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Lessons from a Pocket Card: Standard Work for Leaders

February 9, 2015/in Leadership /by Kaufman Global

Top leaders frequently approach us seeking solutions to their business problems. They want to know what approach we will use, what tools will be applied, how the project will be managed, what results to expect and how we will get their organization to change and sustain? A high-functioning Executive Steering Committee is the most powerful technique for effective change.

These are good questions, yet, their focus is entirely on the problem and the organization. It omits the critical success factor – namely, their own role in driving change.

The question that should be asked is: “How are you going to engage me and my leadership team in this process?”

Seeking the answer to that question means there is recognition that standard work isn’t just for “the doers”. Having a disciplined approach to leading and managing change at the top of the organization is the difference between success and failure. It’s what brings focus and alignment, and therefore prioritization and attention, to the urgent things that must be done.

So what does the standard work of engagement look like for leaders? It’s a question we answer so often it prompted us to create pocket cards that would serve as an easy checklist and guideline. In this case, providing the basic formula for the Executive Steering Committee – the change governance structure. The card does two basic things:

1. Defines the “what” and “how” of the Executive Steering Committee

2. Provides questions to ask on an ongoing basis to test ESC functionality

What more could you be doing to propel your teams and initiatives forward with a standard work structure for leaders that drives focus and discipline? Do an informal audit of your own to identify areas of improvement.

Procedural Adherence: Your Problem is Bigger than Technology

June 9, 2014/in Change Management, Whitepapers /by Kaufman Global

Procedures are Rules

They are the standard practices that organizations use to do things in a consistent way. There is incentive to adhere to procedures. With better procedural adherence (PA), the business is more effective in the work that it does. More efficient too. But rules are not always followed. There are three reasons why:

Procedures are not defined.
People are not trained on the procedures
Procedures are not followed.

A Behavioral Problem

The key to understanding the issue of procedural adherence – that is; why people don’t follow the rules, is knowing that the problem is behavioral, not technical. Sure, you may have some technical issues – like undocumented and poorly trained procedures, but these are less difficult to solve. It’s worth noting however, that there are plenty of opportunities with definition, documentation and training. The following chart shows the traditional response to the problem:

A Behavioral Problem

The most common response to someone not following a procedure – the behavioral problem – is punishment. Punishment is a technical solution. It may address a specific instance of rule-breaking but for every rule enforced with discipline, there are dozens of others not. It’s not an optimal solution and it won’t cause broad compliance or prevent catastrophic failures. To change the status quo, where procedures are randomly and frequently broken, requires a behavioral response because it’s a behavioral problem.

The Target for Better Rule Following

The most common target audience for process standardization and procedural adherence has been the front line of the organization. Within that population, efforts are often focused on repetitive processes like those found in manufacturing. This needs to change. Enlightened businesses extend their efforts to administration, service delivery, field operations, and so on. Even greater opportunities exist at the top and in the middle of the organization. Focusing procedural adherence efforts here can deliver major benefits and value because ultimately it drives the rest of the organization. It is here, at the top, that here behavioral change must start.

Building Blocks for Procedural Adherence

The chart below shows the basic elements of better procedural adherence.

Each of the solutions for the three elements: Have procedures / Understand procedures / Do Procedures / is customized. Technical problems have technical solutions. The behavioral issue is met with a change in behaviors starting at the top. When leadership engages and pays attention to procedural adherence as something that is valued, people pay attention, compliance begins and behaviors start to change throughout.

Procedural Adherence Defined

Procedural adherence means executing against a defined set of standards in a particular way, even when it’s possible that alternative approaches could achieve the same result. When standards are arbitrary, we get chaos ― an environment where infinite possibilities exist and individual preferences prevail, which leads to outcomes that are anything but certain and, more importantly… provides no baseline upon which to build systematic improvements.

Ready to dig deeper? This article is continued in our White Paper: On Procedural Adherence. Click here to register and download the document. In the paper you’ll learn about why the risk profiles for the enterprise are different than for the individual. This mismatch is a major driver of procedural adherence problems.

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Kaufman Global presented Procedural Adherence at the IADC Human Factors Conference in Galveston Texas Oct. 17-18, 2017. If you would like to run through this presentation, contact us and we’ll set up a call.

