Back to: Foundational Continuous Improvement for Leaders
You’re a leader of a team and you’ve heard all the hype about continuous improvement, Lean, and Six Sigma. You want in on the action. Process improvement, eliminating defects, and better performance. Sounds great right? But how exactly do you implement any of these great methodologies? And how do you know you’ve done it right and that it’s working? The purpose of this article is to teach you just that. Keep reading and you will discover an outline and framework for building a culture of continuous improvement on your team. We’ll take you step by step through the beginning stages and help you get up and running quickly with results that will speak for themselves.
What is continuous improvement (CI)?
Before we dive into the how, let’s review what we mean by continuous improvement. Call it a mindset, a philosophy, or even a set of values, continuous improvement is the drive to get a little better every day. It’s as simple as that. Nothing more, nothing less. If your team is making gains and improvements consistently over time, then you are continuously improving. In fact, anything you are doing that supports your efforts to improve is a part of your system of improvement. This is exactly what methodologies like Lean (Toyota Production System) and Six Sigma are trying to articulate- systems and tools that successfully lead to improvement. If you have that desire and drive to want to get better, then you are already on your way and have the most important element of continuous improvement.
How do you “do” continuous improvement?
Let’s get right to the point. Here are the 5 steps described in this article.
5 step CI implementation process
- Focus on basic needs & stability first
- Engage the team in training & project work
- Implement the four fundamentals
- Setting targets, tracking results, rewards & recognition
- Personal leadership continuous improvement
Following these five implementation steps is the key to beginning your continuous improvement journey. Many organizations overlook these steps and skip right to the fancy, sleek tools they hear about and see other companies using. They want to implement flashy “gemba boards”, setup sophisticated poka-yoke devices, and hire vast teams of “black belts” thinking it will improve their operations. Other teams will oversimplify and focus on cleaning work areas and putting tape all over everything to mark where it’s supposed to go thinking this somehow shows what a “lean” culture they have. The truth is these things may be good for a quick win or short terms results, but they miss the entire point of continuous improvement- which is to create a system where the team is constantly improving and getting better.
An in-depth description of each of these five implementation steps are described in sperate articles, but here is a summary of each one below:
Focus on basic needs & stability first– before you worry about improvement, you first need to create a stable environment for you team. Just like people need basic necessities like shelter, food, and water before they can focus energy on other things- teams also have basic needs that need to be met before they can focus energy on improvement. Trying to engage the team in continuous improvement before these basic needs can be met will only undermine your efforts and lead to eventual failure. Some of these basic needs include trust between team members, a safe work environment, a product or service that has value, and job security.
Engage the team in training and project work– once stability is established, 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.
Implement the four fundamentals– as your team starts working to make improvements, guide them to focus first in the four fundamental areas: 1) Good process flow, 2) Standard Work, 3) Improve quality, 4) Eliminating Waste. These are the easiest and most impactful ways to start making gains right away. It will provide a good foundation your team can then build upon as their efforts become more advanced.
Setting targets, tracking results, rewards & recognition– the initial excitement of CI can dwindle quickly after the “honeymoon” phase is over. In the same way people avoid hitting the gym and eating healthy even though they know its good for them, it easy to become “too busy” or complacent with improvement efforts. Setting targets and tracking results is a good countermeasure for this. It also will allow you to positively reinforce behaviors of improvement with recognition and rewards. This in turn helps spread more excitement around continuous improvement.
Personal, leadership continuous improvement– as any good leader knows you must lead by example. If you are asking your team to improve, then you need to set the example by making your own improvements as well. If you don’t, the team will see your hypocrisy and you will lose trust which will undermine the stability you’ve created. Make sure your team sees the value of improvements you are making regularly.
How does CI help? How do you know if you’re doing it correctly?
If you’re wondering why you should put any energy in continuous improvement how it will help, then congratulations you’re asking the right questions. The best way to know and understand the benefits of CI is to try and it see for yourself. Everyone’s application and experience is different, and the “why” behind doing it can be different for everyone. Here are a few general benefits people typically see when implement continuous improvement within their teams:
- It’s fun and engaging for employees. Employees love to learn and grow. Most will jump at the chance to learn a new skill or get a certification in something (especially if it’s on the companies dime). This adds to their engagement and helps them enjoy their jobs more. It helps them feel like you are supporting them and giving them new opportunities as their leader.
- Gives them another way to develop their technical and leadership skills. In most teams the only way for an employee to advance in by going into leadership. This is great for some, but for others who may not be ready for or want to go into leadership it limits their options. Continuous improvement gives them another option and opportunity to feel like they can grow and advance. It also gives them skills that will help prepare them to be a leader should they ever be ready to make that jump. There are many companies that even require their leaders to be certified in CI before they can become leaders.
- Improves speed of delivery. Countless teams have come up with ways to make their processes flow faster. Through focused improvement efforts your team can too. Blow away your customers and your competition by providing faster service than they could ever imagine.
- Improves quality. Eliminating quality defects, errors, and frustrated customers is another way continuous improvement can benefit your team. Work together to find solutions to common problems that happen and eliminate them for good.
- Reduce costs. One of the side effects of eliminating waste from your processes and improving quality is that your costs will go down. You can save money and become more profitable as you make more and more improvements.
- Improved business results. Businesses have many diverse goals and targets, and implementing continuous improvement is a great way to help your team get better at hitting those targets and improving business results. Whether it’s more consistently hitting sales targets, reducing the wait time in your emergency room, or getting higher customer satisfaction scores, continuous improvement can help your team find way to get the results you want.
Hopefully this list gives you some beginning ideas of why you might want to implement continuous improvement on your team. As you try and experiment on your own team, you will find additional reasons why you personally like it. These are also good ways to measure and know if your efforts are working. If you are seeing these things happen on your team, then that is an indicator you are doing something right. If you aren’t seeing any of these things; or worse, if its creating contention or results are negatively impacted, then that’s a sign you should probably reevaluate your approach or get some help.