Use Your Team's Strength: Deliver Exceptional Service

LAB LEADERS DELIVERING EXCEPTIONAL SERVICE

SUMMARY:

How do you get your team to come together and support you, so you all can deliver exceptional service?

First, it is vital to build up the strength of your team in order to get the support needed from your team.

 Your team will go through the following growth process.

1. Growth begins with Challenging your team.
   Let your team know you believe in them and their potential to do great things.
2. Challenging your team allows your team to demonstrate their Capability of going above and beyond, and challenging allows them to stretch and grow.
3. With the demonstration of capability comes Confidence, which gives your team independence, and the willingness to keep growing, thus building more capability.
4. With capability and confidence, your team will then Contribute both inside and outside the lab by helping to develop more expertise in the lab and shining the light of your lab.
   
   This growth process results in a compounding effect of multiplying more capabilities, capacity, expertise and support by your team. Thus, your team is able to support you so you all deliver the exceptional service you always wanted to deliver!
   
   What are you waiting for? Begin to grow your team and start delivering the exceptional service you always wanted to deliver!
   
   How are you growing your team? Please add your tips to the conversation.
   Remember #YouAreAnImportantPartOfTheWhole

 

 

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FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Raw transcript with minimal edits:

Do you feel so stretched with the demands of lab leadership? Doing your daily operations that sometimes you wonder if you'll be able to deliver the exceptional service that you thought you would, when you started in you role?

Your daily operations seems “trapped in the weeds” that you wonder if you'll be able to lift your head up to see the “trees in the forest”.

You had these big dreams, these big goals of changing the culture of your lab, of being visible and work with the rest of the hospital, of mentoring your team, and coaching.

 Now these goals seems so elusive and gets further away every day as you address the urgent stuff and the  important ones just get pushed further and further behind.

I know exactly what that feels like. I remember when I took on my position as a Quality Specialist. There were all the stuff that you know have to be done, the reports, the competency, the data analysis, trying to investigate Patient Safety events, and all the reports from data.

And you feel as if you're not going to have the impact that you need to have, when you're totally just spending your time analyzing data, working with things and not being able to use what you're working on to make a bigger impact.

And so, in a very short time I realized that that was not sustainable. And so I realized that if I wasn't able to use the strength of my team, so that we as a whole could move forward, then I would be ineffective in my job. And so that's what I did.

So the first thing to do is to Challenge your team. Whether it's an individual team member that you're challenging, but you’re challenging them. And when I say challenge, this is in a positive sense. You’re basically letting them know that you believe in them. You believe that they can do more than where they are. Especially if it's someone who wants to do more. Just reassuring them that you believe in them and you believe that they can move to the next level.

So that with that challenge, and moving from where they are to the next level, it causes them to stretch and it causes them to grow.

And I'm gonna give you a quick example. There was one team member who wanted to do more. And so I gave that person the opportunity to do audit. So they were doing hand hygiene audits. While they were doing the audits, we noticed that we weren't having improvements at all. We were actually failing on hand hygiene. So I sat him down and I said, Would you want to attempt a process improvement project?  For him he was like, "Me? I wouldn't know what to do". So we started talking and that person had a lot of great ideas. So I was able to challenge him to let him know that "yes you can do it!". So I worked as a mentor and I gave that person the project. When they had challenges or roadblocks, they were able to come to me and we worked on it so that person was able to complete that process improvement project. We had a great improvement.

And the next challenge, after that, after they felt confident, was to present this in a QA meeting. They were able to present that project and they did real well. And so what that did was growing that person from one level to the other where they're presenting projects.

So that's just one example of challenging. So just by challenging your team, you're building Capability.

So you have capable team members who are competent, and they can work independently, so they can work on their own without having to always call for help, because they have built competence and capability.

So, that's really important because with that capability, it builds Confidence, so it's moving from competence to confidence and I made another video on that competence confidence loop. So go back through my videos and you'll find that when it comes to empowering your team.

So you're building that confidence in your team. So with that confidence it also cause them to want to do more. Confidence causes them to want to do more, the more they do, the more they feel competent, or capable, and the more capable they feel, the more they feel confident, and it's a whole loop of growth.

So you're basically growing your team in that sense, and now they can Contribute through training and knowledge sharing, so they're building other experts on your team. So this become a compounding effect of being able to contribute in that way.

And not only they are contributing by building other experts on your team, but they can contribute in shining the light of your lab outside of the lab.

So now they are capable and they can help with other projects not only inside the lab but outside the lab.

So what that's doing is, one it's freeing you up to focus on the things that you’d want to be focused on that will make an impact, so you can deliver exceptional service.

And they’re making themselves capable to support you in that goal.

So you're building up your team indirectly, you're being able to build your team up, you're freeing your time, and you're able to deliver the exceptional service that you want.

Now you're also freeing your time to do a direct mentorship, not only by challenging your team and allowing them to grow, but you can free  your time up to do direct mentorship.

So when you think about this, one thing that I find that people would do is like, let me just select one or two people from my team that I’d want to grow or to mentor.  I think so many times that's a mistake, because you're limiting your capability when you just select one or two people. The important thing is to multiply that capability, multiply that goal.

So what I would do is maybe start with one or two people. So, maybe after this video you decide okay I'll start with this one person or two people, but don't stop there. Grow your team, give them capability, utilize their strength, and that will allow you to be able to deliver the exceptional service that you have always wanted to.