Welcome back, this is day ten of my 14 day blog series about Deming's 14 points. Each day I go over a new one in an order defined by an ASQ reference book. I explained it here, so take a look if you want. I also try and keep these brief, you're busy and I want to respect your time. It is possible to go crazy in-depth with Deming's work, as he was brilliant. I have not done so here. Some surface level discussion and I'll give you a tiny (read: poor) sales pitch on my Start. Somewhere. system. Anyway, I'll get to the point, pun intended.
Drive Out Fear
Effective communication removes fear from your organization. Working on all the previous points, you should be in a position in your company to ensure communication up and down the chain functions. To actually remove fear from organizational interaction, employees must be free to express ideas and take ownership. Leaders must be willing to respond to needs and work on idea implementation. A high level of effective communication indicates a healthy organization.
Communication is a culture function. Leadership, leveraging their purpose, must commit to action to promote this culture. Mechanisms I recommend to get results here.
- Let people with ideas flesh them out and run them for two weeks
- Make sure they are compatible with process, to ensure you don't have a problem, and let people experiment
- Weekly status meetings
- people get to vent, propose ideas, talk about the ideas currently in testing
- Leaders who attend these listen, don't talk, and take notes
- Recognize the employees who pitch ideas, even if they aren't used
- Idea boards
- I like the "PICK" structure for these
- Possible, Immediate, Complex, Kill
- Ideas have to move on the board or people will lose faith
- If you don't have the bandwidth for a physical board, Google forms can help you
- Leadership is seen responding to questions and ideas
- Training programs that don't stop after you finish your required stuff
- Continuous training is underutilized in all industries
- Best practices and lessons learned, those weekly meetings should create some of these references, this is why leaders are taking notes
Start. Somewhere. & Fear
The Strat. Somewhere. system is really a leadership and culture system in a trench coat pretending to be a process improvement system. This is by design. I realized a long time ago nothing gets better without good leadership driving healthy culture. Nothing else makes things happen. Well, force can make things happen, the results are never as good.
Start. Somewhere will get you a fantastic structure to isolate systems and make them better. The accessory pieces will help and show you how to be better as a leadership teaming build a culture you want.
If you'd like to hear more, smash that Start link at the top of screen, or setup a free consultation. Thanks for reading today.
