Episode 152 - Plans

I’m David Veech and this is Elevate your performance. 

After taking June off from making videos, I figure it’s time to get back at it, especially since it was one year ago today that I made the first of these.  I managed to run a pretty good streak then.  When I broke the streak, I broke that momentum.  As with everything else, if you’re running a streak and something breaks that momentum, it’s very tough to get back to it, so the videos got more and more sporadic. 

Because of that, I’m hesitant to commit to getting back on this horse, but I do need to make some more and spread some more joy and knowledge.  Let me share some plans with you that I’ve been working on and thinking about. 

I did a short workshop on Fearless Teams for the NK Institute for Human Advancement.  It was a blast and got great feedback.  In my consulting engagements, building effective teams is a major focus area.  We all need teams to WORK.  I’m also building a couple of additional workshops we will offer in the future. 

Fearless teams lead to fearless culture.  Any change you’re trying to make in your workplace, whether it’s new software, or something from the Lean Six Sigma toolbox, if you don’t address the culture change needed, that initiative will fall short of your goals.  I help companies bridge that gap.  While your lean consulting group is doing their thing, or your software implementation team is doing theirs, I work in the space between the technical change and the people to bring about a culture change.  That’s the sweet spot for my coaching work. 

3 other big things I’m planning to launch in the next several weeks: 

First, I want to offer a mastermind study group through the NK Institute that will focus on High Speed Problem Solving.  This will be an ongoing membership-based group that will take lots of deep dives into techniques and skills for problem solving.  We’re still working the details, but I want to meet virtually every couple of weeks and face-to-face about once a quarter with one of the participants hosting at their workplace.  While we’re there, we’ll do some specific work on their specific problem. 

Second, I’ve had this nagging idea about a new leadership study group where the focus is on balance.  I’ll be writing some more on this idea in the future, but this group will be developing more effective leadership behaviors to drive change, build wisdom, and work in cycles where we define a challenge, work to meet that challenge, then set a new one in an upward spiral elevating performance for everyone. 

The third is a podcast.  I’ve been wrestling with this one because producing a podcast is a lot of work, and marketing it to get any followers is real heavy lifting.  But I think I can do this and tie it to the leadership study group.  I want to talk to leaders about balance, about learning, and about problem solving.  Be watching for more information about this.  I’ll need at least 10 episode in the can before I can launch, so I guess I need to start on that very soon. 

I guess I’d better get to work, huh?  Thanks for listening.  Subscribe to get updates and let me know if you’re interested in participating in any of those three projects.  And if you need help developing teams and problem solving skills for your employees, reach out.  I’d love to work with you. 

Have a great day and I’ll see you tomorrow. 

126 - Culture of Confidence

Good morning. I'm David Veech and this is Elevate Your Performance.

The term "High Performance Culture" has been in circulation for a pretty long time now with probably a dozen consulting firms offering strategies to create one.  Most of these are very good.  

What I want to do is to view the need for higher performance as a management-response problem, one that is created by leaders to take the organization to another level.  We'll have to define what we mean and how to measure it, and there are many components to this.

For example, at one client, they adopted an HPC that involved 15 key components, and many of them had subcomponents for further clarification.  It is an excellent package, but there weren't any measures of performance actually tied to HPC.  It was more of a "reminder" to leaders to behave according to the values described.

Based on my research, organizations want cultures of engagement.  They might call them Problem Solving cultures, or continuous improvement cultures, or even high performance cultures, but the desire is the same:  we want our people to show up, do good work, improve that work whenever they can, and achieve our goals.  So we have 4 key measurement areas:  Attendance, Productivity, Improvements, and Results.  But the way we measure and respond is far more important than what we measure.

Are we measuring these things at work?  Most places I've been aren't really.  But let's say we're not getting what we think we want.  If that's a problem, let's look at the root cause.  In the years that I've been working on this with people, I believe the single most important root cause for failure in all four of these areas is that our workforce has low self-efficacy for engagement.