Employee Engagement Requires Focus

July 25, 2013/in Engagement, Leadership /by Kaufman Global

The following is an excerpt from Kaufman Global’s White Paper: Engage the Organization and a Performance Culture Will Follow. Here we examine the reasons why leaders fail to pursue employee engagement, even while it’s proven to be fundamental to success.

Employee Engagement: Why Do Leaders Fail to Act?

If we accept the idea that a fully engaged organization is fundamental to success, then we must ask, “Why Do Leaders Fail to Act?” The simple answer may be because it is exceedingly difficult to challenge ingrained culture and belief systems. Pushing decisions down, engaging the organization broadly and deeply, and giving up some amount of control is not a simple matter. In fact, it counters the culture of traditionally run organizations.

To dig a little deeper into the reasons leaders fail to pursue engagement, Kaufman Global recently surveyed a large group of top leaders and known change agents. These individuals come from diverse industry backgrounds, such as consumer products, energy, government and technology. Averaging over 20 years of experience, each has a proven track record of successfully engaging and improving their organizations.

6 Reasons Employee Engagement is So Difficult

Too distracted to do anything new
Immediacy – This is the “tyranny of the emergency”
Tools Instead – The belief that workshops and Rapid Improvement Events (RIE) solve employee engagement
Failure to understand how real engagement works
Risk – It’s simply one more thing that inhibits more immediate results
Do not believe it makes a difference.

Each of these are described below.

The question was asked, “If we accept that the leader’s function is to create value and that one vital and comprehensive way to do this is by fully engaging the organization — at all levels and at all times — why do so few leaders truly, actively pursue this essential aspect of sustainability and performance?” Six possible answers were given with a rating that ranged from 1 (seldom) to 5 (often). A summary of the results follow. Additional detail is provided within the white paper.

Distraction | The top reason at 80% is that leaders are too distracted with day-to-day operations and other external inputs to focus themselves or their teams on anything other than existing systems applied to here-and-now deliverables. This defines a mostly reactive environment and one that has multiple competing inputs — often from above. It’s true enough that “Change starts at the top.” With enough distraction the opposite is just as true (and way more common). In this instance, engaging the organization is not valued enough to make it a formal priority.

Immediacy | Next comes immediacy at 72%. Immediacy has to do with the extreme focus on short-term goals and results. There’s no time for something that might not deliver a here-and-now win, requires some level of faith and is even slightly different than anything already being done. Moving upward in the organization, if results are not achieved, personal compensation and job security are at risk.

Immediacy and distraction are intimately linked. Distractions mount as the need for immediate results rises. Two back-to-back quarters of poor performance and the level of distraction goes off the scale. If this cycle goes on long enough, pressure and confusion over priorities lead to loss of morale and disengagement. People tend to exit these types of environments, and it’s unfortunate that engagement — a major mitigation factor and the single greatest contributor to employee morale and retention — is among the first to go and is seldom pursued in a systematic fashion.

Tools | Following closely at 68% is “toolitis.” This is a common ailment of many organizations where things like Kaizen Events, Value Stream Mapping and 5S are viewed as engaging the organization. It’s true that these types of activities get people involved, but only temporarily. Six Sigma is more of an expert practitioner methodology and has even less of an engagement mandate. There are many examples of organizations stalling in their Continuous Improvement efforts when they apply a tools-only approach. They have the tools, but value workers are not compelled to pick them up and use them because they aren’t immediately aware of, or have visibility to, their own performance. “Toolitis” is a big problem within production organizations, where employees find it difficult to expand into business processes because they can’t translate the improvement techniques they started with. Tools are most effective when they held in place with engagement.

All of these factors are closely related and combine to form a powerful barrier to real change. That “fail to understand” and “don’t believe” were scored as significant factors says a lot ― and not in a good way ― about basic leadership and management skills. Training is one element that can help, but people learn through their own experiences that are illuminated by existing values and norms. To change these patterns requires a significant reset on how organizations reward certain behaviors.

These barriers — and they apply at all levels — are daunting for anyone attempting change within the area they control. Some traps are more common depending on where you are in the organization. The lower you go, the more the system will attempt to kill your initiative (i.e., “Not invented here.”, “Who else knows about this?” or “This is not part of your job description.”). As you go higher in the organization, the problems associated with trying anything different prevent ignition ― pick any combination of reasons.

