RACER Update July 2024
Acorn is in the latter stages of their collaboration and team coaching work with the RACER team at Nuclear Waste Services in west Cumbria.
Since being appointed in 2021, Acorn has utilised their proprietary Collaboration Questionnaire, a unique tool which offers insightful diagnostic data and free text feedback, and the findings continue to underline the progress made by this high performing team.
“The responses from the questionnaire returned slightly lower scores in some areas, but that’s no cause for alarm and isn’t a result of a decline in their development.” Says Acorn’s Keith Longney.
“These low scores are more an indication of previous achievement in these areas, and less prominence given to them going forward.”
The free text responses in the Questionnaire have provided some of the most insightful feedback and, on the most recent instance, some of these statements concerned three threshold areas:
- Decision making
- Empowerment
- Prioritisation
“Decision making was highlighted, primarily the need for the team to make more decisions at pivotal points because others were not making them.”
Acorn worked on these areas during a recent team coaching session with 32 people across the RACER project.
Decision making, whilst encouraged, supported and promoted, has on occasions become a ‘pinch point’: instead of making decisions, some have opted to defer them up to more senior people.
“Part of the focus of our work has been cascading the decision making to the wider team, accelerating the process and speeding-up the outputs.”
“Some of this is a matter of confidence, for people to make their own decisions and overcoming any harboured perceptions of what might happen if something were to go wrong.”
“Culture changes really can’t be underestimated; I recall a recent conversation with a long-standing employee who, whilst not going so far as to say the approach had previously been adversarial, there was certainly a feeling of ‘command and control’.”
“This may have been the environment six or seven years ago and, to a degree, it has been clear that a few ‘ghosts’ still remain.”
“The organisation [Nuclear Waste Services] talks about ‘the latitude to experiment’, people being bolder in their decision making and having the support of their colleagues. Mike Piggott [Director of Waste Operations and Sites at NWS] himself uses the phrase ‘collective forgiveness’.”
“This is rooted in enabling people, in them having the confidence to make decisions and, if it turns out that a mistake is made, then as long as the decision was made with the best intention they will not be chastised.”
“One should remember that the RACER team is comprised of personnel from NWS and Jacobs, the lead contractor, but there are also additional service level providers plugging-in as well – quality, engineering etc.”
“Because of the organisational re-design of NWS, some of these providers can be conflicted as they have numerous clients [in NWS] to support, bringing additional challenges in terms of the service support mechanism.”
Along with reviewing the Questionnaire scores, the team created a ‘tick list’ of collaborative requirements: “Basically, they have created a list of what they think would be good to suggest to the next iteration of RACER, what they consider to be the enablers to successful collaboration.”
“The intention of this list, created entirely by them, would be to provoke the the new organisation that they will be working with; it would be an opportunity from the outset to say, ‘going forward, what practices ‘may’ assist in continuing or further enhance the collaborative culture that has already been created?’”
“As touched on previously, the message we’re getting from the RACER team is that, although they are preforming really well there is still that desire to continue the momentum and carry through this culture, even after Acorn’s involvement has ended.”
The RACER programme has been an incredibly insightful opportunity for Acorn, not least for seeing the sea-change in team members: in the early days, some expressed their concerns at being involved in RACER only for the complete opposite to be the case today.
The outputs from this programme of team development, team performance and collaboration can be seen in the results from the Collaboration Questionnaire but, more tellingly, by observing the interdependent relationships evident between team members.
We thank all of those involved for their open and honest approach to this programme, they are the ones who should be congratulated for the successes achieved to date and the foundations laid for the future.
