Within your team, do you see the following characteristics:

• When something goes wrong, the first question is “Who messed up?” rather than “How do we learn from this and stop it from happening again?”?
• Is documentation created as a way to defend against the “Who messed up?” question being asked in the future?
• Are individuals focused on ensuring they do not mess up rather than ensuring that the team’s commitments are being met?
• Are individuals afraid to take action on bold ideas because they are too concerned about what will happen if the idea hits some roadbumps on the way to implementation?

Even if you are best buds with the members of your team, if the type of characteristics above are present, you do not have a sufficient level of trust to function as a team.  As a result, productivity is taking hit and you are probably focused on tasks that are more about process adherence rather than product improvement/innovation.

Do you find yourself in this type of gloomy situation?  While team members themselves can focus on avoiding “CYA” type of behavior, your managers can have the biggest positive impact on the situation.  Imagine if a team meeting is called and the key managers come in and say “Going forward, we do not care if mistakes occur.  However, we do care about you learning from your mistakes and improving.  In addition, we care about you meeting your commitments more than having the proper paper trail”.  Now imagine when the first mistake after this meeting occurs and managment follows through on their statements!  By establishing the fact that  continuous improvement is valued over the blame game, teams are now enabled to build a trusting environment for themselves.

Up until today, I had not gained much traction in getting the changes approved.  However, after I stated the opportunity as “we pay people to manage channel X.  This other channel that we do nothing with and serve a “hostile” user experience to accounts for 1.5 times the traffic of channel X.”, people took notice.   Once the opportunity was stated in a way that used easy to understand measurements, the initiative moved from the back burner to “how do we fix this?”.

This change in direction would not have been possible without a proper web analytics platform being in place.  However, even if you have the “best in class” tool in place, it means nothing if you do not actively research and leverage the data being delivered to you on an ongoing basis.