Being a corportae Team-bsed culture coach and trainer, I conclude the the director of the subject medical center utilized an important component of her team building: “Empowerment.” When she empowred her team to come up with other alternatives, she included her team in an important element of teaming and decision making and that is inclusion approach. This has worked in many critical situations in variuos organizations regardless, private or government, product or service, for or non-profit.

Regards,

Dr. Kami Moghaddam

As editor-in-chief of a national business magazine, I noticed that we were having increasing problems dealing with the volume of e-mail. But we hadn’t analyzed the problem. I did a little research to find out what type of e-mails were causing us the most volume problems. It was not junk mail. It was duplicate e-mails being sent to the whole staff.
Rather than try to figure out a solution, I told the staff we were going to have a meeting to work on the problem. It took us only 40 minutes to further analyze the issue, figure out a way to create a central e-mail address for the types of releases that were being duplicated, incorporate our new system announcement into each outgoing e-mail, etc. The point is, I had heard or been taught in a management class to give the problems to the staff when possible. They enjoyed the brainstorming session, I had my problem solved and we all then felt confident each time a problem came up that we could all solve.
The age of managers knowing everything is over. Certain staff members have specialized knowledge. I get much more out of recognizing that knowledge and tapping it than pretending that I can solve the problem on my own.
The bonus was that the staff, I think, appreciated the fact that I called them in to “consult” on this issue: that way their particular e-mail issues also were considered in forming the solution.
This approach to problem solving worked better (and quicker) than I ever could have imagined.