Selling Continual Improvement as a Business Leader

Business leaders can have a massive impact on the success of Lean Six Sigma, in fact on the success of any improvement initiative. In this article the author discusses his observations and thoughts about business leaders selling the concept of business improvement with Lean Six Sigma to the workplace.

By George Lee Sye

Some years ago I had a very interesting discussion with the Managing Director of a medium sized company about the implementation of Lean Six Sigma in his business.

He told me about the difficulties he had experienced in keeping the initiative going. In the conversation he said it never really became a part of the way work was done in the business. His next level managers weren’t committed to it and over the short-term focus had drifted away from the philosophies of improving the business PROACTIVELY.

He was concerned about whether or not it was even worth continuing. With so many other things on his plate it was now becoming a distraction.

So I asked him a few questions. Questions like …

• What training did you participate in?
• What tools from the program have you used yourself?
• How do you run your meetings with the management team?

His responses can be summarised in a few words.

He had not attended any formal education or training beyond a very short ‘executive alignment’ session. He admitted that during the session he had also attended to other work commitments, you know phone calls and so on.

He said his work life was very hectic considering his enormous responsibilities, and “he did not really have the time to commit to any training”.

If I had one dollar for every time I have heard that!

Okay, granted he knew quite a bit about the methodology, there’s absolutely no doubt about that. however, he had never used any of the tools or processes or event minor pieces from the Lean Six Sigma toolkit … EVER!

I also noted that his approach to meetings and facilitation was the same as … well the same as everybody else’s approach. His meeting agendas were just lists of discussion topics. No defined outcomes or written purpose. The meetings … in my opinion they were lengthy studies of what had occurred in the past. Plus … one of his greatest challenges was getting the team to agree on decisions.

I noticed that he often used phrases like “I don’t have the time”, “the approach has always worked for me” and “what I’ve always done is this”.

You get the picture.

Here’s what I told him about his leadership of the initiative.

He ESPOUSED the value of engaging in Lean Six Sigma for the business and its participants. More importantly, he truly BELIEVED it … he did, I have no doubts about that whatsoever. He committed RESOURCES by putting in place a team of people who focus on the project work and manage the day-to-day Lean Six Sigma function.

Now … you need to listen carefully to this … when he talks to people about what is happening and he sees the day-to-day operation for himself, he knows that people are INCREDIBLY BUSY (as he is). He’s told by his direct reports that they don’t have time to attend training, he hears EXCUSES for not doing Lean Six Sigma such as ‘there’s nothing wrong with what I do now, it’s always worked’.

Every time he sees or hears this, deep down inside HE KNOWS EXACTLY what these people mean and are experiencing. These are actually HIS REASONS for not really being involved in it. He is emotionally connected to THEIR EXCUSES for not using the initiative themselves, so how can he sell the concept?

The NON-VERBAL part of his communication conveys HIS TRUE FEELINGS.

Here’s my point.

If you want to sell something … and we are ALL SELLING … you have to convey and transfer feeling to the buyer.

What do I mean by that?

My experience with leadership has been that ‘selling’ and ‘leading’ is the same thing! Don’t you think it’s interesting that we use the term buy-in when we talk about leading change?

To sell an idea to your people, to get their buy-in, to CLOSE THE SALE, you have to be emotionally CONNECTED to it, to have feeling for it. You cannot be emotionally connected to the excuses for NOT DOING it. If you were a car salesperson, could you honestly expect to effectively sell Ford or Holden motor vehicles yet drive a different brand of vehicle yourself?

When the customer says she’ll buy the different brand because it is CHEAPER, you’re emotionally connected to that very same reason for not buying the car you’re selling YOURSELF.

I’m not suggesting that all a leader does is sell, but I am suggesting that influencing how people think and what they buy-in to is a significant part of the role. And a business leader or manager cannot expect to get buy-in for business improvement at any level when they do not use the terminology or concepts themselves!

When people give excuses for not doing it a business leader will never be able to lead them beyond that paradigm when the same paradigm is theirs.

The only way we can CHANGE THAT PARADIGM is to DO IT OURSELVES, thus severing the emotional connection to the excuses we get.

I think the phrases used, perhaps to the point of excess, are that leaders have got to not only ‘talk the talk’, but also ‘walk the talk’.

If you say you don’t have time, hold that thought for a moment.

The CEO of Ford (a company with more than 300,000 employees world-wide) had time to undertake Lean Six Sigma training and champion projects. He has 300,000 employees!

[Source: Paton, S.M., “Consumer Driven Six Sigma Saves Ford $300 Million”, Quality Digest, September 2001, http://www.qualitydigest.com/sept01/html/ford.html (2001)]

I’m sure we all can MAKE THE TIME, we just need to learn how.

Any opportunities to include life management training for leaders and managers in the early phases of your business improvement initiative roll-out should be explored.

I now spend the major proportion of my time coaching business leaders and employees in self AND business leadership skills. The intention of this is twofold:

• To help all people realise that CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENT is the key to success in ANYTHING, not something you do as an add-on in business.
• To provide participants with the psychology and tools they need to

BECOME MORE EFFECTIVE in all aspects of their life (both personal and professional) and have MORE TIME for proactive improvement.

I believe this is a powerful way to create the mental space and emotional desire to develop business improvement capability and so far this is proving to be true.

Here’s to your continued success.

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With 37 years of working experience behind him, George Lee Sye is now a highly sought after speaker, performance coach and mentor to business leaders in organisations of all sizes and all industries. To read more about his approach to business leadership and business execution visit the comany website here – http://www.soarent.com.au/business-leadership/academy-business-leadership

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