SARA PRINCE: Some follow up we've talked about, visual management, and the metrics and the targets that are associated with that component. We've talked about huddles, and how they engage the team, and making sure everyone has a clear sense of daily what they need to go do and what to be focused on. Now, we actually need to get to the work. Your role is not to do all the work, but your role certainly is to be out among your team while the work is happening, so that you have a really good sense for what's taking place.
This is the part that we call process confirmation. There are a couple of goals you should have. One, just build your own familiarity with the work that's being done and how it's being done, but two, to make sure that there's no clear process breaks that you or your team need to be addressing or fixing. It's really important to be clear what this time is to be used for. This is not about you leaning over the shoulder of all of your team members and making sure that they're dotting every "i" and crossing every "t."
This isn't a performance indicator, I don't think you're doing a great job. I want to be looking over your shoulder. It's literally, this is how we all work together, and this is how I stay connected to being the most effective partner for you and making sure you can get the work that you need to do done.
Ride alongs are really a great opportunity to identify best practices and seed and share them across the team, particularly in places where people may not work together very consistently, but actually, have overlapping either processes or activities that would make sense for them to be able to learn from one another. These can be incredibly powerful and empowering opportunities for your team. They get to show you great stuff they're doing, places where they think that the processor or the activities can be improved on the margin.
They get that one on one time with you to think through issues that they are facing and how to solve them. They can also be very demoralizing depending on how you show up, or if you don't show up. I've seen in a couple of situations where you've actually had two polar opposites of what worked or didn't work.
One situation where the only people who ever got ride alongs or sit withs were the actual best performers. And they only came in when someone wanted to see how things were happening, and so they got to become the show pony, which one, distracted them from their work, but two, just made all the folks that didn't get the ride alongs or sit withs feel awful.
In one company, the ride alongs or sit withs were really for the people struggling. And it's actually quite common for managers to spend a disproportionate amount of their time with folks that are underperforming, which has a double edged sword effect to it, which is your top performers who you really could supercharge by spending that coaching and that time observing what they're doing, and understanding what's happening, and use that as an opportunity for best practice sharing.