Those in the middle of the organization have simultaneously the most to gain and the most to lose. Here there is a lot of local control over value creation ― therefore the gains can be fast and big. In addition, the personal risk of failure for trying something different is less; yet there is strong attachment to the status quo and disruption isn’t much welcomed. Besides, in many situations, operating marginally better than one’s peers doesn’t require anything as foreign as attempting your own fully engaged organization. Without the support of peers and bosses, mid-level managers quickly start to feel they are rowing upstream alone.

Given all the barriers, it’s amazing that anyone pursues the engagement prerogative, but some do. And when someone, somewhere intends to make a meaningful difference by getting everyone involved to the fullest extent possible, the journey can be made a little easier with well-conceived boundaries that are defined by accountabilities, expectations and metrics. Journeys begin by starting to think about engagement as a process (as opposed to an outcome)…

Ready to dig deeper? This article is continued in our White Paper: Engage the Organization and a Performance Culture Will Follow Click here to download the full text.

Drop us a line if you want to learn more about Kaufman Global’s view on engagement.

Employee Participation: 5 Ways to Boost Engagement

October 2, 2012/in Engagement /by Kaufman Global

Over the past 25 years, we’ve worked with clients around the world by supporting and / or leading Lean initiatives. If there’s any major “lesson learned” we’ve taken away, it’s that employee engagement is critical to success. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a magic potion that could be consumed throughout an enterprise to solve problems or improve efficiencies? Unfortunately, it will never be that simple. The rate, degree and level of change for Continuous Improvement endeavors hinges on people.

Within any transformation journey, employees must be empowered and engaged. Improvement happens in the field, on the factory floor, and within the office one employee at a time. When effective leadership support is in place, employees are more likely to embrace change. Without it… Not so much. There must be concentrated focus on active engagement ― connecting employees to the work they control.

It’s well known that as employee engagement increases, so too does organizational performance. So what are the top, most proven methods for increasing employee engagement? Integro Leadership Institute President Keith Ayers recently identified five leadership skills that are most effective.

#1 Build Trust

Trust is an essential ingredient in increasing engagement. The first thing leaders need to know about building trust is that it does not happen just because you are trustworthy. People do not know how trustworthy you are until you demonstrate it by using trust building behaviors and the most important of these behaviors is to trust others. We build trust by trusting others. This requires a basic belief in people, a belief that people are essentially trustworthy. After all, if you have untrustworthy employees, why did you hire them and why are they still there?

#2 Mentor

The relationship between the employee and his or her immediate manager is a critical factor in how engaged the employee will be. We have to get away from the idea that Managers cannot mentor the people who report to them. Employees need feedback; they need to know how they are performing regularly ― not just once a year at review time. They must be able to discuss their needs for growth and development with a Manager who cares about them. Effective leaders need to give and receive feedback — to coach and counsel employees in a way that increases engagement and commitment.

#3 Inclusion

Whether employees feel like an insider or an outsider also impacts their level of engagement. Effective leaders know that everyone on their team has strengths the team needs, and they know how to get the best out of each person regardless of their ethnic background, gender, age or sexual orientation. They understand that people with different personal values can work together effectively when they commit to the same values about trustworthiness and standards of work performance.

#4 Alignment

Engaged employees feel aligned with their organization’s Purpose, Values and Vision. Their work is meaningful to them because their leader helps them see the connection between what they do and the success of the organization. The effective leader also understands that gaining their team’s commitment to the organization’s values increases the team’s performance standards as well as their engagement.

#5 Team Development

Effective leaders understand the potential for significant increases in performance through high performing teams. They make sure that all team members understand the strengths they and other team members bring to the team and work at developing a process that capitalizes on all of these strengths. The leader’s focus is on developing the leadership potential of each team member and ultimately implementing a shared leadership approach to continuously improve performance that is owned by the team.

Each of the skills above are needed to fully engage employees. In fact, engagement and subsequent results are diminished if any of them are missing. At Kaufman Global, our implementation approach is focused on linking leaders and employees to change initiatives by providing a structure within which the tools of Continuous Improvement are consistently applied. By applying Lean Daily Management System ^® (LDMS ^®) and other methods, we generate engagement and ownership. These practices also drive those critically important business results.

To learn more about how to leverage LDMS to improve engagement — and, ultimately, sustainability — click here to download Kaufman Global’s white paper, “Leading Purposeful Change with the Lean Daily Management System.”