Demonstrating Commitment to Process Excellence
A client CEO recently suggested he wanted to demonstrate his commitment to the company’s Process Excellence efforts by participating as a team member in one of the organization’s next Lean Events. This approach is fairly common. Executives often participate in Green Belt courses, some will act as Executive Sponsors for one or more projects led by Belts within their organization, and a few will even lead their own DMAIC projects. These types of highly visible activities usually result in the intended increase of organizational change momentum, but it is often only short lived. Why? Because the Executives are only “walking the walk.”
Oftentimes after the act of demonstrating their commitment, except for the occasional progress review, organization leaders revert back to their old familiar behaviors and work routines. They delegate the pursuit of Process Excellence to those beneath them in the organizational hierarchy. For Process Excellence to weave deep and permanent roots in an organization, leaders need to do more than “walk the walk,” they need to “live the life.”
“Living the life” entails making Process Excellence (including Lean and Six Sigma) a part of everything you do. It includes:
- Personally striving to continually improve the efficiency and effectiveness of all your daily activities.
- Employing Process Excellence as the primary vehicle for achieving the organization’s strategic objectives.
- Utilizing Process Excellence concepts to improve decision making, such as applying the Pareto principle to focus on the critical few items; responding appropriately to special-cause and common-cause variation; asking to see the statistical significance when someone says “something has happened;” and drilling down to identify deep root causes rather than fixing symptoms of poor performance.
- Continuing to investment in Process Excellence, even when times are tough.
- Rigorously monitoring Process Excellence progress and results, and taking appropriate action to improve performance when necessary.
- Linking a large component of company leaders’ compensation to the internalization and effective application of Process Excellence within their organizations.
To gain a better understanding of how much, as a leader, you “live” the values needed to sustain Process Excellence - or Lean Six Sigma - success, download and complete the assessment contained in the following link:
http://proficiencysystems.com/media/Leadership_Self_Assessment_Form%20v1.0%20(090608)_.pdf