Leaders who bravely embark on a process improvement initiative, whether in small pockets or across an organization, understandably have high hopes. Fixing broken processes, eliminating activities that don’t add value and making operations run more efficiently all hold the promise of a better, more competitive business.
Often, these efforts deliver impressive wins early on. However, these early successes usually don’t translate into sustainable improvements. Why?
People factors are primary contributor to unsustainable outcomes
The reshaping of employee attitudes and behaviors is just as critical to success as the disciplined implementation of process changes and learning new technology. This is the leadership challenge.
Our team at Growth GPS aims to help business leaders understand the need for behavior change and embrace training in people factors along with the “real work”. By providing leaders, managers and supervisors key leadership skills of communication, coaching and teamwork, we enable them to create synergy and improve results – the building blocks of sustainable performance.
Top 3 People Factors
- People won’t change unless their leaders do
Leaders are often happy to commit upfront to being good role models and supporting process transformation. But too often, these are often empty promises. Leaders may not see themselves as part of the problem, but if you don’t change, how can you expect your employees to change?
- People need to feel that the change really matters
Across the organization, people may hear about the new vision and strategy in town halls or all-hands meetings. Too often the words “this time it’s going to be different” aren’t followed up with action. Employees have heard it all before, so without seeing action from the top, the vision falls on deaf ears. Employees see the latest change as another top-down imperative they know will be replaced with the next new idea in a few months or next year, so they wait it out.
Employees need to see how the change makes a difference for the customer – because they believe that will make the change stick. Besides that, employees need to understand how the change impacts their day-to-day roles. When employees “get it,” then they want the opportunity to contribute ideas to making the change work.
- People want to be involved in shaping change
Effective communication is a two-way process. Only by speaking to employees AND listening to them can leaders and managers truly make the business transformation successful. And after listening, it’s crucial to demonstrate how employee input helped shape the change. People must feel actively involved not only in making the change happen, but in deciding what to change and how to make the team function more efficiently and effectively. Two-way communication supports personal involvement at multiple levels and helps create a vested interest in success.
