imapMyTeam Blog

Are You Relationship Lean?

The core idea of lean is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Simply stated; lean means creating more value for customers using fewer resources.  A lean organization understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste.

What does that have to do with your relationships? Everything.

The quality of the problem solving in a group is directly linked to the quality of the teamwork. Teamwork means being able to solve problems across functional boundaries – it’s the key to successful process improvement. In order to establish the right environment for process improvement, leaders must constantly develop teamwork by teaching individuals to work with their colleagues across functional silos.

One of the eight wastes in lean is underutilizing people’s skills and abilities – their talent. What you understand as an imapMyTeam® user is that to get the best performance from someone we need to tend to their motivational needs. Needs unmet cause a reactive behavior that we refer to as ‘stress.’

That stress behavior is a person’s ineffective style of dealing with relationships or tasks. When exhibiting this behavior people are less productive (and unhappy with themselves).

To foster teamwork, to get the best out of each individual, to avoid wasting their talent you need to pay attention to others needs. That will ‘lean’ the relationship and help you achieve your goals. imapMyTeam® reports are largely written for others’ needs. They give you a model of how to interact with another person in the most effective way possible. Relationship Lean!

Lean is not a tactic or a cost reduction program, but a way of thinking and acting for an entire organization – imapMyTeam® is a tool that adds value to that process.