Maricopa agency finds Appreciative Inquiry approach boosts staff morale, builds relationships
AI embraces successes
Tuesday August 26, 2008 -- Jennifer Higgs
Staff members at the Maricopa Association of Governments have benefited from an Appreciate Inquiry (AI) approach being implemented across the agency that boosts morale and relationships, says Amy St. Peter.

“We are using AI to get them to really embrace the successes that do happen,” says St. Peter, Maricopa Association of 
Governments human services manager.

“It’s been great to reframe all of the work we do, whether it’s in human services or across the agency or as a whole region.”

St. Peter says the agency was interested in AI as an organizational development tool, which sparked her to read The Power of Appreciative Inquiry and listen to a previous training tape. She attended Corporation for Positive Change’s Appreciative Inquiry Summit.

Returning from the Summit, St. Peter led a small planning group with at least one staff member from each of the agency’s divisions to introduce them to AI.

“We didn’t have a lot of time for theory for theory’s sake,” she says.

The agency benefitted from being able to use principles of AI very quickly through activities without the need to have people sit through a lot of instructions, she says.

“We haven’t followed the model precisely, we’ve adapted it to our timeframe and to our capacity but that is part of the beauty of the model, that you can do that,” she says.

AI has helped foster relationships between staff members who might work across divisions and not know each other. The diverse staff has benefited from AI to bridge across cultures and different personalities, says St. Peter.

Celebrating and embracing successes and using them as lessons moving forward have been very helpful throughout the agency, says St. Peter.

At a staff retreat everyone was involved in an AI exercise. Staff interviewed each other about what makes them feel most alive in their job, what the ideal Maricopa Association of Governments would look like and how they can build, replicate and expand on successes.

After the retreat the agency brought together the list of values and elements that contributed to those peak experiences and asked each staff member to rank and identify the top categories where they draw success from. At their discretion, managers met with employees to talk about the goals they would like to work on in each category.

“They were able to bring that work forward in a really meaningful way and in a way that was empowering because it was an employee in discussion with their manager talking about how they wanted to expand their own professional development in each of the categories that were common across the agency,” she says.

“We are really trying to maximize those achievements,” says St. Peter.

Read more about Appreciative Inquiry by visiting the Corporation for Positive Change website.

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