Going Beyond Lean and Six Sigma To Enable Change

In many organisations, change processes built around Lean and Six Sigma have become important elements in helping business units deliver new and better results through increased efficiencies. What a recent feature in the McKinsey Quarterly ('Developing Better Change Leaders') highlighted however, is that while these processes may contribute to change success, they are not sufficient for it 

Few companies can avoid big, periodic changes in the guts of their business. Whatever the cause— market maturation, a tough macro- economic environment, creeping costs, competitive struggles, or just a desire to improve—the potential responses are familiar: restructure supply chains; rethink relationships among sales, marketing, and other functions; boost the efficiency of manufacturing or service operations (or sometimes close them). Such changes start at the top and demand a relentless focus on nitty-gritty business details from leaders up and down the line. Too often, however, senior executives overlook the “softer” skills their leaders will need to disseminate changes throughout the organisation and make them stick. These skills include the ability to keep managers and workers inspired when they feel overwhelmed, to promote collaboration across organisational boundaries, or to help managers embrace change programs through dialogue, not dictation.

Conor, as we’ll call one European plant manager, needed to boost yields using the company’s new production system. In the past, the industrial giant would have assigned engineers steeped in lean production or Six Sigma to observe the shop floor, gather data, and present a series of improvements. Conor would then have told plant employees to implement the changes, while he gauged the results—a method consistent with his own instinctive command-and-control approach to leadership. But Conor and his superiors quickly realised that the old way wouldn’t succeed: only employees who actually did the work could identify the full range of efficiency improvements necessary to meet the operational targets, and no attempt to get them to do so would be taken seriously unless Conor and his line leaders were more collaborative. Workers were skeptical. A survey taken) showed that plant workers saw Conor and his team as distant and untrustworthy. Conor’s leadership training gave him an opportunity to reflect on the situation and provided simple steps he could take to improve it. Conor explained: “As I shared We’d had the lean tools and good technology for a long time. Transparency and openness were the real break- through.” As the new atmosphere took hold, workers began pointing out minor problems and additional areas for improvement specific to their corners of the plant; within just a few months its yields increased to 91 percent, from 87 percent. Today, yields run at 93 percent. 

This emphasis on the mindsets and behaviours which accompany, and optimise, change processes is a core part of FranklinCovey's work with organisations. At an individual level, this is about enabling the resourcefulness and initiative of 10s, 100s or 1000s of people towards the overall objective. At a team level, its about creating the conditions for collaboration and innovation between groups that work together. At a leadership level, our focus is on supporting the instinct towards empowerment over that of command and control. Finally, at an organisational level we help to create an environment of high trust, which can act as an accelerator on the performance improvements achieved at all of the other levels.