 Now that spring is just around the corner, we could all benefit from a little spring cleaning. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. We've all heard of spring cleaning and just like it's helpful to get rid of some of the clutter in our homes, it's helpful to get rid of some of the clutter on our teams. Often our teams get caught up doing things that are no longer productive to our mission or have become stagnant and wasteful. We should always be looking for ways to eliminate waste and improve our processes, but it's easy to get caught up in the crisis of the day and it's tempting to just let things go on the way they are as long as the job is getting done. Planning a spring cleaning activity gives us an opportunity to look at all of our activities and see if any of them can be improved, streamlined, or eliminated. The first step in our spring cleaning is assessing our current activities and processes. If you have a lot of different things going on in your team and a lot of different activities, you may want to choose the ones that most urgently need to get reviewed and leave the others for another time. If you're having a hard time getting started, asking a couple of key questions about what's going on in your team can be a big help. Does anyone use the results of this task? Does this activity take a large proportion of work time but is used infrequently? Does the information produced by this process give us insight about our mission or team or is it outdated? Or is there someone on another team or elsewhere in the organization that uses the outputs of this process? Asking probing questions about how valuable our team activities are can provide us with even more valuable information about whether we should keep, modify, or even eliminate certain activities. Sometimes it's hard to know what to do next after we've done our assessment of activities. If the activity is no longer valuable and nobody in the organization uses the outputs anymore, the decision's easy. Just stop doing it. The other side of that coin is if the information coming from the activity is valuable, people are using it and it doesn't take up a lot of work time, keep on doing it. The real challenge comes when we have to decide how to improve an activity that we have to keep. When it comes to making improvement, it pays to move thoughtfully and deliberately. You'll want to get inputs from the people who are most intimately involved in executing the process as well as inputs from the people who use the outputs of the process. Ask yourself some questions like are there things the team can do on their own to make things more efficient or are there rules that can be relaxed or procedures that can be updated without making major changes? Once you've gotten input from your team members and key stakeholders, pull them all together into a vision of what the new process looks like. You may not be able to reconcile all of the inputs from everyone, so put together a plan that optimizes the performance while still providing excellent outputs. And it's okay if you decide not to make any changes at all after you do a thorough assessment. We're not here to make change for the sake of change. What we're trying to do is make a conscious effort to review and improve the processes that we have. If you found this helpful, make sure you follow us on Facebook and Twitter. And don't forget to join us every Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific Time for a live interactive leadership discussion on BLAAB. Click off on that globe to the right. That'll get you subscribed to our email list and bring all of our content direct to your inbox. Thanks for watching. I really appreciate it. And remember, the future is out there. Lead the way.