SOLVING REAL-WORLD ORGANIZATIONAL ISSUES
Sheri Dougherty
 Dr. Sherilyne Dougherty, CEO

At some point, every organization faces challenges, and many times these challenges are related to organizational effectiveness. The root of these challenges can often be traced to diminished employee effectiveness and communications barriers. In this month's issue of the DAI Solutions Advisor, we offer insight in to ways to resolve these types of challenges.
 
Effective organizations have cultures, policies and structures that attempt to maximize employee contributions. Developing high-performing teams requires an understanding of what motivates those employees. Our first article covers the attributes and values of cultivating and sustaining high-performing teams.
 
Communications can be difficult when an organization is highly federated and geographically dispersed. Important messages may not go out on schedule, through the desired channels, or as intended. Failure to communicate effectively can, unfortunately, doom even the best-planned project. DAI Solutions encountered and overcame this issue on a large change management project. Read on to see our solution.
 
We hope you enjoy this month's DAI Solutions Advisor.
BUILDING AND SUSTAINING HIGH-PERFORMING TEAMS

Building and sustaining high-performing teams is a basic tenet of how DAI Solutions operates. As a small boutique firm, everyone is a key contributor. For our firm to thrive, our employees must be engaged, have a shared understanding of what we value and what we want to accomplish, and see a line of sight between what they do and how their work investments contribute to us achieving our goals. If we fail to foster an environment where performance excellence is the norm, we fail our employees, we fail our clients, and we fail our company.

See the rest of our insights on building high-performing teams.
HOW TO COMMUNICATE EFFECTIVELY WHEN YOU CAN'T COMMUNICATE DIRECTLY
 
All communicators want to have a direct line to push their messaging forward, but what happens when you can't control the timing, vehicle, or even the message's content? This is the issue we encountered while supporting a federal agency's implementation of an enterprise-wide HR IT system.  Though we worked with the offices of HR and IT at the agency level, we were restricted in how we could reach out to the functional organizations, which had a high degree of autonomy in their policy, communications, and human resources operations. This led to two major communications challenges:
  • We could not control when stakeholders received our messaging since organizations had their own in-house communications shops. We could provide messaging to those communications teams, but couldn't be sure when it would be delivered to stakeholders.
  • We could not be certain that the messaging we sent would be consistent and accurate across the agency since we had no control over what went out once we passed it over the fence.
Ready to focus on the people part of transformation?