BUSINESS
BUILDING AN EXCEPTIONAL TEAM
- FROM NEAR DISASTER TO A WELL OILED MACHINE PART ONE
By Ashley Byrne I Byrnes Dental Lab
A
shley Byrne talks openly in this 4 part series on building a team to achieve amazing things. In this series Ashley talks about getting leadership wrong but managing to turn it around into an exceptional motivated and driven team. In part one he covers the issue of when a team becomes dysfunctional and the blame can only lie with company owner despite what the company owner can think (and I speak from experience). Sometimes as the boss you can get leadership wrong and about 3 years ago that’s exactly what happened to me and the lab became incredibly difficult and stressful to run. The lab was growing rapidly, we were achieving great things but the stress levels were high, too high. With a desire to grow I took my eye off the ball, my team and things in general went south pretty quick. We were making mistakes, I was getting short with the team and I probably came as close to a break down as you can get. The team were just not on board with my views and direction and I couldn’t understand why. I started to feel my beautiful company and all it stood for, was slipping through my fingers.
Project’. Leanne started in my operations team as a junior and now, after a university degree, heads up learning and development. So Leanne and Jim started by putting the most amazing survey together for all the team which I was not allowed access to. The team each filled in the survey and then Jim and Leanne interviewed each member of the team for around 45 minutes to openly and strictly confidentially talk about Byrnes, the owners and everything that involved their working day. After a few months it was complete and my wife and I spent the day offsite with Leanne and Jim to break down the information. Jim and Leanne started with 3 full pages of negative comments on myself and the company. It was brutal. I had to just sit and listen and take it all in. Whilst the first hour was hurtful and I took it personally, the next hour was all the positives and I started to see a different view. The team had all taken their time to air their views, not as I thought about the negatives, but more the ‘we love this company, but things need to change and Ash needs to change’. The full day was broken down into each aspect of the company from my vision meetings (we’ll discuss those in another section) through to training and even Christmas holidays. We spent the last few hours working on how I needed to change and it wasn’t rocket science. Listen more, offer more one to one training, share your knowledge, make time for me, be clearer in what you want in innovation and how we are to achieve that innovation. The message was simple, I was lost in my own world and not sharing my view of the company and the
future enough. I needed to spend more time with the team, be less negative and slow down my ‘let’s take over the world’ approach. The process was incredible and completely changed how the lab ran. I needed to be reminded of my changes by the team on a regular basis (and they still do now) but by allowing more of my time for the team, listening and behaving professionally when disaster struck saw a revolution at Byrnes Dental Lab. When a full arch was ruined for whatever reason, there was no blame, we just worked as a team to ensure it doesn’t happen again. I allocated time to do my emails away from the team, we even set up a ‘query board’ which meant I had time to think and answer each and every persons questions and offer that one to one time and training my team craved. The take away for me was listening to your team via a third party is priceless and it’s something I will continue to do. Ensure everyone has a voice and if the team are heading wayward, the chances are, it’s probably your leadership and attitude rather than your team. As we go through these series I’ll talk openly about Building a team for a modern lab and explaining why we need to look outside dental technology for inspiration. After that we’ll talk about Company Vision and what that means to both the company and the employees. After that I’ll talk about Employee Engagement and the power that can give a company if you can fully engage its people.
Leading a team of 25+ people isn't easy. At this moment in my life, my team were disengaged, a little dysfunctional and I felt they couldn’t wait to leave at 5:30 leaving me increasingly frustrated and angry. I spoke to a friend of mine who is a leading HR consultant - let’s call him Jim - about my problems and he reassured me that in a lot of companies, the disengagement from the company owner to the employees is common but if I was prepared to listen and be willing to accept radical change, he had a solution. Jim worked with Leanne from my team on what they called, ‘The People
www.dentaltechnician.org.uk
31
