That's my story and I'm sticking to it! I'm embarrassed that I haven't posted in over a year. On the other hand, with no one posting comments, asking questions, or challenging me it gets lonely out here in the blogosphere. I perked up today however when I realized that Blogger.com has made upgrades and I can now see some stats for this blog. Over 3200 people over the country have visited this blog in the past year. I feel better now!
So what happened in 2013 on the Valley TBO journey? In the last post we talked about our 4 most highly engaged teams at Valley and the importance of learning from them. Over the spring and summer we interviewed these teams to find out what was going on. Of course each team was unique, their purpose and goals were unique, and each manager had a unique set of talent themes. What these teams seemed to share in common was respect for each other's talents and strengths, a deep trust, excellent communications and support for one another.
On October 1st we invited everyone in the institution to share in a celebration honoring these teams. We invited our Gallup consultant Kyle Robinson who interviewed the teams on stage to share their group wisdom with all.
Also over the spring and summer we were upgrading our customer service training program to put a focus on how employees can use their unique talents and strengths to provide student/customer satisfaction. There is no "one size fits all" when it comes to service, and we know that each employee will be at his or her best if they're using the foundation of their talent themes to achieve the outcome of customer satisfaction. This is an important step in the TBO journey - moving from knowing our talents and strengths to putting them into action by intentionally applying them.
In April, we sent an email to administrators, managers and supervisors asking them to identify folks who seem to be “naturals at serving our students well – the ones that always seem to have a positive attitude, a smile, and a willingness to “go the extra mile”. We said we’d like to capture whatever these folks have, bottle it and sprinkle it around, but since we can’t do that, we’d like to capture some of what they have on posters and videos. Each employee shared what they thought are the essentials of good service and how their talent themes contribute to them being a "natural" at delivering it. These are now a part of our new Service.edYOU! training.
Finally, during the last quarter of 2013 we began working with a company to move our relatively new performance management process online. F.O.C.U.S. stands for Future Outcomes Collaboration Using Strengths, and it is different from anything we've done before. Based on best practices and positive psychology, it keeps us looking to the future, continuous improvement, working together, and doing what we each do best.
To take us in 2014, the Student Strengths Development unit in our Student Success Department celebrated 10,000 students taking the StrengthsQuest assessment this month!
