Do What You Say You Will
In Keeping Good Employees I talked about asking some simple questions. The biggest mistake I see managers make is to fail to deliver on what they say in such meetings. There is the saying “It is better to be thought a fool than speak, and prove it.” Well it is better to be thought a pointy haired boss than to ask for feedback, then ignore it, and prove you are a PHB. This behavior is extremely common with a survey of employee satisfaction but can extend to any failure of management follow through. If you are not going to act on what good employees tell you - don’t ask.If some of what they mention is something you disagree with, then explain that to them. Even bad decision making that is explained is better than no explanation and no action. If you end up explaining why no action can be taken on any suggestion then employees should rightfully (most likely) find you lacking. One aspect of the explanation is to educate them for future suggestions - there may well be factors they don’t think about that you must. But, even in such a case the best practice is normally to adjust the idea a bit to make it workable.
 Encourage Improvement Action by Everyone
Centralizing decision making is not an effective way to manage organizations. Organizations need to encourage improvement by everybody in the organization. We need to create a system where that is encouraged and supported. However, there can be problems with just making improvements individually. We tend to overreact to variation. Therefore we tend to tamper with systems which actually increases variation and reduces performance. Also there can be effects on other parts of the system due to a change that are not obvious at the point of change. We need to remove undue bureaucracy. However, it is good to remember that, such efforts are much more effective and safe when supported by a good system (standardization, PDSA, visibility, communication, lean thinking, well trained workforce…).Without an understanding of systems and interactions sometimes changes are made without an understanding of the consequences those changes. The beer game is a good example of one way this can cause problems (people don’t always understand all the consequences of their actions). To be clear I agree with setting up systems that allow people to make improvements in the workplace. Just be cautious to avoid tampering. The way to be cautious is not to prevent people from trying to improve but to be sure everyone has an understanding of system thinking, variation… With an understanding of the systems, and interactions, people can make the distinction between simple changes that are very unlikely to have an undesirable affect later and other types of changes. I believe the goal is to trust them to make the right decisions on what can just be done and what should be piloted (pdsa) or discussed more thoroughly first.Take the effort to help people see the systemic effects of change and understand variation. They will then make more effective simple changes and be able to determine when systemic problems require a more thorough process improvement process be used to improve the system.
“Having no problems is the biggest problem of all.” - Taiichi OhnoÂ
I understand that most managers feel that their employees should not bring them problems. Instead, expressed in the most positive way, employees should fix things or bring possible improvements. However, I think that is poor management.I understand there may well be more detail than you provide that adds a more sensible (but more complex) reaction that stated in your post about your situation. However, there are many example, of bosses that expect their people not to bring them “bad news” not to bring them “problems” and that attitude is exactly wrong in my opinion.What they are saying is: if you know of a problem but don’t know of a solution I would rather have my company continue to have that problem than admit some of my staff don’t know how to fix it (and then have to deal with it myself - maybe then having to accept responsibility for results instead of just blaming you if I am never told and there is a problem later…). I think that is setting exactly the wrong tone to set.Employees should fix things. They should bring solutions to managers to improve things that might be out of their ability to fix. But if they know of a problem and not a solution and a manager tells the employee they don’t want to be brought problems then I don’t want that manager.If an employee never learns how to find possible solutions themselves that is not a good sign. But it is much, much better to bring problems to managements attention than to fail to do so because they know the manager thinks that doing so is weak. It is the attitude that problems are not to be shared that is weak, in my opinion.
Respect for People - Understanding Psychology
Process improvement tools offer great resources to improve results. Dr. Deming included understanding psychology as one of the 4 areas of his management system. He understood organizations where not machines but systems made up of people. Therefore management needs to reflect that reality. -Lee Fried discusses these ideas in It is All About the People:We may organize and teach around the process, but it is the people that we really need to change if we want to show long-term sustainable improvement. This is exactly why every organization that treats Lean as a process improvement methodology or a set of tools fails in their efforts.
