Unleash the Power of your people!

Every business produces waste and fails to deliver their product or service in the most efficient way possible. How do we know this? Do we ask the CEO or anyone else on the leadership team? You could, but I’m not sure you would get an accurate answer every time. We generally know this by asking the staff that produce the wealth for the business – the production line workers, the office staff processing an order, the front-line staff in a retail outlet…the people who actually do the work! They know where things are going wrong, why waste is created, why orders are late and why ultimately, customers don’t get their product or service on time and at the right quality.

Should we ask them what’s wrong?

Often the biggest fear of leadership teams is admitting that they don’t have all the answers. They are afraid to ask the real experts in their business as “not knowing” could possibly be seen as a sign of weak leadership or a lack of a coherent strategy. Another fear of asking what’s wrong is being unsure what to do with that information once you have it.  

How do you take improvement suggestions from your staff and do something meaningful with it?  

How do you know what they are suggesting is the right thing and what if it’s not?   

Who will do the “work” if we have members of staff working on improvements?

What if they keep making improvement suggestions, how will we keep up?

 Maybe now it’s clearer why C.I (Continuous Improvement) initiatives never get started or lose momentum and fizzle out. There is a real fear of the unknown, where to start and ultimately a lack of understanding of what impact it will have on the business. So why bother?

Why do we need to improve anyway?

At the very start of this blog, we stated that every business is inefficient (to differing degrees) in how they deliver their product or service. That’s a given. Should we just accept that and hope that our customers don’t notice and continue to buy from us? Or do accept that improvement is the responsibility of everyone in the organisation. We owe it to our customers and ourselves.

To develop a culture of improvement, the people in the organisation (top to bottom) need to recognise the need for change and embrace it and understand the benefits this change of mindset will bring:

Leaders that “walk the talk” – Leadership support and sponsorship of CI will determine the success or failure of any improvement initiative. Leaders must exhibit behaviours that not only demonstrate support for the initiative but also the behaviours they wish all employees to emulate. Ultimately, this comes down to leadership guidance and support. If that support isn’t there, the team charged with implementing improvements will be isolated in the efforts and will ultimately fail.

Putting out “Fires” Vs Preventing them - No individual, team or company can implement change if they do not have the time or mental capacity to do so. The trouble is that often it is often the very problems that need fixing that are creating a series of "fires" that constantly distract managers from solving the root cause of their problems. Everyone is constantly having to work harder, rather than smarter. Worse, some company cultures celebrate and reward those employees and managers who put out the most fires, which removes incentive to prevent the fires in the first place.

Building an Improvement Culture - An unrelenting, unwavering focus on improvement is critical to maintaining and sustaining process improvements in the long term. Changes need to maintain momentum to ensure the changes are not forgotten and do not grind to a halt through fatigue or resistance. Successful continuous improvement programs understand that improvement is not merely a management initiative – a so-called "flavour of the month" – but a long-term practice that needs to permeate everything an organisation does.

Change to a Longer-Term Mindset - Leaders are often focused on whether they are going to meet their monthly or quarterly targets and it can be very difficult to prioritise improvements that will only make an impact over the longer term. As a result, continuous improvement is as much about mind-set as it is about actions. The company needs to start looking at the long-term impact of the work it is doing and understand that a quarterly dip in performance can be tolerated if it means that in the long term, the company is in a better position - both financially and in terms of the company’s ability to deliver outstanding products and services to its customers.

Where do you start?

Embracing C.I inevitably means change. As humans we tend to avoid change, we like the status quo. Not everyone will be on board, so how do you make a start? It is vital to identify individuals in the organisation that will not only embrace the changes that C.I brings, but they will also lead it and be the standard bearers. A very simple, yet effective technique call Key Role Mapping can be used to help identify those potential C.I Champions. This exercise is done with the leadership team who are the sponsors of the C.I initiative:

• Map out the Organisation – create a visual Org chart of the entire organisation or the department or area we are looking to implement CI.
• Build the C.A.S.T of Characters – Label everyone on the chart with one or more of the following:
• C – Champion of change – a small group of individuals that can be relied upon to help promote, lead, deliver and help sustain change.
• A – Agents of Change – typically a consultant who can help facilitate, organise and co-ordinate the changes – typically not a subject matter expert and not involved in the “doing part” of CI.
• S – Sponsors – We typically have one Authorsing Sponsor (AS) – a single leader who has overall responsibility for providing resources to the project. We also have several Reinforcing Sponsors (RS) who lead by example and support the CI initiatives that are planned.
• T – Targets – anyone on the ORG chart that is yet unaware of the forthcoming changes but, the changes will affect their role. As a result, we need to ensure that they are communicated to effectively to ensure they understand what the proposed changes are and how much it will affect their day-to-day jobs.

Start Making Improvements:

 At this stage, we have ticked several key boxes:

The leadership have bought into change and view embracing CI as key to the delivery of that change.

We have an experienced Change Agent who will help both the Leadership team and the Champions of Change make small incremental but impactful changes.

A small group of Champions of Change who will form part of a CI team.

What do we do next?  

The Change Agent needs to spend some time with the newly formed CI team. Assess their skills and experience with CI and put together a simple training plan which will expose the entire team to a pre-agreed set of C.I skills – Typically we would be looking to develop skills in VSM (Value Stream Mapping), Kaizen (Intensive improvement workshops), Root Cause Analysis, Analysing Risk, Triaging and prioritising potential solutions.

MAKE A START! 

The CI team will have ideas for improvement. Ask them to identify opportunities in their own areas of expertise. Identify a problem that you have high confidence that the CI team can not only fix, but can help embed, monitor, and sustain the change. 

• Identify an opportunity for improvement
• Start small
• Measure the current situation or pain point
• Make the change
• Monitor the impact and measure the benefits
• Have a lessons learned – what went well, what wasn’t so good and what will we do differently next time.
• Communicate the outcomes
• Move onto the next one