of people to buy in, at an emotional level, with these goals.

Alignment gives tools, yet atunement breeds passion. How does this happen in an organization? How do we, as Lean Leaders, build this passion? I’m learning this myself and welcome your input.

Be passionate and live it.

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2 comments:

lafever said...

Great point. We're trying to use lean/six sigma in our IT shop but no time was spent on atunement. As a result, lean has only taken root in our department because of my passion for kaizen. Even with all the improvement our team has made, there is little enthusiam across the whole enterprise. "Atunement" is absolutely dead on and needs to be considered when using lean.

Rick said...

Nice post.

As a project manager, I try to create a shared vision for the team. If I am successful, through lots of repetitive communication, I can insure that everyone is working toward the same goal.

I also worked for a time with a company that defined shared values. In time we really had an evironment where everyone was treated with respect, we worked with integrigy, we expected innovation from everyone, and had fun on the job.

As a leader, if you consistently use the tools/methods, provide positive re-inforcement to other followers, and communicate often, then you will develop a culture that does this subconciously.