how to create a continuous improvement culture Archives

Develop your people first and motivate participation

For a successful cultural change from traditional to continuous improvement, the CEO or company owner leads the way. It does this by ensuring some actions are taken. One of them is to develop your people first and motivate participation.

The mission of continuous improvement is to develop team skills. Teaching and coaching the team to help them reach their maximum potential is a way to show respect. Respect for the people is at the core of lean thinking. Also, it is one of the top three characteristics of the right work environment for CI success.

Develop your people

One of the lean thinking principles is that the people doing the work design it and solve their problems. The leaders guide the team by respectfully asking questions. They teach them problem-solving and data analysis tools and support them in providing resources and removing roadblocks. In other words, the leaders are now coaches, not bosses. The most senior leader coach his or her team, while they do the same with their teams.

To develop your people, start by giving them a purpose

Each one of your employees needs to know how their work affects the company’s bottom line. Let them know how they contribute to achieving the company mission and vision. That is to say, give them a purpose. Learning new skills will be critical to fulfilling their part.

Link the company Vision and Mission statements to the continuous improvement activities. For instance, link them to the company goals and objectives. Continuous improvement is not a project. Instead, it is part of everybody’s daily work. Therefore, participation in CI efforts and training should be part of the performance review program. Ensure that these things are communicated, discussed, and explain to everybody.

Communicate the development plan and motivate participation

Build a team to work on tying together communication, training, participation, and employee’s performance. The objective is to define and clarify responsibilities, set expectations, and incentivize participation. This team is responsible for reviewing the job descriptions, performance system, and incentive program. Also, they are in charge of creating a suggestion program.

An important piece to motivate participation is training tailored to the company and industry. A good trainer will design the training based on the audience and their preferred learning method. Lean is about learning by doing. In the process, it provides enough theory to support the hands-on activities.

Peoples’ development and participation

A continuous improvement culture is a learning culture. Learning by doing is one of its tenets. Another one is to formulate theories for problem-solving or improvement. Following the scientific method, those theories will need to be tested. The success of this process (PDCA) lies in the understanding that it is ok to make mistakes. It requires effective communication and trust between leadership and teams.

The leadership team has to work with their leader to communicate, train, motivate and clarify alignment between objectives and actions.

Culture Transformation Journey

How is Communication in a Continuous Improvement Culture?

Have you ever wonder how communication is in continuous improvement? Poor communication affects productivity, quality, customer experience. Also, it costs money. David Grossman wrote the article titled The Cost of Poor Communications. He reported that the total estimated cost of employee misunderstanding is $37 billion. The article use information from 400 surveyed corporations in the United States and the United Kingdom. On top of that, many companies spend a good chunk of money every year on communication training.

Poor communication is critical for the successful operation of any business. Consequently, can you imagine how critical it is when you are trying to change the culture? For instance, let’s see how communication is in continuous improvement.

Communication in continuous improvement is clear and transparent

Clarity of purpose and transparency are critical elements of the lean culture. Therefore, effective communication is imperative to convey a shared vision of the future that the company wants to build. To inspire people with that vision, you need clarity of purpose. For instance, everybody needs to know and understand how their daily work supports the company’s strategic vision. Moreover, to achieve the dramatic change from a traditional to a continuous improvement culture, people need to trust. Trust grows within the organization when transparency exists, and people receive the information they need.

As a leader, your job is to communicate. For instance, 80% of the time you are communicating instructions, expectations, policies, news, standards, and others. A leader in a continuous improvement culture is expected to be a role model and a teacher. These two tasks are forms of communication.

Many sources offer advice to achieve effective communication. For me, one thing is clear, you need to know when and where or how to communicate. Also, I learned that you need to follow the three C’s of effective communication.

Know your audience

One of the best ways to quickly improve the effectiveness of your communication is to adapt your communication style to match your team member’s styles. You need to know his or her communication style. How do they like to receive the information? Also, how much detail do they like? Adapt your vocabulary and examples to the receiver. Remember that not everybody understands the same kind of jargon.

Choose the best time to start your conversation. Do not try to discuss something with a person who is in the middle of an important task. Show respect, ask for a good time to talk. Besides, where and how the communication takes place is also influential. You don’t need a meeting for everything, sometimes a short conversation over a coffee is more than enough. However, other times an email is ok. But always remember that face to face communication is better. If you choose to send a written communication schedule a follow-up conversation to ensure the message gets through as intended.

The three C’s of effective communication

All types of communication need to have at least these three basic characteristics, clarity, collaboration, and consistency.

Communication has to be clear and simple, avoid fancy words if they are not critical to convey the message. It has to be complete but concise to prevent misunderstanding and gives people the information they need.

