Case Studies - Division of Community Health and Prevention —
Illinois Department of Health and Human Services

The CH&P Division is a high-performance operation of 150 employees organized through five regional program sites and two central administration offices (Chicago and Springfield). As a whole, this vast statewide network (including human service workers, economists, accountants, government administrators, public servants) is clearly passionate and committed to appropriately focus resources where they are most needed for the families and children of Illinois. Unfortunately, too, they are under tremendous daily pressure to collaborate effectively within a challenging environment of shrinking budgets, significant staff reductions, expanding expectations for services, and shifting mandates and leadership structures.

During the period from December 2005 to March 2006, SEED guided 25 Community Health and Prevention senior staff (including the Director) through a three-session training designed as a hands-on demonstration of an innovative process for improving communication and trust, building team spirit, enhancing individual and group creativity, devising and rolling out promising approaches, and taking successful ventures with universal appeal to scale. As part of this experience, the participants received training in some simple but powerful practices for enhancing dialogue and communication.

The intent throughout these three sessions with ILDHS-CHP was for the leadership of the Division to experience the spirit, the flow, and the whole of the SEED technology to inform decisions regarding its future applications.

Results:

After the first session the Division leaders began to restructure lines of communication and to recreate the way that services are designed and implemented across the State. A team was formed to review current communication and meeting patterns (including between Chicago/Springfield offices, new and senior staff, administration and field offices, etc). The intent is to encourage Division-wide input in developing improved practices for communications—as a means to enhance the capacity of the Division to fulfill its mission.

Specifically, one example is a plan that emerged to restructure the Division’s concept and delivery of "expanded staff" meetings. Recognizing the value of SEED practices the team modeled at the December training, expanded staff meetings are being reconceived to incorporate:

1. The principle that every voice is heard;
2. Rotating facilitation ;
3. Shared responsibility for designing and setting agendas (possibly rotating between sites with advance input from participants) ;
4. Division-wide practice of Reflective Listening, Check-In, and other communication techniques; and
5. Spaces to encourage reflection and deeper personal connections, as well as systematized mechanisms to insure team creativity and group/field consciousness.

1. Going to scale with "who" instead of "what"
2. From serving to enabling to ennobling
3. Functioning as a team instead of workgroups