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I know now that in the early stages of Lean transformation improvement should not be measured by project charts or number of improvement events. The foundational work of changing the way people think and behave needs to be done first, done correctly and done at the rate it can be absorbed by those that are doing the work in the first place.I see building improvement capacity of the organization, which largely means building the capacity of the people, as an extremely important focus of improvement efforts. As he mentions, it is at times, important to slow down the pace of change to ensure that people can adopt and incorporate the new concepts fully. If not the improvements tend to only take effect on the surface. Improvements in results are important but it is also critical to have management improvement concepts adopted as the natural way of doing business. And reaching that point most likely requires a focus on making that happen as well as improving processes… This split focus may seem to dilute effort but it is the most effective long term strategy (the time invested today in building capacity will make the management changes much more likely to sustain over the long term and will improve results over the long term).
 This reminds me of a fundamental lesson I learned from my mentor years ago. In essence, “You cannot lead people to where you want to go, even if you are right. You can only lead them to where they want to go.”
People are Our Most Important Asset
One of the beliefs I try and get the organizations I work for to adopt is to truly value excellent people. The costs are challenges of hiring great people, to me, makes it critical to do what you can to keep your exceptional people. I probably haven’t written about this because it can conflict with my advice against performance appraisals. I do actually believe it is possible to know certain people are great and contribute greatly to the success of your organization. I also believe many (a majority) organizations do such a bad job of identifying those people they shouldn’t even try. But if you can identify some people that seem to be positive special causes of success there is a good argument for making sure they are happy.I don’t believe you should try to pay these special employees fairly. Overpay them. I would much rather waste (10-20% on extra pay) than pay them fairly and make it easier for them to switch to another job. Talk to them and make sure they are doing what they want and making the progress they want. I find (I don’t have enough data to know if this is generally true) that the best people complain the least and so you need to make extra efforts to find out what they might like to see improved.Don’t focus all of your energy on putting out fires and expect those that keep their areas of responsibility in decent shape without your intervention to just cope on their own. Since many managers adopt this “only dealing with the squeaky wheel” strategy (without saying that is what they do, of course), force yourself to spend time coaching, learning, helping… the most successful - as well as others. I want to have employees delighted (all of them ideally, but at least those that are most critical). As Deming said it is easy for competitors to take away satisfied customers - it is not easy for a competitor to take away delighted customers. The same holds for employees. If you are concerned that this is in conflict with some of Deming’s ideas I think you are right. Ideally the entire company would be optimized so that all employees were delighted (as much as that is possible obviously even delighted employees might not love everything they must do or prefer to be at the beach some days…) within the context of the best overall management system for the organization (improving employee satisfaction is part of the system needed to optimize results for all stakeholders). So ideally the organization would be providing all employees excellent coaching opportunities, all employees would be paid more than fairly, all employees would have the opportunity to develop along their desired plan, all employees would have great leadership, all employees would not be subject to continually annoyance of management system failures, all employees could count on the support of the system when needed…But in organizations that I have worked for we are have not reached that point. So while working to move the organization closer and closer to that goal, I believe making some extra effort to focus on those people that are helping move the organization in that direction. But it is risky if done without an understanding of systems, variation, psychology, etc. Providing extra coaching, advice and attempting to protect people from the management failures you can’t get fixed seem like pretty safe methods. Learning what goals the person has and helping them get there is also important (which is a big part of coaching - giving them opportunities to develop and grow with support). Without this effort what I have noticed is that you lose the people you most want to keep to new opportunities.In my opinion, it is critical, in order to do this well to apply all the management improvement understanding to this effort. I put a huge focus of the coaching on getting them to understand management improvement ideas. My efforts in this vein are focused on two things: building organizational capacity (and their individual capacity) and attempting to move them from dissatisfaction, or satisfaction, to happiness (delight so far has not really been a reasonable aim). Along these lines improvements in the system often have the dual benefit of improved performance and increased employee satisfaction. At the worst (if they leave) I hope they can carry some of the management improvement ideas to future jobs and find more success and happiness due to the knowledge and experience they gained working together. Â