Self-efficacy is the belief in our ability to influence events that affect our life and our sense of control over the way we experience events (Bandura, 1997). [From Self-Efficacy and Leadership Commitment During Lean Strategy Deployment by Angela D. Pearson. November 2019 PhD Dissertation.] 

Another way to think about it is our individual confidence in our ability to perform a particular task in a particular setting.  I think it is particularly relevant in a work environment.  Performing the work is typically taken care of during someone's on-boarding and on-the-job training.  

We expect people to have to work up to a level of competence over time.  But how much time to we spend reflecting on why that competence is really important?  In most cases, managers will tell you that competence is important only for how it affects the results; not how it affects the person.  

Competence is the most critical builder of self-efficacy for that job.  Competence leads to mastery.  Mastery leads to innovation.  When you're an expert, you don't burn cognitive energy on actually doing the work - you just work.  Your brain is free to think about ways to improve the work - but we, as leaders, need to make that a clear expectation.  We want you to achieve a level of competence because it will allow you to find better ways to work and that benefits both the worker and the company.

I've hit this in a few other videos, and in the future, I'll go into a lot more detail.  But for now, I'm going to shift gears a little over the next couple of weeks and talk about some historical developments that have shaped the way we think about work.  Hopefully, if we understand what shaped that thinking, we can change things and reshape or reframe our thinking.

Subscribe and follow along.

Have a great day and I'll see you tomorrow.

Thinking about 2021

After the new year, I'm planning to get back into the daily video business.  I've been spending these past couple of weeks focused first on family, then on developing some new ideas.

Neither of these are really new ideas, but I'm mustering up some energy to get them going this time around.

First is a concept around a high confidence culture.  This is based on what I think is the most significant factor in a successful culture of engagement: self-efficacy.  I've been talking about self-efficacy for years and sometimes it seems like I'm the only lean guy who does.  Self-Efficacy is the confidence we have about our own ability to do a particular task.  It could be a particular job at work, or an entrepreneur's marketing efforts, or my confidence that I can take a train from one part of DC to another.

Self-efficacy isn't something that just happens. Leaders can help shape this in team members, and I believe this fundamental understanding of how to build confidence in team members, and then to let it flourish is the first step to becoming a more effective leader.

The second idea is to build a more focused practice on coaching others.  I intend to take on clients who want to become more effective leaders and build engaging, high-confidence cultures.  I need to keep it oriented toward leadership in organizations, since it's that culture piece that we want to employ to create a better work environment for as many people as we can.

I guess I'll end up with three tiers of membership.  

    Tier 1 is individual, one-on-one coaching.  It'll start with a 360 degree assessment.  I use the LifeStyles Inventory (LSI) from Human Synergistics.  It'll also include an organizational assessment for profitability using the Quantum Profit Science Profit Model and will show how your organization compares with its industry averages.  We'll build a personal development plan and a roadmap to more engagement and we'll connect once a month for an hour to help you with accountability.

    Tier 2 is individual, one-on-one coaching as in Tier 1 but with 2 sessions per month, plus access to a weekly group Zoom call that will use lean coffee dialog techniques to discuss issues that participants bring to the table, rather than a set agenda.

    Tier 3 is the big Kahuna.  It includes the same individual one-on-one coaching as at Tier 2, and this group'll get their own weekly Zoom call.  But for this group, we add a specific project for participants from their own workplace.  Every 6 to 8 weeks, we will have a 3 to 4 day workshop focusing on a deep dive into a familiar topic, or an introduction to something completely new.  Finally, twice a year, pandemics notwithstanding, we'll meet face-to-face as a group in a place where we can learn, reflect, and relax.

What will the coaching focus on?  I'm glad you asked.  As the author of a book on leadership and another book on problem solving, it's a good bet that we'll be spending a lot of time on both of those topics.  But they will always be discussed within the framework of the high confidence culture.  Lots of lean systems thinking, principles, practices, tools and techniques with a special emphasis on standardized work (no, it's not the same thing that you're familiar with), workplace organization, visual management systems, and problem solving systems.

