Why is air travel considered one of the safest activities you can engage in?
Because pilots don’t have their own way of operating. Before every flight, even commercial pilots with 20 years of experience, rely heavily on checklists. They perform pre-flight tests of the same items in the exact same sequence every time. It’s their standard work.
Why is air travel considered one of the safest activities you can engage in?
Because pilots don’t have their own way of operating. Before every flight, even commercial pilots with 20 years of experience, rely heavily on checklists. They perform pre-flight tests of the same items in the exact same sequence every time. It’s their standard work.
Respect Every Individual, Lead With Humility
Respecting every individual and leading with humility is the foundation of creating a continuous improvement culture.
When people feel respected, they give far more than their hands; they give their minds and hearts as well.
Do you wonder why after spending millions in consulting fees and internal resources time to implement Lean, Six Sigma, Total Quality Management, Just In Time, and other process improvement systems; nothing seems to stick over time to create a continuous improvement culture in your organization?
Why do these systems fail and people revert to their old habits?
Most likely, it's because you haven't established the cultural enablers required to create a solid foundation for continuous improvement mindset and behaviors in your organization.
Most organizations focus on tools and systems to meet their performance targets. Nothing wrong with that. But tools and systems alone do not operate a business. People do!
Each person within an organization has a set of values and beliefs that influences the way they behave. Ultimately, the aggregate of people’s behaviors makes up an organizational culture, and culture greatly influences the organization’s results.
It is difficult to build a continuous improvement mindset in an organization that fosters fear, fire-fighting, survival, blame, and other negative cultures.
Excellent organizational cultures are built around humility, respect, trust, collaboration, innovation, and empowerment, which unleashes the power and creativity of continuous improvement mindset and behaviors.
How We Can Help
We coach, facilitate, and support the organization in enabling cultural enablers that align strategy, stabilize work, and create a continuous improvement culture.
Changing organizational culture takes time and depends on factors such as:
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Organizational size, complexity, geography, diversity, etc.
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Management desire and commitment to action
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A quality framework for cultural enablers
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Disciplined and focused execution
Depending on the above factors, small companies with few employees, products, and services may take a year or two to develop and sustain a continuous improvement culture. For large and complex organizations it can take a few years and many attempts at developing a desired mindset and behaviors for embedding the continuous improvement culture in the organizational DNA.
Cultural Enablers
Assure a Safe Environment:
Creating a work environment that promotes both the health and safety of employees and the protection of the environment and the surrounding community is a strong measure of respecting the employees, customers, suppliers, the community, and society in general.
Develop People:
Through people development, the organization creates “new scientists” who will drive future improvement. People development is more involved than simple classroom training. It includes hands-on experiences where people can discover new ideas in a way that creates personal insight and a shift in mindset and behavior.
Empower and Involve Everyone:
People are the only organizational asset that has an infinite capacity to appreciate in value. Success can only be achieved when every person at every level of the organization is able to continuously innovate and improve. Elimination of barriers to that innovation is the responsibility of management.
A Learning Organization:
The knowledge of an organization is the cumulative knowledge of its people. As people solve problems, they discover better ways to do things and share them across the organization.
Respect must become something that is deeply felt for and by every person in an organization. Respect for every individual naturally includes respect for employees, customers, suppliers, the community, and society in general.
A leader’s willingness to seek input, listen carefully, and continuously learn creates an environment where team members feel respected and energized and will give freely of their creative abilities.
Improvement is only possible when people are willing to acknowledge their vulnerability and abandon bias and prejudice in their pursuit of a better way.