Most companies I work with want the same things to happen:
- Problems solved quicker
- Solutions created faster
- Work done with more urgency
The most effective way to positively impact those 3 things is to focus on people’s connections at work. The more people an employee knows at work, the more people they have available to ask for help, the more likely they are to know someone that’s faced the problem they’re trying to solve before, the more experience and cognitive ability they can call on to do whatever it is that they need to do.
I often find that the most successful employees at a company have the most relationships across the company. They don’t just network within their team, the intentionally create connections across the business.
If every person in every team had that mindset, business would happen faster.
But, employees can be reluctant to come on that journey with you…
So, I’ve created this simple activity to run in your company to demonstrate how effective this can be for people.
Setup:
- Ideally you need to be face to face
- 5-10 people, 8 is ideal
- For this to be most effective, bring together a group of people from different teams across the business
- All individual contributors
- It will take no more than 15-20 minutes
The Activity:
- Ask everyone to write down a problem they are wrestling with at work on a post-it. This shouldn’t be a personal problem, but something they are finding challenge in their job. It could be a customer challenge, or a process problem, or something they don’t know how to navigate internally.
- Once everyone has written down their problem, ask them to pass it to the person on their left
- Now everyone has someone else’s problem in front of them. They need to read that problem, and then mark a line (like a tally) on the post-it if they have an idea on how to solve it, or they know of someone that could help them in the company.
- Everyone passes again to their left, and repeat the process.
- By the time everyone’s problems have gone full circle and ended up back with their owner, ask who’s problem post-it has the most tally lines on.
- Ask that problem owner to read that problem out, then invite the people who placed a tally line on that post-it to share what they know about how to solve it or who they know.
That’s it! You can repeat for all of the problems, but the point should come across in the first go.
From that point on, you should have a receptive audience that appreciates how they can do their jump faster the more people they know internally.
