Welcome back! Today I wanted to talk about the opposite points to my series on Deming's 14 points. Specifically, the seven deadly diseases he uses as foils to the overall thrust of the 14 points. If you haven't read my series on Deming's 14 points, start with them here. When you're done, this post should make a bunch more sense. If you're already familiar with Deming's work, jump right in.
The "Seven Deadly Diseases"
- Lack of constancy of purpose
- Emphasis on short-term profits
- Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance
- Mobility of management
- Running a company on visible figures alone
- Excessive medical costs
- Excessive costs of warranty, fueled by lawyers who work for contingency fees
Disease #1
Constancy of purpose is so important, Deming makes it his #1 point for management. Let's talk about the opposite of this. Who has worked in a place where there is a "flavor of the week"? How many improvement activities have come and gone? How often is the focus brought down from leadership wander around? This product is more important than that one? Wait! Now this other thing is the number one focus.
Let us consider how lack of purpose affects the people. Obviously, it is bad. Stopping and starting all the time. People don't know where to go with their actions. They will disconnect and we lose their best effort. They will avoid ownership of anything because as soon as they do, someone comes along and all the priorities shift.
When your people avoid ownership, your systems is going to lose potential. Output, the point of what your business does, will not meet potential. Well, maybe it will, and you'll be burning up your people. At some point, the customer will feel your lack of focus. It might be a wrong shipment, a bad product, hopefully it isn't an injured customer from a quality problem. Once your customer finds out you can't deliver it is only a matter of time before they aren't your customer.
Disease #2
This disease relates to the first. Often, lack of purpose is catalyzed by short-term mindsets. We need to get THIS order done now, this one, stop everything else. Then suddenly you are behind in some other area. You aren't spending any time on process optimization because you refuse to focus because you aren't looking past the next sale. You are compromising your potential for now. Your people can see this, though too often, they are hesitant to tell you. I've seen this be a cycle where nobody says anything despite "everyone" understanding the need to slow down, focus, and think long-term.
Disease #3
Performance review systems have only burned me in the past. It took me some years to really understand what it was about them that made me so unhappy. While I understand they are deployed with good intentions, they cause anxiety, contribute to lack of individual focus, and directly relate to "arbitrary quota" mentality. Sure, most places set goals and annual review metrics. But WHY? Too often these are also a distraction from the primary purpose of the employees. So in one way they contribute to other diseases. Lots of review periods are filled with goals outside the control of the employee. Perhaps my biggest point here is by pushing these structures onto people, leadership is allowed to obfuscate their responsibility to fix processes. I finish this rant by asking how many readers who pour their soul into work are rewarded with the "meets expectations"?
Disease #4
Management mobility, if you're not familiar, is were leaders bounce around the organization. This reflects directly to constancy of purpose. Top management is not leading, so they move people around to fight fires (or hire out). Everyone else is then stuck in constant transition and therefore cannot even begin to actually determine where, what, and how to fix anything. The cadence of people with different ideas, styles, and skills adds to the chaos. It is better to have fewer managers than a revolving door.
Disease #5
Not everything is measurable. Do not fall into the trap of only considering your metrics. You likely have many things to manage where, objectively, you cannot measure them. Culture, as a metric, is not something directly measured. The point is to identify where metrics serve you and where they do not. And never assume what you can put into numbers, charts, or graphs is the entirety of the picture. Leaders must have multiple soft skills to be effective. Understanding where hard and soft skills interact is a key component of good leadership.
Disease #6
Excessive medical costs. Deming notes some employers pay more for this than their cost of raw materials. I would correlate this to the previous point. As something you cannot measure directly, the health and well-being of your workforce is of importance to leaders. It is useful to facilitate their mental and physical health via leadership activity and to find the right providers for insurance to maintain proper balance. The customer here is your employee. Leadership must serve them by building processes which prevent undue stress. They are responsible for culture where people are recognized as valuable and are not expended like consumables.
Disease #7
Excessive liability costs. Although the words in the disease talk about legal services, I find myself relating this to company structure and supplier relationships. Company structure should output products where risk has been correctly assessed and mitigated. Suppliers and vendors, including attorneys, need robust process control and relationship management practices. It isn't enough to just pay them for whatever. Toyota exemplifies how to build and maintain supplier relationships with their Lean Enterprise approach.
Start. Somewhere. vs. Diseases
How do all these "do nots" relate to what I teach my clients? Well, I start with why. why are you doing this? Why does this process exist? Who does it serve...and why. Defining, or sometimes redefining your purpose right away can lead to correlated mitigation of other diseases noted here.
The second attack on these diseases my systems do is to define the process. Bad process is the primary reason for stress, errors, and preventable variation. With your why well defined, it becomes easier to dig into process and either justify what it does or notice where is stupid. Always excise the stupid.
If you'd like to explore correcting or mitigating any of these diseases within your organization, schedule a free consultation below.
Together, let's Start. Somewhere.