What's it going to cost??  I haven't figured that out yet.  I do know that I'm capping tier 3 at 16 people so I can provide a proper level of attention to achieve their learning and performance objectives.  What would you be willing to pay to get one or two of your key people into a focused development group like that?  Let me know.  

If you want to know when we're going to start and how you can be first in line, send me an email (david.veech@leadersights.com).  If you're ready to take that plunge now, go to https://calendly.com/davidveech/15min and schedule a 15 minute video chat with me.

All the best and Happy New Year.

David

125 - Cultures of Engagement

https://youtu.be/jZEuHIko1jM

Hi, I'm David Veech and this is Elevate Your Performance.

It's December 14, 2020.  The first truckloads of COVID-19 Vaccines headed toward 636 distributions centers over the weekend.  It'll still be months before we reach a point of saturation that will allow us to put aside our masks and social distancing, so please, keep maintaining your safety protocols through the holidays and well past when you get your own vaccination.

Here are a couple of cool events from history on this date.

On the sadder side, in 1799, George Washington, our first president, died at his home in Mount Vernon, Virginia.  In 1861, Prince Albert - Queen Victoria's husband - died in England.  He was a strong advocate for our Union - an important ally for the United States that was now in our 8th month of Civil War.

On the cool side, today is the day in 1900 that Max Planck presented Quantum Theory at the Physics Society in Berlin.  In 1911, Raold Amundsen reached the South Pole with 4 team members, after a 1400 mile trek over Antarctica.  

What piqued my interest in the Amundsen/Scott race to the south pole was Jim Collins and Morten Hansen's book Great by Choice.  They use it to contrast todays companies, in highly competitive and unpredictable markets.  

Some companies prepare like Amundsen and get similar results - they win.  Others prepare like Scott.  Scott's team died on the return trip from the south pole.  Pick up Collins' and Hansen's book along with Roland Huntford's "The Last Place on Earth" which Collins recommends as an excellent study of the two explorers.

The discipline applied by Amundsen's team created a culture that drove excellent performance.  In that kind of environment, your team has to be fully engaged.  

How do I define a culture of engagement?  The biggest difference between a culture of excitement, as I described in my last video, and a culture of engagement is the level of self-determination by the team.  

In a culture of engagement, everyone knows the vision, the goals, and the boundaries; they're trained to mastery level; and they're allowed to do whatever is necessary within the boundaries to achieve the goal.  And then, they do it.

Engaged team members don't wait until the Kaizen team comes to make improvements.  They make improvements everyday, practicing true kaizen - doing something everyday to make like a little better for those around you.

The leader's job is clear...set the vision and the direction, along with what's allowed and what's not allowed.  In lean we call these boundaries and rules Standardized Work.  But once these are set, the leader trains, teaches, and coaches, emphasizing problem solving and then let's go - encouraging everyone to improve everything without waiting for approval, as long as they operate within the rules to determine that a solution is in fact better through experimentation.

The harder part comes in how the leaders respond to failure.  If you hope to sustain this culture of engagement, we need to celebrate failure as learning events.

Please keep in mind that culture is fragile.  Any mishandling by leaders can undo any progress made toward this highest level of performance.  

Have a great day and I'll see you tomorrow.

david.veech@leadersights.com

https://www.leadersights.com

Merch:  https://teespring.com/stores/leadersights

124 - Cultures of Excitement

Hi, I’m David Veech and this is Elevate Your Performance.

Let’s take a quick look back at what happened on December 8 in history, then we’ll get into today’s topic - Cultures of Excitement

Perhaps the first crack in the glass ceiling occurred on this day in 1660 when a woman was allowed to play the part of Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello.  Apparently up to this point, men played all the roles, even email characters like Desdemona.

