The Importance of Group Process

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Today I am discussing the importance of group process and why it is so important to forging accountability in how people work together in engaged, quality-focused, collaborative and humanly satisfying ways.

Group process is how all the employees in your organization work together to get things done.

For example, do you get things done through competitive operations with executives directing you and everyone else on what to work on?

Or are the employees in your organization empowered to interject their ideas into how they work together so organizational goals roll out more smoothly. Their a work community tends to be helpful, quality-focused, cooperative, productive and highly engaged.

These are two very different ways of working together.

The obvious solution to improving group process is developing employees with the skills and attitudes to help one another achieve goals.

So why is the importance of employee-centered group process significant to forging employee accountability for wanting to achieve those goals while working well with others to get things done?

True success is achieved when the work side of operations is balanced with the skilled side of human operations. I am emphasizing skilled side of human operations here because training in skills that improve how employees work together has dropped off sharply in the last 20 years - maybe more. In some organizations it is non existent.

Understanding the human to human skills people need to work together cooperatively, to collaborate and achieve goals with quality and a felt sense of personal satisfaction is where the world of work is headed as work becomes more automated.

Typically, organizations spend a great deal of time and energy establishing and striving to reach goals but give little consideration to what is happening between and to work’s greatest resource –employees.

When employee input is requested to establish what employees need to operate in trustworthy, interdependent, genuine, empathetic, risk resolving and successful ways, you get an employee’s attention.

Then when employee ideas are adopted, there is more employee ownership of them. It is the ownership of decisions like these that opens the door for all employees to be accountable for them and for maintaining them. Then it falls to leaders like you to tend the boundaries of those decisions.

So What group process skills are needed most today?

The skillset categories for effective group process include:
• Problem-solving
• Decision-making
• Conflict resolution and management
• Communication
• Group and personal boundary management

These are the skills that employees who want to be accountable desire to master. These are skills that serve your organization and every aspect of a person’s life.

Culture transformation to become more employee-centered in the ways employees work together and get things done is scary for some executives. It can, however, be sensible and easy to roll out one great cross-functional team at a time.

So where can you go from here?

There are 3 resources listed in the comments below. And you can also view them in the learning center at https://learn.corevalues.com .