Many organizations are increasingly appreciating the importance of behavior in determining organizational performance. This is supported by the numerous of leadership coaching and training programs available.
We are increasingly convinced that most business are not starved of knowing best practices within an industry or what is required to get them to the next level of performance. Infact, hiring great talent is one of the top priority of most businesses. Continued developing of new products is also encouraged by most businesses.
Yet, we have seen businesses with top talent and that secured a lot of investment capital struggle and in some cases, wind up. In short, finance and technical knowledge alone are not sufficient to sustain and accelerated high business grow. Do you disagree?
What’s commonly missing is the consistent high performing habits of management and staff. Management thinking, behavior and staff routines are rarely visible, yet they are critical for continuous learning, adaptation and innovation.
Most employees are focused on getting their work done – and rightly so. However, this is limiting as they often lack the awareness on how their output affects their colleagues work. At best, this results in redundant work, for instance when a report produced is not read but more typical are the corrections of tasks because it did not meet the requirement of the next process/colleague to do his/her work effectively. All these lead to inefficiencies, increased frustration, reduction in morale and the bottom line.
I bet many of you have at least once heard ‘I don’t care how you do it, I just want results’. Not only does this statement create fear among employees, it also undermines the team’s ability to consistently delivery high quality results as each employee did whatever they had to do to get the results, some good tactics, some bad. More often than not, they achieve the targets, celebrate and forget about the challenges until they are not performing again. And so the cycle of cajoling to get results and burnout continues.
If, however you adopt Continuous Improvement as the management thinking, everyone in the team will be empowered to experiment, and eliminate inefficiencies leading to production of high quality output (with no corrections, on time and on budget). These in turn results in greatest return on investments.
It’s the management thinking that influences tactics (habits) for implementing tasks, these will then influence the quality of output and business results. 
According to Mike Rother, ‘Continuous’ means many minds engaged in improving their processes, and daily cycles of experimentation. Yet our existing work routines rarely include improvement. Systematically and scientifically improving processes is a complex skill set we are not naturally good at!”
Click here to learn more about Continuous Improvement and empowering everyone in your team to reduce inefficiencies.
We also encourage you to sign up for the interactive and free learning session on Lean thinking and AI on 22nd March, 2023.