On the bad news side, today in 1980, John Lennon was murdered outside of his Manhattan apartment building by Mark David Chapman.

Let see what shapes up for today and what kind of history we can make.

Today, I want to continue building on the evolution of corporate culture.  We started with a culture of defiance, then compliance.  Compliance is the default organizational culture.  No matter what we do, we normalize in compliance and we’ll get locked in there if we don’t deliberately shake things up.

For future business survival, we have to break out of Compliance as often as we can think to and we do that first by asking for involvement.  In a culture of involvement, leaders ask for input to improve the workplace.  A lot of leaders in a lot of organizations do this regularly, but we can’t sustain this and push to the next level without certain working systems that allow us to process the input from involved employees productively.

As we push past involvement and begin allowing employees to not just share ideas, but participate in testing and implementing their ideas, we lay the foundation for a culture of excitement.

We love a workplace that’s exciting.  But what is it that excites people?  

Participation is a big part of it.  So what are we asking people to participate in with us?  One of the more popular activities is a rapid improvement event.  These events go by a wide variety of names:  Kaizen Event, Kaizen Blitz, Action Workout, 5 days/4 nights, Improvement workshops…anything.  

They are focused activities that bring a cross-functional group of people together for a set period of time…usually 5 days.  In that week, participants receive focused training on solving the problem at hand or implementing a particular strategy - something like creating a work cell, or a 5S campaign to organize the workplace. 

These same kinds of things make for popular Television Shows like Trading Spaces, Extreme Makeover Home Edition, Fixer-Upper, or Flip or Flop.  These are focused on getting the maximum result possible in the minimum amount of time.

What makes these exciting is the attention, the resources available, and the results.  These events are facilitated by skilled team members.  The tools they employ are designed to equalize the group so that the input from the front-line employee weighs the same as input from the CEO.  That’s very satisfying for most of us mortal humans.

So in that week, we feel listened to.  We feel like we matter.  We help make a real change in the workplace, and we can measure that change to show how much better we made things.  And that feeling of “look what we did” or “I helped” and “We won” is wonderful.  I think it’s winning that excites us the most.  So these events have to leave us feeling like we won. 

But how long does it last?

When the event is over and the facilitators go on to the next event, the participants are usually back to their old status - just team members.  They’ll remember how exciting the event was and they’ll say things like “I can’t wait till the Kaizen team comes back to do that with us again.”

A culture of excitement runs on events.  Since events are usually limited in scope to a small area that can actually get finished in a week, for a large organization, people might never participate in a second event.

These events drive great improvements in organizations of all kinds.  They work.  Don’t misunderstand me.  But they don’t create real, broad employee ENGAGEMENT.  The difference is critical. 

I’ll talk more about that in the next post.

Have a great day and I’ll see you tomorrow.

123 - Involvement

Hi, I’m David Veech and this is Elevate Your Performance.

It’s my granddaughter Ivy’s first birthday today.  She’s a fireball already and promises to be the perfect wild child.  I’m sure her moms will be able to handle it…one way or another.  Happy birthday, Ivy!

For the past two days, I’ve facilitated an online workshop sponsored by Lean Frontiers that I called High Speed Problem Solving.  I had 5 active participants that were just great to work with.  

As each introduced themselves, they described some frustration that in their organizations, getting to solutions just seemed to take too long.  Several were holding kaizen events that they hoped to shorten by applying what I might be able to teach them in this “high speed problem-solving” workshop.  

I spoke to them about the Lean Adage that says “sometimes you have to slow down to speed up.”  That pretty much sums up the premise of High Speed Problem Solving:  Slow down and do the thinking required to find the right problem, set the right scope, find the right root causes, and evaluate several different countermeasures to find the right one.  The speed comes from never having to solve that particular problem again.

I did share some very specific techniques for speeding things up, including ways to see problems more quickly through visual management and workplace organization; writing better problem statements, so we don’t have to ask a lot of questions to get the clarity we need; breaking down a big problem; stem-and-leaf cause mapping; and ways to cultivate creativity.

