Creating Opportunity With Numbers

Let's start today with your to-do list of tasks awaiting your attention. Take a good look at each task and honestly answer, just how did that get on my list! How many of the action items on your list are about some new fire that needs to be put out? While leadership is a tricky business, the bigger challenge is not having everything land on your desk. To get your time focused on what matters most, we need to get the highest number of your organization's staff proactively engaged in creating opportunities for improvement to prevent new fires from happening.

Simply put, do you want one person making fifty decisions, or fifty people each making one? Engaging more staff in making improvements that matter to them creates ownership for outcomes, raises staff satisfaction levels, and improves sustainment of implemented changes. Imagine how much more responsive and smooth running your organization would become if you invested the time to teach and prepare others to improve processes, products, services, and the physical layout of work spaces.

There is an Italian proverb: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for his life time.

Our objective today is to stop giving staff the fish. To accomplish our objective, we need to deploy a proven approach that works in any business or medical environment. The approach I recommend is a program called Continuous Daily Improvement also known as CDI.

The mainstay of a CDI program is a tool called a Huddleboard. The Huddleboard is typically a magnetic white board segmented into six sections used by Front Line Staff to collect, evaluate, track the implementation, and celebrate completed improvement suggestions. Staff huddle at the board at regular intervals to review new improvement suggestions, evaluate the benefit of implementing a suggestion, and provide status of ongoing improvement efforts. A significant benefit of Huddleboards is that staff can visually see where their suggestions are at, that the organization is interested in their ideas, and provides them the time and/or support to make improvements in their area. That's right, the front line staff is acting upon their ideas for improvement.

What we do as leaders is guide our front line staff during their improvements and show them how to responsibly trial tests of change. Once the change is implemented, we guide our staff through the writing and training of other staff on the standard work to permanently hardwire the change. I would qualify all the above work on behalf of the leader as teaching someone how to fish!

The last major component of CDI is building visibility to highlight the staff's improvement efforts. To build that visibility we need to get Leadership on a cadence of going to GEMBA. The Japanese word GEMBA means "real place" so going to GEMBA is to go to where the work is done. We want leaders to GEMBA to Huddleboards throughout the organization to understand what is being accomplished, recognize those accomplishments and even offer necessary resources. As a leader, recognition can be accomplished by simply signing and dating a handwritten congratulatory note or impression on their Huddleboard. Letting people know their efforts are recognized and appreciated is a lost art today. What is certain is that a higher number of staff engaged in improvement activities will shorten the time to a smoother running organization that is capable of quickly responding to changing market needs.

The Lean Operations Consulting Group LLC located in Homewood Illinois works Nationwide weekly helping clients achieve their vision. Our knowledgeable staff can get your CDI program structured, implemented, and monitored through sustainment. Call 708.960.4899 now for a free no obligation evaluation.

Cannot see the value yet? Here is an example; take an average salary + fringe of $ 75,000 and save 15 minutes a day for each of 15 staff members. Annually that would equal 35,100 dollars and after you take off our cost you will have a worthwhile net benefit. Do not wait any longer to making your business run smoother, call today!



 By Phillip A Swearingen


Article Source: Creating Opportunity With Numbers