Neal Kocurek, a well known civic leader, co-founder of Radian (a top environmental company), and former President of St. David's Healthcare System, shared with us his formula for strong, lasting, and productive teams. His recipe is based on open communication.

Kocurek used a technique he called muscle building. He would hold regular meetings with his vice presidents, with the goal of assessing their organizations and leveraging their strengths. He describes the process: "Now at the beginning of those meetings I had an agenda which I had prepared, but the first thing I asked was, 'What do we need to add to the agenda?' and people would put ideas up there. All right, now let's prioritize the agenda.

"So we would prioritize the agenda and we would get what everyone thought was the most important topics up there first. We started working on the first thing and we would work to resolution. Now maybe resolution wouldn't be finishing everything, but it would be doing all the thought processes, making assignments, knowing exactly what's going to happen. And of course we never made it through the full agenda at any meeting ever, but we got the most important things. Furthermore, we carried them to appropriate resolution."

During the meeting, each participant would review his/her organization openly. For instance, in one meeting, Jean, a vice president, stood up and discussed her organization's strengths and weakness with the collective group. When she discussed a weakness in her organization, she reported the action steps taken to correct the problem. She also listed the people she felt were capable of replacing her should something happen to her.

The discussions were interactive and lively, empowering participants with knowledge of each person's strengths and weaknesses, and allowing them to make helpful suggestions to the speaker. For example, one vice president might suggest trading personnel to mutual advantage or offer new strategies for handling organizational weakness. Kocurek concludes:

"To go through that organization this way would take four to
five hours. But they all learned Jean's organization, personnel,
strengths and weaknesses, everything. Each one of them, because
of the discussion, comes up with a list of things on how to strengthen
their organizations-different things for different folks."

Kocurek's muscle building method provides mutual support and leverages the strength of each participant's organization to support the others. To increase communication among people, Kocurek offers the following suggestions:

1. Let your ideas/problems incubate.
2. Listen to all parties who have an interest.
3. Collect, analyze, and present data--again and again.
4. See that all parties involved/affected are educated.
5. Create "our" idea.

Open communication takes confidence and trust, but the result is "getting everyone on the same page" to move forward. No wonder Neal is called "Mr. Gets Things Done" in Austin, Texas.