Action Inquiry case study
Context
Anthony is a benefits consultant in the Wheeling office of an international human resources consulting firm with recognised unique expertise in a very complex method for comparing company benefit programs for large corporate clients. The opportunity his Action Inquiry project presented was two-fold. Firstly, at a personal level, he understood it to be a valuable opportunity for him to ‘break out’ of his narrow specialisation and secondly, he saw a clear opportunity to contribute to quality improvement within the organisation. Anthony formulated the ‘problem’ that his Action Inquiry project was designed to address, as follows;
“As an employee, I encounter shortcomings in a myriad of administrative functions such as billing, training, hiring and new employee initiation, career tracking, work allocation and performance review. Our team coordinators are supposed to oversee all this while simultaneously bringing in new clients and working with ongoing clients. The coordinators are constantly forced to juggle priorities amid tight time constraints. Clients, employees, and the coordinators themselves suffer severe consequences.”
Anthony developed a plan to improve some of the team coordinators’ problems. He was helped by the fact that the organisation of the Wheeling office is non-hierarchical, with the office divided into 12 teams, each headed by a team coordinator, who report to the office manager. This allowed Anthony ready access to the team coordinators and the office manager.
Planning for change
Anthony’s plan involved a detailed set of steps. The first step was to meet with the office manager to discuss the project. The second, to meet briefly with each of the team coordinators to explain his proposed approach. After this, he planned to prepare questions for interviews and for a survey instrument and to subsequently administer both of these. After analysing the data, Anthony planned to present feedback to a monthly meeting of the team coordinators and to collaboratively develop an action plan with them, to be implemented following the meeting.
First steps
The meeting with Don, the office manager, went far better than Anthony expected. Instead of the scheduled half an hour, the meeting “blossomed into two hours of discussion about our team coordinator problems and how this project could help address them”. Anthony also established with Don that, rather than to make recommendations to the team coordinators at the planned monthly meeting, he intended “to facilitate a collaborative effort” with all of them.
Anthony described his meeting with Don as a “productive give-and-take discussion” where he was able to enlighten him about the perspectives of lower-level staff members. Through this first meeting, Anthony was already beginning to achieve the personal and organisational objectives underlying his action inquiry project.
After several further discussions with Don, Anthony decided to survey the team coordinators explicitly on their responsibilities – which they should retain, which should be delegated to their team members, and which should be handled through a centralised office administration. He proceeded then with the survey and the interviews, and reported his experience as follows;
“My discussions with the team coordinators were fantastic opportunities to experiment with my behaviour on a one-to-one basis. They were very willing to open up and discuss sensitive subjects and were also appreciative of my efforts to make their lives easier.
Each coordinator directs a given consulting speciality. I had to constantly be aware of how to frame questions, which areas to hone in on, which to tactfully sidestep. For instance, on several occasions, I drew a chart with ‘market growth’ and ‘market penetration’ on the two axes (the old star/dog/cash cow diagram). While talking with the coordinator of the health care team, I marked his team in the star category, and a defined benefit team in the dog category. Should the leaders of these two teams have the same set of responsibilities? Perhaps the health care coordinator should let expenses rise to permit getting more revenue, while the defined benefit coordinator should work on cutting costs to increase profit.
In any event, the chart proved to be a perfect arena for using my framing/advocating/illustrating/inquiring skills. You can’t just tell a senior manager and expert who’s been in the business 25 years that he should change his behaviour. But through using Action Inquiry, it was an opportunity to increase the team coordinators’ awareness.”
Building on progress
After completing the interviews and tabulating the survey results, Anthony then presented the feedback at the monthly team coordinator meeting. He commented on this as follows;
“I began the meeting by framing what I intended to accomplish and we then entered a lengthy and somewhat spirited discussion of a chart showing results of the team coordinator and team member surveys. I sensed that several coordinators interpreted the chart as saying that they weren’t doing their jobs well. I quickly thought how I could rephrase my lead-in and announced that the shaded responsibilities shown were areas which stood to gain the most through focused attention and delegation to other team members. They were more comfortable with this way of looking at things.
The meeting lasted for over an hour and produced encouraging results. I was surrounded by every member of our senior management team, they all had vested interest in the subject matter, there was a constant interchange of ideas and opinions, and I was leading the meeting. Add to that that each team coordinator represented a different service line and years of ingrained behaviour. We ultimately decided to pilot test a delegation of certain coordinator responsibilities to three teams.”
Following the meeting, Anthony continued to work with the office manager and the various teams to implement the quality improvement initiative.
