Shaping Up

The Living Job involves collaborative, self-managing teams. In this context, the strengths and behaviours of team members need to be complementary in order to achieve goals/tasks/outcomes. To make the most of the next 5 months, we will need to define specific focus pieces, an end goal and really leverage the strengths of our team to get things done. I’m liking the sound of this more and more.
As a prototype of the Living Job, it has become clear that we need to get much smarter about how we pull people in to different portfolios of work. My secondment is having a crazy ripple-on effect! The requirement to be transparent, fair and reasonable needs to be faster so we can achieve agility and responsiveness as an organisation. At present, this involves posting up a request for expressions of interest (internally, for a week), then there is a period of sifting and sorting (as with any appointment) which took over a week in my case, followed by time spent on negotiating terms of the contract. The problem is, when you source internally, backfill is required. In this situation, we are looking to repeat the process internally, most likely for a number of iterations, which means the cost of shifting someone to work in another space for a short time seems to blow out quite quickly… So, what’s the alternative? This is something I’m definitely keen to sink my teeth into!
On the radar today:
Social Leadership
Margaret Wheatley
Belbin Team Roles
Living Job Capability Development
Strategic Capability Building
Cross-unit collaborative development
Online Toolbox development
And that’s just the surface!
Questions:
What do I contribute to this team?
What do I need to develop/learn to pull this off?
How do we make compliance and regulations sexy? Or at the very least engaging?
Who do I know that can help us shape up this work?
While waiting for things to land, is it appropriate to resource the “boring” parts of the piece?
How can we frame this up like the Poutama?
How does social leadership fit with my practice? To what extent does it matter if my inner values and leadership practice are at odds?
I like coherence… how can I marry up fun parts with boring parts to cover off the whole gamut? Is this a reasonable approach?
Feeling a bit like I’ve bitten off something massive and am starting to choke on it… But am loving the adrenaline charging through my veins!