Leadership

​Where Leaders Prevail and Managers Fail

Why do companies embark on change efforts if the road to success is long, difficult and mostly likely to lead to unsustainable change? They embark on this effort because the payback is tremendous when you succeed. Companies that have been successful in sustainable change have reaped the benefits of;
  • reducing cycle-times by 95%,
  • improving quality by 300-400%,
  • reducing space utilization by 50%,
  • improving customer service 100% on-time every time,
  • reducing unit costs by 30%.
It's the culture of your organization that defines how things get done. As a result, you need to change your culture if you want to sustain the changes to your processes. So, for leaders to realize that change, they must lead differently. People should see that they are engaged, vested and actually leading not just paying lip service to the effort. 

Sustainable Improvement is a lengthy, gut-wrenching journey for any company. The expedition can be fraught with many perils; disillusionment, missed expectations, cost-overruns, lost business, and worst of all, unemployment. In a study conducted with 45 companies spanning six industries and 10 years, research shows that over 70% of all transformation efforts fail to deliver the desired results while almost 50% of all Lean transformations equally failed. 

​​Whatever title is attributed to this, the journey to sustainable change is truly about changing your culture, people and processes to focus on efficiently delivering value to the customer, the stakeholder and the company.
​​Culture is a combination of the way people work and the climate in which they operate. The three interdependent elements of Culture are (1) Company Behavior, (2) Team Behavior and (3) Individual behavior. The climate is the primary driver of this behavior, not the end. Culture then is the pattern of behaviors and values that employees create for themselves.
​It's the lore, legends, rituals and stories that people tell about working in the company and it's beyond the direct control of management. So, if culture is what determines whether your improvement efforts will be sustainable and it's not something you can manage, what's a manager to do? It's here where that leaders prevail and managers fail.

There is an “e” tool offered by www.LeanPowerTools.com to assist companies in understanding culture, leadership and sustainable change. The tool provides step by step guidance on defining, planning, implementing, measuring and even correcting the change effort to drive towards sustainability.

​This whole process takes a lot of patience since it's changing people's behavior, which takes leadership and perseverance. You are trying to change how people think, act and interact with one another to achieve cultural change that will in turn allow your organization to sustain process improvements.