But all of those are just tips and techniques.  The context that makes them work, really, is in the culture of the organization.  Last week I spoke about cultures of defiance and cultures of compliance.  To get to a culture of engagement, we have to navigate our way through involvement and excitement while we build the skills required to thrive in engagement.  These include leadership skills as well as problem solving skills like critical thinking, quantitative analysis, creativity, planning and organizing, execution, and evaluation.

Getting to involvement should be easy, but staying there is very tough.  To get there, all you have to do is ask people for their input.  Staying there requires that you act on their input.  What makes this hard is that this early input expects the leader to solve the problems they point out, many of which are beyond the leader’s authority.  When the leader fails to act, people notice.  They go back into their compliance mode telling themselves that the leadership was never really serious about listening to employees anyway.

To make our way through this involvement stage, we have to have systems that allow us to show that we are listening to people, but we need to make it clear from the start that the leader’s role is not to solve the problems, but to provide resources to people to solve their own.  Those resources include time, coaching, and supplies.  Problems and ideas have to be tangible and work related, so complaints about how lazy other employees are doesn’t count.

If we don’t think through what the new rules should be for involvement, we’ll fall pretty quickly.  I’ll be happy to help you define those rules and help you begin your journey to a new culture.  Just give me a call.

Have a great day and I’ll see you tomorrow.

121 - Cultures of Compliance II

Hi, I'm David Veech and this is Elevate Your Performance.

A few days ago I described a culture of defiance in organizations, and I ended up saying that a new leader would usually be necessary to pull the organization into a culture of compliance.  

It takes a leader to create conditions for a culture of defiance - and that leader generally has to convince people that they can trust no one but them and tends to blame everything bad on some group or some person. 

The first step toward getting out of a culture of defiance is to remove that leader.  

The new leader will need to be pretty much a tyrant, enforcing his or her will through the strategic application of power.   But if that behavior persists, the organization will return to the pits of defiance.

The first stages of a culture of compliance  will involve a new set of rules with consistent enforcement of those rules.  There is no room for anything else.  These new rules will form the basis for a new relationship between the leader and the led.  During this period of time, the leader has to be brutally honest about everything.  The more transparent they can become, the less difficulty they will have in restoring trust.

The vast majority of organizations are stuck in cultures of compliance.  This isn't because leaders are maliciously keeping people there.  It's because people have been conditioned for compliance their entire lives.  It's parents, then teachers, then employers who have consistently punished non-compliance over time that creates compliance as the default until you discover how much freedom you actually have.  

The new rules need to encourage and reward compliance, and punish and discourage defiance.  It won't work for some of your people.  That's fine - they can go, either voluntarily, or through termination - If they can't or won't follow the new rules, which you have carefully communicated and taught - there is no reason to keep them.

As we settle into the new culture of compliance to the rules, and as we see some degree of trust returning, leaders have to adjust the rules to allow for more involvement.  But it isn't just adjusting the rules.  It also requires systems to allow for productive involvement of the workforce in setting those new rules.  We have to ask employees for their input.

We will always need compliance to set rules.  But to advance the culture toward engagement, we'll need a defined process for breaking the rules.  So when someone has input to share, that defined process shows them what they much do to confirm that the input makes things better, and then we change the rules - we create a new expectation.  We capture that in our standardized work and it becomes the new source of compliance, until we find a still better way.

More to follow.  Stick with me.  Join me next week, Wednesday and Thursday, for a high speed problem solving workshop sponsored by Lean Frontiers.  It's virtual - four hours Wednesday afternoon, and 4 hours Thursday afternoon.  

Have a great day and I'll see you tomorrow.

120 - Cultures of Compliance

I’m David Veech and this is Elevate Your Performance.

We’re exploring this spectrum of organizational culture that spans from Defiance to Engagement.  

