Aligning your management team isn’t important, it’s essential. If just one member of your team isn’t committed to your continuous improvement journey, you’ve got a problem to fix. Why? It’s really pretty simple. When any change initiative is started, the members of the organization will have a variety of opinions about the need for change, the direction taken, the commitment level, and so on. There will be the early adopters who will welcome almost any change that seems reasonable and necessary. In contrast, there will be a fair number of CAVE dwellers (Citizens Against Virtually Everything) who will choose not to engage no matter what the cause or benefit. But the critical mass of people in most organizations will not let their opinions control them at the outset, instead, they will wait and observe the behavior of managers and assess their level of commitment. It is this level of commitment that will strongly influence their decision to get on board with a change initiative or not. This is why alignment is so critical. A manager who is not aligned with an initiative single handedly creates and perpetuates skepticism, apathy, and complacency. These mindsets are fierce opponents of change and make the work of improvement much more difficult that it has to be.

3 keys to aligning your management team

First determine what you want to achieve

Most managers consider themselves pretty good problem-solvers, but sometimes a rush to solutions prevents people from first defining what is wrong or what they want. It is critical to be clear about what you want to achieve before you decide how to achieve it. This may seem elementary or obvious, but most failed continuous improvement initiatives never had a clear and concise goal or objective. Many times, if there is a goal, it is vague and hard to measure, something like “we want to create a continuous improvement culture.” It is much more effective to define quantitative and measurable goals like reduce lead time to two days and reduce external defects by 90%. When you have these types of goals you can easily measure progress and people can see the scale of the initiative and eventually, how they will contribute. By clearly articulating what you want to achieve, you create something for managers to align with, without this, you leave it up to interpretation.

Define the roles and behaviors required of managers

Most people need to know what they are signing up for before they can fully commit. Likewise, most managers vastly underestimate what will be required of them in leading change. Once the goals are defined, the management team should spend time together discussing and documenting what will be required from each of them in the change process. It is important to define both the roles and behaviors of managers in these discussions. For instance, a goal that we often see is to improve relationships with customers. A role of a manager might be to initiate feedback from a customer in order to understand what needs to change to improve the relationship. A required behavior change might be to never utter an unappealing word about a customer and to take immediate action when someone else does. This might seem like a waste of time to many managers but it is critical to define different roles and behaviors if you want to achieve different results. Be wary of anyone on your team who is not engaged in this process and appears to be going through the motions. Alignment means that each of your managers is in full agreement with the goals and accepts their responsibility to be a leader.

Create a high performing management team

Whether it’s in business or sports, high performing teams with exceptional teamwork skills achieve the greatest results. Your organization is no exception. The success of your business will be heavily influenced by the level of teamwork that your management team can achieve. This is not soft, tree-hugging stuff, teamwork skills are just that…skills! Your managers need to develop the skills to effectively communicate, utilize resources, trust and be trustworthy, give and receive feedback, support and be supported, and be good team members. Managers who choose not to be good team members need to be removed. In addition, you should spend no less than 10% of your time in the early stages of a change initiative developing teamwork within your management team.

PDG provides a number of products and services that will help you create and sustain continuous improvement using lean, six sigma, and organizational development. If you would like a free 30 minute consultation to help you deal with any CI issue you are experiencing, you can email me at slage@pdgconsultants.com to set it up.

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Steve Lage
President, PDG

www.pdgconsultants.com 1-866-404-7221

This article was written on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 4:46 pm by stevelage. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.