Effective communication is a collaborative process, in which two or more people contribute to the talking subject. Communication is a two-way process where both parties send and receive information. If you talk without expecting any interaction from the individual(s) you are talking with, you are making an announcement not communicating. Don’t try to dominate the conversation, give other people a chance to express themselves.

Be consistent, commit to your message and act the same way always. When your words and actions do not match, you lose trust, and credibility.

Communication in continuous improvement

Continuous improvement and lean need effective communication for its success. Lean is a people-centric system, which means that the way you treat and communicate with the people is critical for success. In continuous improvement, we want to make the standards and the deviation from them, visible. We want to communicate the standards and performance against them. 5S, visual management, visual displays, kanban, and others are forms of communication. They are tools to ensure transparency and keep the clarity of purpose by making the information and standards visible.

Leadership & Team Development

Self-discipline, 10 Ways to help your team to build it.

To create new habits you need to build self-discipline.

To achieve a successful continuous improvement culture implementation, leadership needs to Develop new behavior patterns. They will learn and teach new skills to the team. This is by itself a monumental task. To achieve success, self-discipline is going to be paramount.

How do you motivate your employees while helping them to create new habits?

Ten things you can do to help the team to build self-discipline.

Model the new behaviors every day, go to gemba, ask with respect, and always explain why. Set a good example, teach your team how to do it, be consistent and persistent.
Foster an environment of respect and collaboration.
Encourage daily improvements, kaizen events, PDCA, and root cause analysis.
Take your time to listen, get to know your team, and become a teacher and a facilitator.
Give feedback often, create a reward system and a formal performance appraisal program, including a development plan.
Give specific instructions and communicate clear expectations, follow-up, and assess.
Ensure everybody knows the performance metrics used to measure success and make them visible.
Conduct daily stand-up or huddle meetings, discuss what we did good, what we can improve. Celebrate the wins!
Promote customer satisfaction to see the process from customer lenses.
Be present, visit the workplace every day, not just when there are problems. And when you go, acknowledge the good things your team is doing and come back with at least one improvement idea.

Why do you need it in continuous improvement

During a transformation from traditional to continuous improvement, the entire team will need to learn new habits. Self-discipline is the vehicle to let go of old habits and embrace the new ones. The heart of the continuous improvement or lean system is a highly flexible and motivated team member that is always improving.

When employees participate in daily improvement activities, they see the benefits of the new culture. Some of those activities are housekeeping, small improvement steps, problem-solving, and standards review. Becoming an integral part of the company’s success makes the team feel they have a meaningful job. When leadership takes time to listen, teach and learn from them, they build trust and discipline.

Culture Transformation Journey

Develop new behaviors while creating a continuous improvement culture

develop new behaviors for a successful continuous improvement journey

To start the continuous improvement (CI) journey, you will need a culture change. One of the first steps is to learn how leadership and the team will react to it. However, there are a few things that you need to understand before start planning. For example, you will need to learn about the current culture and the company history regarding policies, salary systems, and politics. Moreover, knowing this, you will identify what behaviors need to change. Develop new behavior patterns is the fourth action from the top leadership to-do list to achieve a successful CI implementation.

Say goodbye to old behaviors

Commonly, past collective experience is based on thoughts and behaviors that you need to change. A culture based on disrespect, lack of appreciation, and lack of clarity, is no longer acceptable. Likewise, dysfunctional competition, us versus them mentality, and values talk without action either.

The foundation to develop new behaviors

We need to guide people with a clear, inspiring, and shared vision of the future. Continuous improvement is not easy, and although it has many sweet rewards, it also has disappointments and brings some failures as well. Be honest about the challenges in front of them, answer their questions, and never back up from the objective. Talk the talk, but most importantly, walk the talk, a voice without action will not do any good to gain the trust of your employees.

How to develop new behaviors

Leadership must become coaches who are communicating the idea of continuous improvement all the time. Every leaders’ responsibility is to model the desired behaviors. Learn and practice lean thinking and promote challenging the status quo. Prove with actions that it is ok to try and fail as long as you never stop trying. Show them how to test new ideas using a system like PDCA. Get used to reflect upon every win, and every loss, share the lesson learned and use them to improve the improvement process.

Leaders should watch for stress reactions, such as threats, resignation, or illness. They need to work with those affected to understand why and create an action plan. It is normal to feel high levels of stress or fear because the team is still weighing if they can trust the new culture. There are many uncertainties during the change, and for that reason, constant, honest, and effective communication is critical.

Set achievable milestones, prioritization, and practice positive feedback. Develop a fair performance assessment program designed to develop people’s skills and not to punish them. Avoid anything that can result in frustration or underutilization of individuals.

As I said before, as long as leadership keeps fulfilling their continuous improvement responsibilities, implementation will keep going and slowly, but surely, the culture will change.