Tag Archives: continuous improvement

Continuous Improvement, Working Without a Safety Net

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What gets in the way of improvement?  Stated differently, what gets in the way of on-going success?  Understand that today’s success is tomorrow’s mediocrity.  I believe the answer is related to our clarity of vision, our focus. We have heard the cliché, “Keep your eye on the ball”.  The question is which ball?

I believe that the answer is also related to how much energy we spend on maintaining the status quo. We can easily create an overload of rules, processes and metrics that keep us from doing our best work.  Like the swimmer who spends their energy treading water to avoid drowning, instead of swimming to shore.

Compare that to the stories behind Lockheed’s Skunk Works and the Manhattan Project.  These folks embraced the horror of working without a safety net (the status quo).  The risk of failure became the challenge and the motivation to accomplish great things.

Consider the following questions:

  • People do what you incentivize them to do, so are we incentivizing the maintenance of the status quo? Or for seeking excellence? Do we spend energy defending our performance? Or for striving to get better?
  • Are we accountable for maintaining the targeted goal? Or accountable for pushing past it?
  • Focusing on who to blame, or reward, will prevent us from winning the race. This is called siloing. “This is my sandbox, stay out”.  Do you welcome ideas from outside your group and seek constructive criticism?
  • What do you spend your time doing?  Are you making a case for why you are OK?  Or what you intend to do to make it to the next level of performance?

Here, I believe is the secrete sauce:

  • Cooperation. Working together to drive improvement.
  • Open mind to the ideas and criticism of others.
  • Willingness to fail, in order to succeed.
  • Getting out of your comfort zone. Comfortable folks are those to whom the status quo is a good thing, and change is a bad thing.
  • Being just a little bit dangerous.

In my life, I have been most successful when failure was a real possibility.  It makes you come alive to potential.  Answering the difficult questions and tackling the difficult problems give the biggest rewards.  Let’s become dangerous to the status quo.

Teamwork

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My great grandfather had a team of mules he used for farming. He was the envy of the other farmers in the area because, as I learned, it is difficult to get mules work together as a team. Just because you have two mules, you don’t automatically have a team. As a freshman in college he would tell me stories about his mules and how he managed them to become a team. He would also show me letters from all over the mid-west offering to buy his mule team. They were something rare and valuable.

We are not mules.  We make up the human capital of this business.  Human capital is our most valuable asset. As Michael Gurz is fond of saying, machines depreciate in value over time, but people increase in value (and cost). We are worth even more as a team than we are as individuals. So how do you move from a group of individuals, to a team, to a high performance team? 

Warren Bennis, in his book “Organizing Genius”, states, “Good leaders make people feel that they’re at the very heart of things, not at the periphery.  Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization.  When that happens people feel centered and that gives their work meaning”.  This is about giving purpose to our work.  In my experience, after being exposed to purpose, everything changes. 

One of the best opportunities we have in continuous improvement, in my opinion, has more to do with our people than it does our processes. Notice that we use the phrase “continuous improvement” not “continuous process improvement”.  I encourage all of you to invest more into developing your team. This means listening with the intent to understand, asking their opinion, and working to get their buy-in. Leadership is always more effective than supervision.

It is similar to the goose and the golden egg.  If you want more golden eggs, invest in the goose.