Confrence Call – Getting People to See Opportunities For Improvement Part I
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You’re running your company/department/team and you realize that things could be better. You’ve read an article or taken a short class on Lean, Six Sigma, Emotional Intelligence, or some other method to improve your performance and you want your team to see all the possibilities that you see. You want them to run with all these great cost saving and revenue generating ideas and you get excited at the possibilities. There is just one challenge and that is your team doesn’t see what’s possible and isn’t on the same page as you. So why is it that your team “just doesn’t get it?” We’ll have you considered that you’re one person an there are many people on the team so they may be thinking the same about you? It’s like you are arm wrestling with a gorilla who is 800 pounds bigger than you and by the way the gorilla has all the momentum and that creates a large mountain of change that can be difficult to climb. What most leaders forget is that people are irrational and rational at the same time so you have to appeal to the emotional side of a person as well as the rational side. There are several factors you need to consider when you want to get buy-in from your team to align with what you are doing.
Build an Emotional Tie and Big Picture
This can be done two main ways. 1) The Burning Platform 2) The Shared Vision. You are trying to move people out of their comfort zone and into a new level however that doesn’t just happen. Most people will say build a burning platform and fear people into change. My personal preference is to create a shared vision with the team on where they want to go. This is much more inclusive and aspirational and tends to be more sustainable than a fear based tactic. Techniques like Appreciative Inquiry are great ways to build a shared vision.
Why/What/How Is It Important
Now that you’ve developed an emotional pull towards a direction, start to appeal to the rational side of people and explain to them why you as a leader want the team to change what they are doing to a new way. People are naturally curious about what might be coming up and chances are you will get a wide range of emotions from “will I lose my job” to “I can’t believe we’ve waited this long to change something.” This step goes hand and hand with building the emotional tie and the big picture. For example if you wanted to do start Lean you explain to the team how you want to go about trying it. Most importantly make sure you tie it into your big picture from above. For some that will be tying it into the burning platform. For others it’ll be the shared vision.
Awareness/Training and Seeing and Doing Things Differently
One of the first steps you’ll want to take in applying your improvements is to make people aware of what you are trying to do by getting to them have their own AH HA! moment similar to what you experienced. This can be done several ways including formal training, daily informal training, or with project work. I would recommend using a blended approach and trying all three. Having the awareness is one thing but taking the awareness and applying it by seeing the same company differently is a different story.
When you look at an optical illusion people usually only see one of the two items in the illusion. Take the example above, do you see the young women looking away or do you see the face of an old woman in profile? If you have ever been frustrated at not these types of illusions then you can empathize with some of your employees who may not see the benefit of trying something new. When I go into a manufacturer and start to do a waste analysis on a process we usually find that around 99%+ is waste in the process. Of course everyone is in a bit of shock because they would have never thought it would be so high. With Lean the framing of a situation is done by asking what is valuable here. With Six Sigma the framing is what needs to be the output and where are the possible defects that can occur to prevent the needed outcome. If your employees have never framed a situation with a Lean or Six Sigma frame then there will naturally be emotions of doubt and skepticism. During this step there needs to be that understanding and patients with people while they learn and are giving opportunities to learn. This is also the critical part in the process where if someone gets stuck it’s usually in this position of going from awareness to implementing.
Blockages
The step from awareness to application and seeing new possibilities is the critical step that can have many blockages for people. These blockages include personal defenses, lack of trust, lack of social capital to help change the current culture, and lack of alignment. We’ll explore these blockages more in part II.
Summary of Part I
When getting your employees to see opportunity start with these steps:
Please see the referring post How to Retain Customers – Listening to the Voice of the Customer
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Usually at some point during dealing with clients the question of how to retain and gain new customers comes up. A good starting place is to listen to what the customers have to say. There are several ways to get their feedback from doing surveys, to involving them in your strategy sessions. In other blogs I’ve talked about ways to use things techniques like Appreciative Inquiry and how you can include your customers into the discussion of your companies future. Another approach that works very well is to survey the customers. We’ll dive deep into the survey and how you can use it.
1) On a scale from 1-10 (10 being the most likely) how likely are you to recommend XYZ company to a friend or colleague.
2) Why would you rate XYZ company that way
3) What is the strength of XYZ company and why did you pick them?
4) What are some of the things XYZ company can do better?
How Listening to the Customer can Help Retain Customers
The first question is very telling. If they rate you as a 9 or 10 then they are going to actively be fans of your company. A 6,7, or 8 means they are fairly neutral. Below a 6 and chances are they are actively talking bad about you in some way. Word of mouth reputation matters to your business. The rest of the questions are follow ups to try to get to the root cause of success or failure. You will probably want to go deeper into each question on a customer by customer basis.
Before we started a strategy session with client we did a survey with 8 of their existing clients. Ideally we would like to do 30+ but 8 was all we could get access to and is enough to start getting some good information. During the survey we found that 4 people rated the company either a 9 or 10 and 4 rated them between 6-8. The results were anonymous and this came as a surprise to the leadership team. They thought they were going to score much worse. What we found was that the strength of the company was in building the relationships with the clients and getting to understand their needs. Their weaknesses included a lack of follow through and communication. Given this information the team did some interesting things with their strategy. Of course they decided to revamp part of their team and process to enable better communication. The interesting thing was that they actually started to institute a relationship building learning program into their company. They realized that this would be a critical competitive advantage to keep and attract customers. Just by asking some simple questions they were able to get great insight on what is so special about their company and how to use that to their advantage. What do you think your customers would rate you?
Our conference call topic next week will cover the voice of the customer so please sign up for the call-in number and reminder.
If you enjoyed this article you may also enjoy Motivating Employees Without Money: The Carrot and the Stick
Please see the referring post Where to Start Lean or Another Change Initiative
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Starting Lean other change efforts can seem overwhelming. When considering where to start a lean effort or any other change effort there are two main considerations:
1) What is the best place to start from a business performance standpoint (technical consideration)
2) Where does the culture support the change (behavioral consideration)
Technical Considerations/Criteria
I like using a scoring system to understand if an area is a good area to begin here are some considerations:
If you answer yes to all the higher the ratings the better the area to focus.
Behavioral Considerations/Criteria
The behavioral considerations can be even more critical to success when choosing a place to start a lean or other change initiative. Here are some initial criteria to help you determine an area to choose.
If you answer yes to all the higher the ratings the better the area to focus.
Other Considerations
Here are some rule of thumbs that will help you maximize your success.
For more information on what kind of environment to create please read Climbing the Mountain of Change.
Join our Conference call next week where we’ll cover the topic in detail.
I was on the radio the other day talking about strengths based Lean and how it can help revive manufacturing.
If you are going to through a change like Lean or Six Sigma there are many things you want to consider. One fact is that at best only 30% of any kind of change you do is typically sustainable and gets the results you had hoped for. Here are the variables that will help you be successful:
These are some of the items you should be aware of when you start a change effort like Lean or Six Sigma. there are many other factors like alignment to strategic plans that are needed but don’t have to be implemented right away.
Typical results:
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Here are some of the ideas that are in the works:
-Distance facilitation
-Online coaching for managers
-Full package implementation (strategy, org structure, training, and some projects) at a single price point
-Strengths based problem solving
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