Daily Team Meetings

Sorry it's been a couple weeks. A few posts in short order.

1. I never applied Visual Management to the facilitator shirts. I'm finding that in the camp culture "first order" problem solving (stopping at containment measures) is the modus operandi. It's frustrating but a challenge. By the end of the summer I hope to start using 5'why root cause analysis on problems.

2. Daily Team Meetings - Daily meetings are an integral component of kaizen. At the daily meeting the culture of mutual trust and respect is promoted, problems are identified and discussed and important problems flow up the chain of command.

For daily meetings to be successful people need to understand their responsibility for safety, quality, productivity, human development and cost. They must also believe that raising problems is a good thing, understand problem solving and problem selection (bringing solved problems and selecting the right ones to pass up makes for a more effective daily meeting). The daily meeting is also supported by a team board.

The camp culture is not very performance driven. Performance is important but we don't think about it as such. It makes the application of the daily meeting more difficult in my mind. Here's what we're doing:

At 7:30 our staff meets in teams. At 8:00 our staff meets as a whole for things like announcements, devotions, music, getting fired up for the day. At 8:30 I meet with my team leaders and at 12:00 the leadership team meets.

The pluses - communication is good, my teams feel respected and I feel like I have the pulse of camp.

The minuses - there's not a lot of specific problems or problem solving being done and the leadership meeting is out of span. There are some times 15 people there with very different interests. If I were to re stack it, I'd take the summer only leaders and have them meet with the full time person that it makes sense to meet with. The program and men's and women's directors with the camp director, the cit directors with facilities or the camp director and the conference center programs with the conference center director. THen, I'd have all the full time directors meet so that they can discuss the top level agenda. As it is, the conversations veer off so that when we're talking about high level stuff, half the group is unengaged.

It's not all bad, in fact, its very good, but remember -every day little improvements!