Day 78: A month later... still catching up... making headway but culture change is sloooowwww

Well, it's only been a month since I last updated this blog and I have been busy!

We have been working on defining objectives and goals for each employee scorecard.  Every year, we start at the top level corporate objectives, and work our way down to individuals' goals and objectives. It's our version of hoshin kanri and it's been a challenge to get a different approach or mindset to making these more consistent across departments. We usually ended up with each department doing this work in relative isolation. We tried a different approach this year, where we shared far more information on objectives a few levels down from the top, identifying each affected department. I have been trying to push for common objectives, usually focused on quality or similar (being my main responsibility). But I took a different approach this time around and tried to challenge our leadership team to be brave.

Are our managers head's in the clouds?

This year, for the first time, we have added a CI project objective on every single employee scorecard (all 600+ of them). I feel validated! Now, not everyone was thrilled with this, but the leadership team agreed it was the best way to really drive a cultural shift in people. If we can convey that every employee has a responsibility to make even a small improvement, then maybe we can make the biggest leap of all: going from the constant excuse of "I don't have the enough time" to having full support from middle management to allow employees the TIME to do improvement activities. 

I have always struggled with how to address the disparity between "do what I say, not what I do" that flourishes within many organizations. Manager X might tell his staff that quality is important, but then turn around and tell the same people to ship crappy product, because on time delivery is important. How is an employee to reconcile those two conflicting messages? How can we expect employees to make good decisions, using their best judgement, when the message is that confusing? No wonder many employees are either paralyzed with fear of making any decision (for fear of being wrong) or simply check out and stop caring either way.

Many years ago, when I was working in software development, I was introduced to the concept of the triangle of product quality. The points of the triangle were simply: features, cost, time to delivery. You could fix two of the points, let the third be flexible, and still achieve an appropriate level of quality. You could not, however, constrain all three points tightly and expect good results. Or, in simpler terms: do you want it good? Fast? Or cheap? Pick two. Try to nail down all three, with no wiggle room on any of the point, and the results would usually be poor. 

Perhaps if we were all honest about what trade offs we were making, which risks we were accepting, which points of the triangle we were overly constraining, perhaps employees wouldn't feel so disenfranchised. Maybe they wouldn't think the company was being run by chickens.

AMac