Category Archives: Change

Change, Continuous Improvement, Engagement

Culture Drives Continuous Improvement

culture2In a recent discussion a question about culture was raised, which has prompted us to begin a short series of blog posts about the importance of building a culture of continuous improvement and how the right culture drives continuous improvement.

The question to which I’m referring was, “Should there be a change in culture before implementing Six-Sigma or CI?”

Cultural issues have been discussed in several past posts, and this very issue was the subject of review during one of our Partners in Improvement sessions, during which participants agreed that despite a predominant focus on strategy and execution, ‘culture’ is the principal determinant of how well an organization does.

A few corroborating perspectives:

“Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization’s makeup and success — along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like. I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game; it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.” 

— Lou Gerstner, speaking about his IBM turnaround

“Culture isn’t an important thing; it’s the ONLY thing!”

— Jim Senegal co-founder and retired CEO of Costco

Mr. Senegal’s point is that if we get the culture right, all else will follow: engaged, empowered employees (who have deep experience because turnover is so low) will hit it out of the park again and again, driving the entire organization to success.

IBM and Costco certainly have results that support the view that culture drives success. In a less publicized example, one of our partners described her CEO’s successful decision to create a culture of Continuous Improvement, and over the five year effort, the stock price has increased 780%!

But what is culture? Does it really eat strategy for breakfast, as Peter Drucker claimed? How do we build and maintain this powerful stuff?

These will be among the questions addressed in upcoming posts…

 

Change, Continuous Improvement

Managing Resistance to Continuous Improvement

We came across a good article on LinkedIn Pulse entitled “Managing Resistance to Improvement,” in which author John Shultz shares insights as to why improvements can cause anxiety and how to help people deal with their anxiety or concerns.

“Systems and processes exist in their current state because someone got them to that level of refinement,” Shultz explains.  “Flawed and inconsistent as these practices may now appear, at some point in the past, an effort—possibly heroic—was made to coordinate activities and relationships to create a sense of order.

“Then over time those involved learned to compensate for gaps and made the system operational. In turn, these employees built a mental model about who they were and what they could do based on this arrangement for getting work done.

“Proposed improvements often threaten these mental pictures and create self-doubt because the new way of operating will require skills and social structures that are not familiar. The thought of uncertainty then produce anxious feelings about loss of identity, loss of position, and loss of face that give rise to guarded behavior.”

The article goes on to explain that these fears may take many forms from negative attitudes to active sabotage, and may become evident through reduced productivity, decreased quality, increased absenteeism, and produce increased grievances. The following are typical sources for anxiety:

  • Comfort with current operations: The old way for getting work done has been in place for some period of time, and seems to be working fine. Process operators and stakeholders don’t see a need to “reinvent the wheel.”
  • Doubt about the need and vision for improvement: There is uncertainty about the reason behind proposed improvements and how existing work structures and relationships will be impacted. The question—“what’s in it for me?”—has not been adequately answered.
  • Concern over loss: There is a perceived fear over how improvements will affect acquired skills, salary, status, quality of work, or other benefits attributed to the existing process.
  • Organization’s past history: Past proposals for improvement have been poorly handled—muddled implementation, lack of resources, inadequate training, or the eventual abandonment of activities—only to have remedies replaced by another “program of the month.”
  • The proposed improvement is flawed: There is a realization that the new way for operating has real problems that will ultimately create difficulty in the current or adjacent processes.

Read the full article…