Ten Months of Delay Solved in Three Hours
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Sometimes the Love needed on a team is in the stuff of operations, things we rarely associate with empathy and compassion. Love is in team agreements, deadlines, and plans. It’s in project tracking and stand-up meetings because real Love brings clarity and gets work done.
Real Love has to be all up in your business.
Case in point.
I’m working with a mission-driven team of dedicated, capable people. They’ve struggled for years under ineffective management, overwhelming workloads, and interpersonal dynamics that, when left unchecked, lead to factions, low trust, and ineffectiveness.
For months, we’ve worked on trust repair, communication, and team habits. They built confidence through small wins. Then came a high-stakes, multi-faceted project with a hard deadline. Stress and fear were high.
Their pattern was familiar: make assignments, set deadlines, send emails that get lost, miss deadlines, reset deadlines, repeat. No wonder trust was low.
What would Love do? Love would get operational.
Drawing on continuous improvement thinking that says, “It’s about the process, not the people,” I equipped them with six simple tools to collaborate and get things done:
Write a problem statement
Create team agreements
Make a plan
Make work visible
Meet regularly to remove barriers
Learn and celebrate progress
Back to Basics: Six simple steps to help this team to get clarity and have supportive conversations that remove barriers and get work done…Love in action!
The real game changer? Steps 4-6. Once the work became visible and helpful questions were asked in a spirit of support and learning, things started shifting.
Back to Basics: Six simple steps to help this team to get clarity and have supportive conversations that remove barriers and get work done…Love in action!
For example, a team member who'd been blamed for missed deadlines was finally asked, “Would it help if a colleague showed you how to do that task?” It was the first such offer in ten months.
“Yes, please. That would be amazing,” they said.
Three hours later, the task was done. Ten months of delay solved in an afternoon.
This happened because the work went from invisible to visible, and the team went from condemning to curiosity, from shrugging to supporting.
As many of us know, tools are only as good as the culture that uses them. So we continue to carefully tend to psychological safety, communication, and relationships alongside the process work as they move through this crucial time.
This is Love full circle. Love in the moments that matter. Love in operations.
Love all up in your business.
