Step 2 of 5: Engage Your Team in Training & Project Work

Back to: Foundational Continuous Improvement for Leaders

As was mentioned already in our article Getting Started with Continuous Improvement, there are 5 steps to implementing continuous improvement. In this article, we will discuss the second step which is to engage your team in CI training and project work. Once stability is established within your team, the second step is to empower or set an expectation of improvement and provide the team with knowledge and training that will help them get started. Let them know that not only can they make improvements, but you fully expect them to. Challenge them to start completing their own small improvement projects and create a framework that makes it safe and easy to do so.

Empower & set expectations for improvement

Believe it or not, many companies around the world do not have a culture where innovation and improvement are encouraged. In fact, in many cases the opposite culture exists. Many are satisfied to come to work and do their job without much thought toward improvement. In some extreme cases employees are encouraged to keep quiet and just do as they are told. Sometimes people are punished for taking risks and trying new things. Due to this general mindset in the workforce as a whole, it is important for you to set the right expectation with your team up front- that it is not only ok to make improvements to the work, but it is highly encouraged. Discuss with them what continuous improvement is and why you want to encourage it in your team. Share with them your vision of what you would like to achieve in terms of improvement. Challenge them each to start individually by coming up with one improvement to make their jobs better. Another approach might be to brainstorm together a team process that can be made better and improve it together. It doesn’t matter what it is, the idea is to take a step forward in making CI a part of your everyday team culture. Nothing will happen if you don’t first set the expectations for action and results. In summary here are some initial steps to set expectations:

1. Openly discuss what continuous improvement is and why you want to do it as a team.
2. Share your vision of what you want to achieve.
3. Challenge each of them to start by making one improvement.

Once the initial discussion and expectation have been set, you’ll need to reinforce it. This would include following up with them to see how their improvement ideas are coming along. It could become a regular agenda item in one of your re-occurring team meetings. Help them to find time to work on their improvements. Discuss it frequently and keep it top of mind. When someone makes an improvement be sure to share it with the team and praise them for their efforts. All of these things will help reinforce the expectation to improve.

There are also some behaviors to avoid so that you don’t stifle your improvement efforts before they start. As a leader of the team, you have significant influence over whether or not CI will succeed or fail on your team. These behaviors can instantly kill any CI effort:

• Shooting down ideas
• Scrutinizing the value or benefits of the improvements
• Over-riding a change without good cause
• Forcing your own ideas on the team
• Keeping them overworked and too busy to improve
• Never talking about continuous improvement
• Punishing them for experimenting or taking a risk

Provide training to help them get started

For some, making process improvements will come naturally and they will get very excited about it. For others it may be challenging to know where to start. One of the best ways to help people get started is by providing them with training in continuous improvement concepts and then having them apply what they learned by making improvements. The Standard Continuous Improvement Certification is a great program to use for this. Share this program with your team and encourage them to enroll. As their leader, you may even want to require their participation, but that’s up to you. Even if they don’t want to formally become certified, they should at least read the course materials and become more familiar with these important CI concepts.

Once team members enroll, be sure to support and help them through the certification. They will likely need your help thinking of improvement projects to do and carving time out of their day to work on them. Help them choose projects that support your team strategy and goals and will ultimately bring value to them and/or the team as a whole. Openly share and discuss with the team, who is participating and how they are progressing. Discuss project ideas and share the results when projects are completed. Since the training is all self-driven with an open timeline, you may want to help them set deadlines to complete their projects and finish the certification.

One thing to help your team avoid when choosing their projects, is selecting improvements that are too large in scope and/or very difficult. This often occurs with people who are first starting with CI and they want to take on the world and do something amazing that will blow everyone away. While projects like that are amazing, they are often very difficult and can take months or even years to complete. As your team first starts their journey they’ll want to focus on smaller improvements that can be implemented quickly and easily. An ideal project is an improvement that can be made over the course of a few hours or days. Even two to three weeks time is much better than a project that will take 2-3 months or more.

Focus the team on completing small improvement projects

The first eight weeks of your CI implementation are critical to build credibility and momentum. Some will be skeptical at first that this program is another fad or temporary flashy trend that will soon go away if ignored. Your consistency and persistence will help them start to see it as a new part of your culture… or even better- an extension of important values already in place. The key to gaining momentum is to focus people on completing improvement projects. Reading study materials and group discussions are good, but the true value comes from making changes and improvements. In the first eight weeks, a person should be able to complete 1-2 improvement projects. With multiple people participating on your team that should translate into 5-10 projects completed in those first two months. If you can achieve that, or come close to it, you are off to a good start. After that, you’ll have to decide with your team what a sustainable level of project output will be. One improvement project a month is a pretty rigorous schedule to maintain. One every other month, or one every quarter is realistic for many teams. In the best case scenario, your team members will enjoy these projects and have fun doing them… so you won’t need to set stringent targets and goals to push them. They will continue to do projects naturally. On the flip side of things, for some people, setting an expectation of one project completed per quarter (or something similar) is a necessary motivator. Whatever you decide, just be sure to build off of your initial momentum and keep people focused and engaged on small project completion. When you can have a stream of improvements being implemented, month after month then you know you have been successful in your implementation of CI.

Here is a summary of the suggested implementation roadmap: