Process Alchemy

Having worked with management teams for nearly three decades, you start to see the same patterns repeated constantly. The same mistakes recur, even by the same team, years apart. Lessons are learned quickly at the time, and then swiftly forgotten.

Let’s explore some factors that perpetuate these failures:

The Focus on Being Positive This one is tough because the intention is good, but it’s actually best to take a counterintuitive approach. There are various ways this presents itself:

Shooting the Messenger We’ve all either witnessed this or been the recipient of some sort of retaliation. Someone attempts to deliver what is considered “bad” news, and there’s an effort to put a marketing spin on it to spare feelings, hide how bad the issue is, or protect a person or team’s reputation. This presents many issues for the organization:

• Instead of quickly investigating the issue, getting more data, and understanding its magnitude, we waste time in denial. We allow the potential situation to continue brewing until it can no longer be hidden. It usually escalates from a manageable problem to a crisis requiring firefighting.
• You begin to create a scenario where you reward the firefighter and ignore messenger. For some reason, there is often some level of retaliation here. You exclude them from meetings or they are given a reputation for being “negative”.
• You make the subtle statement that bringing up issues in a timely fashion is not appreciated. This will eventually perpetuate the cycle of continuously being blindsided by issues. If you do further investigation, you will likely find that many people saw the situation coming but decided it was not in their best interest to bring it up. They can usually tell a story of what happened to others who did.

Not Having Good Lead Indicators In my experience, most metrics focus on performance or answering the question, “how well are we doing?” This is fine until things are not going well, and then there is a panic to figure out what went wrong. We all understand garbage in equals garbage out. However, how often do you truly understand how this applies in your organization? What are the most important pieces going into the process that you should be monitoring for quality? In today’s business world, things change quickly, for example, when:

• Someone leaves and an inexperienced person takes over the process. You begin to see quality issues through process mistakes and defects.
• Changes are made by the supplier (internal or external) without your knowledge. Someone decides to “improve” their process to cut time, costs, etc. They believe the quality is the same, but you discover a negative impact over time.
• Business rules change and you are not prepared to adapt quickly. This is happening more often in changing cybersecurity and privacy standards. This may require a software change or sometimes a new process change by employees.

When was the last time you reviewed all of your metrics to see if they were good enough to give you a true reflection of your organization’s health? Most companies track too many things, wasting valuable resources. I always remind people that unless a change in the metric automatically forces you to make a decision, you probably don’t need to track it. Month-end reports are enough to show you the overall picture.

Issue Reporting Process What is the process your staff uses to bring up issues? Is it highly informal? Does it depend on the team or the manager? If so, you will likely see high-performing teams who can identify and address issues quickly. They have a high level of psychological safety and trust and can get to the issue swiftly without navigating a lot of bureaucracy or hurt feelings. Then there are those teams where everyone walks on eggshells, spending more time thinking about how they will present the issue versus working on it.

Organizations are living entities. Being more process-driven with clear instructions helps the entire workforce support each other effectively and efficiently. Make it easy to do work well. Have a lot of transparency in your processes with good feedback mechanisms that allow you to act proactively instead of constantly being blindsided and forcing reactionary behavior. Ensure all your teams have ways to communicate issues quickly and effectively.

Maribel Topf has over a decade of teaching companies to transform their businesses through operational excellence. Please join https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14445339/ Lean Office Excellence for more stories into creating a culture of operational excellence.