Employee-focused Leadership Summit
Oct. 24 brings frontline solutions

A continuous-improvement journey was unveiled in Boise at ITD’s annual Leadership Summit Oct. 24, as 22 teams tackled unique issues and challenges. The goal of the summit was to develop leaders, learn the ITD model, and solve real problems facing the department.

In the end, three teams won in each of the Culture and Problem-Solving categories, and were awarded for clearly and succinctly capturing the problem, the current status, its impact on our mission, and formulating a timeline for “next steps” implementation.

“Everyone in this room is a champion,” ITD Chief Administrative Officer Charlene McArthur said at the event. “You all worked really hard, and I was very impressed with the teams and their willingness to roll up their sleeves and go to work.

“The solutions came organically — they were not ‘seeded’ with preconceptions or assumptions about what would work best,” she added.  

In addition to finding solutions to those immediate problems, the greater hope was that participants would take problem-solving tools back to their workplaces and utilize them at the district or division levels.

The opportunity to create a solution or program that ITD would be using for decades to come resonated with many participants.

“To think that the program that we created might still be used by employees years later is really cool,” explained Francine McGrew, who served as facilitator of the employee safety recognition team.

The 22 teams – up from 13 last year and 10 the year prior – were composed of employees from various levels, business units and regions. Each team had a half-dozen participants, a senior leadership team champion, and a facilitator.

Each team gave a two-minute pitch to the audience to entice them to visit their booths for more info, and ultimately, to vote for them. Votes were then tallied and the top eight teams were afforded 15 minutes each to discuss their problem or issue in greater depth. The audience then scored each team on the full presentation, and those scores were tallied to arrive at the three winning teams in each of the two categories below:

Problem Solving
1st Place        Equipment Operator Training
2nd Place       SHIFT Engaged Driving
3rd Place        D5 Equipment Assessment

Constructive Culture
1st Place        A Team
2nd Place       Construction Payout
3rd Place        D5 Equipment Assessment

Please check future issues of the Transporter as we highlight teams, problems and the solutions they proposed.

Descriptions and much of the event material can be found on the Leadership Summit page linked from the “Innovate ITD” SharePoint page.

Published 10-26-18