I believe the vast majority of organizations operate in a culture of compliance.  You can be perfectly successful here.  Some are even satisfied here.  

In a culture of compliance, people show up, work hard, and generally stay within the lines.  That’s another way of saying they do what they are told.  They follow the rules.  They comply.

Following rules is essential, but restrictive.  To create something new, like a new process, or even to change a process, everyone has learned that you can only do something like that when your leader has directed it.  That directive doesn’t have to be dictatorial.  It can come in the form of an innocent question, “How’d you like to be on the next kaizen team?”

And that is what makes us tend to stay in this culture of compliance.  People have learned not to try new things because of the likely response they will get from either their leaders or their peers.  We’ve learned not to rock the boat.  We’ve learned not to stand out.

To change this, we can’t just talk about encouraging people to share their ideas.  We can’t just ask people to let us know when they need help.  We have to have systems that make it safe for people to do these things.

The best way to convince people that this is safe is to deliberately train them on the techniques we want them to use when they have a problem or an idea.  We might need to do some conventional familiarization training - the classroom stuff we’re used to, but the more effective, although slower, way is to build a system that teaches them in real time when they have a problem or an idea.  In this case, the leader is the teacher and coach and reinforces the notion that we do want people to begin pushing the limits of the way we currently do things and forcing changes in the rules when the rules restrict us from improving performance.

I have some ideas that can help you build these systems, so give me a call and we can get started.

Have a great day and I’ll see you tomorrow!

119 - Cultures of Defiance

How do we find ourselves in a culture of defiance?

Defiance is the open disregard or even contempt of something or someone.

I’ve seen defiant cultures in several different organizations.  In two cases, it was a Union workforce that defied any management policy.  I’ve been doing some digging, plus reading the news, and doing some critical thinking; and I’m closing in on what I believe to be the root cause of this kind of defiance.  

I’m almost convinced that a defiant culture, whether in an organization, or a nation, flows from distrust of the opposition based on false or exaggerated claims by influential people in leadership roles.  When leaders, whether they have actual or official leadership positions or if they are simply the people others tend to listen to and believe, make false or exaggerated claims of the activities or performance of some system or some opposition leader, people believe them and resist or defy.  What's bad becomes good.  What's good becomes bad.

I even saw this in Toyota for a short period of time after the first US president was named at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky.  He happened to take the job at the same time the company decided to make changes to the suggestion system that restricted what ideas would be eligible for consideration and reward compensation.  

Team members associated that change with the new President, and I was even asked by a friend who worked there if I thought the new president was trying to bring the United Auto Workers into the plant.

That was a case of unfortunate timing without clear communication about why a change was made.  Neither the President nor the managers of the suggestion system were malicious in intent, but the influential voices started rumors that spread quickly and were believable.  The result at Toyota wasn’t particularly bad from a performance standpoint that I could tell…They were still producing about 2000 high quality cars a day, but the difference in the way the plant just felt was palpable.  

I’ve been in that plant a hundred times.  Most of the time, the team members working on the line would take a second and look up at visitors and smile or wave briefly.  You could feel positive energy in the building.  During that dark time, though, it felt like a pall on the place.  When anyone looked up at you, there were hard lines on their faces and that energy had changed.

We’ve seen this same growing split in the culture of our country.  I think it started with George W. Bush’s presidency and the stories about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that prompted our invasion.  Then when Obama was elected, we see the partisan shift in several news organizations that slid them decidedly to the left or to the right.  And each began coloring the events with that left or right slant.  When Trump was elected, it seems we stomped on the gas pedal for radical reporting with audiences observing the exact same events, but coming to two entirely different conclusions.

Now, with the seemingly clear election results being openly contested by the sitting president for the first time in our history, with half of the country supporting him absolutely and the other half defying him absolutely, we find ourselves in that same kind of dark and stressful place that is just made worse by the raging Pandemic.

This kind of defiant culture can’t last long without having serious consequences.  

