How “Program du jour” Can Damage the Business – September 10th, 2016
Would you agree, that all improvement initiatives start out meaning well for the businesses and organizations that elect to embark on the “program du jour”? Today more than ever, we get business improvement ideas from social media, industry associations, magazines, radio, and television, just to name a few sources. All potentially good ideas if properly applied to the application. In our enthusiasm to help the business or organization, we sometimes go overboard and bombard our teams with several new programs to implement simultaneously. If the leadership team fails to prioritize the initiatives, they all get started and most never come close to being fully implemented. Don’t you also agree that this scenario could actually damage the business rather than improve it?
Additionally, this phenomenon may cause prolonged damage by driving away talent. When good, hardworking employees feel like they can never get their chin above the water line, they look for greener pastures. Meanwhile, you still have all the same work waiting to get done with fewer qualified employees, and you need to recruit replacements. My chest tightens up just writing about it.
I assure you that this is not unusual, nor is it a hopeless situation. There is a way to rectify this problem. The leadership team can identify the highest priorities in the business, rank them to align with company strategies and goals, create projects to address the priorities, empower employees to form project teams, and start closing out the projects. Celebrate, step and repeat. Sounds simple right? Then why don’t more business and organizations do this?
I believe most business do address this phenomenon to some level. Traditional businesses wait until they are ready to collapse under the pressure and seek help. Businesses on a continuous improvement (CI) journey may apply Lean/Six Sigma tools to help them pull out of this phenomenon. And World-Class business… well, never put them selves into this position in the first place.
I created a Leadership Self-Assessment survey attempting to help kick-start, progress, and rejuvenate companies that are on their own CI journey. The survey touches on a few critical fundamentals of a World-Class organization. It certainly does not encompass everything, but should act as a general guide along the journey.
My goal for doing this is two fold. I believe it is critical for businesses and organizations to sit down together as a leadership team and have unbiased, difficult but constructive dialog on how they view themselves on the scale of Traditional to World-Class. Secondly, and most importantly, once the team has established a current state baseline for the organization, they now have a chance to get some quick wins, unloading some of the burden they may have created with their original improvement initiatives.
Why quick wins you say? The road to World-Class is an endless journey (see related article “A Start Without a Finish, the Journey to World-class” August 26th, 2016. There are many components to a highly functioning Continuous Improvement culture. You cannot implement all components simultaneously, as many company attempt, because of the initiative overload phenomenon. Therefore, depending upon where you think your business or organization is on this journey, there are different projects that, once completed, can kick-start, progress or rejuvenate your CI culture.
This is where the “quick wins” apply. Take your most promising talent and give them the first list of quick win tasks, 3 to 5 max. Drive the tasks to completion and verifying that the results are sustainable. Celebrate the wins. Go to the next 3 to 5 quick win tasks and repeat. Your site’s leadership assessment rating will improve, your business or organization will become healthier and more customer focused, and as a result, you might even create some new leaders in the business or organization. Your unplanned departures should reduce because your employees have newfound bandwidth and are better aligned with where the leadership team is heading.
If you follow this link, or check out the “Quick Wins” page at www.tangibleimprovement.com, you can download a pdf file of the Leadership Self-Assessment. In addition to the assessment, I am in the process of documenting a list of “Quick Win” articles that will align with the “Tradition” to “World-Class” ranking from the assessment. As I complete these short articles, I will publish then in a newsletter and post them on my website. I hope my Leadership Self-Assessment and “Quick Wins” newsletter will help kick-start, progress, or rejuvenate your continuous improvement journey.
