Subject: COSE Staff Announcement
Hi everyone! Happy New Year!
I wanted to take a moment to thank each of you for taking the time to participate in one of our Member Experience task teams!
As you know, an important focus for 2010 is going to be all about moving our organization from an inside-out operation to an outside-in operation. Translation: Focus more of our efforts on connecting our members with COSE’s value offerings rather than focusing solely on creating things that create value. This is big! It’s a change of culture. But, I think we are ready for it. Your self-evaluations and comments around the office lead me to believe that you’re excited to work with everyone else to identify ways COSE can create more meaningful connections with our members. Getting there will take some changes in how we think about and service our members.
That change is going to challenge all of us, but there are tools available to help make it a bit easier for all of us! Over the last few months, Claire and I have been working with one of our COSE members, Ike Brooks. Ike is the owner of the The PARTNERSHIP, a professional training and coaching firm and is an active volunteer on COSE’s Board and task teams. Ike has been helping us work through some of the broader concepts of change management over the past few months and we would like to bring his expertise to you. Over the next four months, we will ask that each of you participate in four training sessions. The training sessions will focus on areas of change management, creating effective work environments, working together, and follow through. Our goal is to provide you the opportunity to build some skills in these areas and get more comfortable with the contributions you can provide to make us better.
Each session will be 4-hours and will be held on the following dates listed below. We will have morning and afternoon sessions so that you can pick the one that best meets your schedule.
- Wednesday, January 27
- Wednesday February 24
- Wednesday, March 24 (will be one meeting on this day with all COSE staff)
- Wednesday, April 14
Unless you have a pre-planned vacation, we expect that each of you will work with your managers to attend one of these sessions. It’s important that we all move through this experience together. Having Ike facilitate these sessions will allow us to relate to common themes, language and experiences.
Remember, it’s all about our members! We haven’t figured out every single tactic, in fact that’s why you’re engaged in a task team. Your work there will help shape a lot of COSE 2.0! We can promise you that we will commit to being transparent and honest with you along the way. If you have a question – ask! If we don’t have an answer yet, we will commit to working on one and then sharing it with you.
I feel like this can be a really exciting time for the organization. We’ve got a lot of work ahead, but the result that we are striving for will move this good organization to a great one by connecting more thoughtfully with our members. Thank you in advance for your time, energy and ideas!
Steve Millard