So how would an organization (or a nation) pull itself out of a defiant culture?  I’m still working on that.  

But I believe that without a completely different leader taking the dominant role in the organization, it will only get worse.  But then it gets ugly.  That leader has to be remarkably consistent with the truth, and ruthlessly suppress the disinformation from the opposition.  

We’ve seen some examples of this in history on both extremes.  

When Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, he was immediately, forcefully, branded a tyrant by the opposition.  And he was.  He had to be to draw the nation out of our most terribly defiant culture ever.  

Hitler rose to power by uniting German nationalists against everything else, especially the Jews, by using every lie and exaggeration he could conceive. But he sold it.  

The only way out of both of these cases was a brutal war, and of course, the winners write the history.

Can we work together at the grass-roots level to find the common things that bind us together?  Can we deliberately ignore news and information from the extreme ends of the political spectrum and not let it inflame us to the point where we want to take up arms?

What we have to do is deliberately step toward compliance, together, and build systems that allow us to continue building toward more engagement.  For an organization, that’s not really too difficult.  For a nation, that’s a different story.

Have a great day and I’ll see you tomorrow.

118 - Culture

Good morning.  I’m David Veech and this is Elevate Your Performance.

What is culture?

Dictionary.com offers 8 non-biology related definitions.

Noun

1. the quality in a person or society that arises from a concern for what is regarded as excellent in arts, letters, manners, scholarly pursuits, etc.

2. that which is excellent in the arts, manners, etc.

3. a particular form or stage of civilization, as that of a certain nation or period: Greek culture.

4. development or improvement of the mind by education or training.

5. the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular group of people, as a social, ethnic, professional, or age group (usually used in combination): the youth culture; the drug culture.

6. the shared beliefs, behaviors, or social environment connected with a particular aspect of society: the rape culture on campus; the culture of poverty; a culture of celebrity worship.

7. the values, typical practices, and goals of a business or other organization, especially a large corporation: Their corporate culture frowns on avoiding risk.

8. Anthropology. the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another.

We see culture in the arts, rituals, and ceremonies of any community, society or nation.  Think about the way we in the US have weddings or funerals.  And then, within a variety of communities there are special features of the celebrations.  A wedding involving a military officer is likely to feature something like a saber arch for the married couple to pass through as they exit the chapel. Mine did. Then my best man swatted my bride on the backside with the broad side of his saber…an old and somewhat questionable ritual.

We have graduation ceremonies, bar mitzvahs, prayer breakfasts, and any number of other reasons we get together.  We have have rituals for things like kids’ soccer games - oranges at halftime; ice cream after the game.

In an office, it’s no different.  The rituals and ceremonies are the meetings and gatherings we have for a variety of purposes.  They can be formal or informal, long or short.  

It might be a quarterly all-hands where we share the news of the company and recognize people for accomplishments and achievements.

It might be how we send off retirees.  Or it might just be our weekly pot luck.

The frequency and the duration of any of these along with the tension in the room, tells us the culture of any organization.  If, during the potluck or birthday ceremony, everyone is a little tense and anxious to get back to work, what would that tell you?

In Operational Excellence, we talk about creating a culture of continuous improvement or a culture of problem solving.  And we can talk about it a lot.  But if we don’t have that now, we won’t get it by talking about it.  We have to deliberately change the rituals and ceremonies around problem solving and continuous improvement.  There has to be a legitimate reason for people to change the way they behave.

Ultimately, I think we want to move from a culture of compliance, where people do what they’re told or what they are allowed to do, to a culture of engagement, where people do what they need to do to make the workplace better.  Of course that’s a function of trust between the workforce and management, isn’t it?

At the lowest end of the culture spectrum, we can describe a culture as defiant.  I’ll pick this up tomorrow and see where it leads.

Don’t forget to register for my High Speed problem solving workshop, hosted by Lean Frontiers on December 2 and 3.  

Have a great day and I’ll see you tomorrow.