Home Page |
Resource Links |
Free Copies |
Free Books |
Humor |
Teaching Insights |
Facilitator Toolbox |
Contact us |
CHAPTER TWO: COMMITMENT TO CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT
from
When "Good Enough" Isn't Good Enough,
Core Ideas of Total Quality
© by Ends of the Earth Learning Group 1998
by
Linda Turner and Ron Turner
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven | References and Copying Rights |
Committing to continuous improvement sounds totally innocent on the surface. In
fact, one's first instinct is to say, "Well of course, it makes perfect sense. How could
anyone oppose it?" Everyone claims they want to get better and better.
Most people, however, tend to use at least some of the following cliches. As you read
them, consider what message they are telling about attempts to improve things.
"If it ain't broke, why fix it?"
"Are you saying there's something wrong with what we're doing?
"I've been doing it this way for twenty years and never got any complaints before."
"There's only one way to do a job:
the right way."
"Why re-invent the wheel?"
"We're already the best."
"Why bother?"
"We did it this way twenty years ago, and it didn't work then."
"Good enough!"
"This ain't no piano we're making."
(Quoted by a group of carpenters constructing a
nuclear power plant.)
|
Continuous improvement means that goals should not be anything less than perfection.
Since it is impossible to be perfect, that means there will always be room for
improvement regardless of how good processes get.
When "good enough" attitudes are prevailing, then goal setting shoots for something
"reasonable." This leads to a "target trap." People start working for the minimum, rather
than working on continuous improvement.
|
Commitment to continuous improvement cannot be an empty commitment. It means the organization is dedicating 5% to 10% of its time and resources to improvement efforts such as training, meeting time, development of feedback loops, etc. This is a far greater commitment than most organizations are ready to adopt.
|
Educators who commit to continuous improvement will spend five minutes out of every
hour in order to get feedback and ideas for improving classes. This means less lecture
time, but in the long run it will mean more effective lectures.
Teams will similarly commit time out of every meeting for examining their team
processes. Commitment to continuous improvement should permeate every activity by
every individual within the organization. Nothing should be considered sacred and
immune from review.
Many people resist giving up work time for process improvement. Like the GM visitors
to Toyota, they see the 5% to 10% time commitment as a cost and not an investment.
In the long run, those individuals and organizations that do commit to continuous
improvement will become far more efficient and will get more done. Those who don't
commit will stand still and live with a status quo that never gets better.
Experimentation is part of any Total Quality organization. Necessarily, with
experimentation, there will be a need for good data collection in order to document if
changes made things better or worse. This means replacing guesswork with hard facts. Assertions and
assumptions have to start being questioned without people becoming defensive and
emotional in response.
|
The work environment itself needs to not only drive out fear, but to replace a culture of
"control" with one of "learning." "Common sense" to traditional managers means the top
of the organization must control everything happening at the bottom. This control
mentality leads to red tape and rules that limits learning so that only the top managers
learn and no one else.
|
1. TRUST: There must be trust both of management and peers. This means the
organization must commit its energies to driving out fear and changing behaviors which
cause fear to rise. This usually will require management to promise that improvement
will not result in someone losing their job.
For managers on teams, there must be a role shift that puts them in a peer relationship in which their opinions are accepted not through fear, but rather only when the rest of the team agrees that the opinions are best. Continuous improvement will not take place if individuals fear the consequences of contradicting the boss or contradicting any of their peers.
2. PEOPLE MUST BELIEVE IN THE FUTURE. People must believe they will have a job beyond next week. If there is no belief in the future, then individuals will be spending their energies looking for another job instead of being focused on the continuous improvement efforts of the organization.
3. RESPECT AND DIGNITY. Individuals must learn how to truly listen to one another with empathy. No yelling or "running down" of people should be permitted by either supervisors or peers. People need to respect the feelings and beliefs of others even when they disagree with those feelings and beliefs.
4. THE POWER TO CHANGE THINGS. People must be given the tools and authority to actually change things. Nothing demoralizes people more than to ask them to improve things without also giving them the means for living up to that responsibility.
The fastest way to kill input is for management to summarily reject recommendations from its process improvement teams or individuals working on improvement projects.
5. TEAM APPROACH. Egos must be put aside. People must start to recognize that system improvements are due to joint efforts and not individual efforts. For instance, brainstorming in a group will produce more ideas than can be produced when the same set of individuals work alone. The product of brainstorming is a team product and not owned by the individual who actually came up with the idea the group eventually approves.
Teamwork, when functioning at its best, can do something that no individual alone can do, and that is "create geniuses." When groups of people work together they can be more creative and solve more problems than the smartest, most creative individual in the group.
6. REWARD COOPERATIVE EFFORTS. Most "common sense" notions of the world stress individual rewards rather than group ones. Learning environments shift the focus to joint efforts and joint rewards..
|
A baseball team is far better off when awards are for total home runs by the team, or
awards are for any player who gets homeruns beyond some threshold. World series
bonuses, for instance, are distributed equally across a team in order to encourage
everyone to look out for the interests of the team as a whole.
Don't set up situations where there can be only one "winner" such as "Employee of the Month" or "Team of the Year."
|
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven | References and Copying Rights |