on lean culture, transformational leadership, and entrepreneurial excellence

This is the final part of a 4 part series on Creating Employee Engagement. You can first read Parts 1, 2, and 3.

Skills Required for Engagement

Skill gaps to create engagement exist both in employees and managers, although most transformation efforts tend to focus on only one or the other group.

Employees need to be able to able to identify problems. Have you ever walked into a team and asked “what problems do you have?” and received the answer “no problems.” Well, gee, I’ve been here 5 minutes and spotted 3, how do you have no problems? Not only do them need to be able to spot problems and opportunities, but do so consistently with other teammates.

Team members must be able to engage in brainstorming, experimentation, and communication to be able to develop, share, and decide on solutions to problems. The ability to work with your teammates in a productive way to determine solutions is more than just having the opportunity to contribute. Skills make this succeed or fail.

To be able to support others in idea development and execution, you must be willing and able to:

• Listen
• Give feedback
• Share a common language of processes and ideas

To be able to contribute your own ideas, an individual must be able to:

• Identify waste and opportunity in their work
• Be able to study and find causes of problems and gaps
• Able to develop solutions that are creative and affordable
• Communicate ideas to others

Engagement is one of the major differentiators for companies in the years to come. Organizations shouldn’t be working on it to win some “best places to work” awards. They should work on developing engagement because the ideas of many can outrun the ideas of a few, and your organization can use every advantage it can find.

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This is part 3 on employee engagement. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

The Development of Systems to Support Engagement

When conducting an assessment, one of the most revealing questions that I seem to ask is “if you have found waste or an opportunity to improve, what do you do with it?” I usually get answers ranging from “I don’t know” to “I wait for the next kaizen event.” Organizations will often want people engaged and even teach them some skills to get them engaged, but fall short of creating a mechanism that actually enables this. Instead, we become dependent on the sheer willpower of the individual to decide to overcome momentum and make a change. This is a big chance to take.

Systems and processes must be build that support engagement. This includes problem solving to new idea engagement. There is certainly no one best mechanism.

When developing systems, consider two important criteria in the design. First, consider the natural flow of work. You want people to be able to leverage whatever systems you design while they are doing the work. If they have to disengage with the work to engage in some other system, it is not going to be very supportive of their needs. Second, consider how you can enable decision making at the point of activity within the systems. This might be decision guides, criteria, standard work, or simple empowerment. Anything that requires permission or interruption in order to complete a task is disempowering and disengages the employees.

Systems can include problem solving or help chain systems, suggestion or idea systems, or even processes such as scoreboards and team huddles. I wrote about help chain systems in a Leading Lean column Forging Your Help Chain, and shared the mistakes of many suggestion systems in another Leading Lean column Make Suggestions Productive. The second column demonstrates a common mistake when designing any such system: don’t build a new disconnected system from the work. It must be embedded in the work. It must be physically where the work is done, available when the work is done, work within the flow of daily work, and leverage the infrastructure that already exists.

What systems do you have that help build engagement? What has worked for you?

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This is Part 2, you can read Part 1 on Creating Employee Engagement.

The Role of Culture in Engagement

Culture is the set of shared assumptions, beliefs, and principles that a group or organization holds. It is best measured or observed by the shared behaviors or habits that are exhibited.

A certain set of beliefs and behaviors need to be developed to support engagement. The most important people to exhibit these behaviors are front-line managers. They are in the best position to create the culture, and the easiest to destroy it, simply based on the frequency and consistency of engagement. Front-line managers are often ignored or at least under-invested in during a lean transformation.

The beliefs that support engagement can be stated many ways, but are centered around two fundamental principles. One is that everyone can make a contribution, and is an expert at something. Two is that given the opportunity, most people want to make a positive contribution. These are foregone conclusions that all people share these beliefs. There are others that can also be enablers to success. What do you consider them to be?

But the important thing is not that front-line managers, and managers of managers, espouse those beliefs. What’s important is that they practice them through the right behaviors. Behaviors is what people experience and it’s what influences their own behaviors. Secondly, regardless of your role, the only way you can really measure whether your front-line managers believe these fundamental principles is by observing their behaviors.

So what behaviors best demonstrate these beliefs?

1. How a person reacts when someone makes a mistake is a great indicator. If the first reaction to a mistake is condemnation and chastising, then this is not consistent with a belief that people are intending to do good. If instead a mistake is met with empathy and support to correct the mistake, that is a very different experience to the individual.
2. An overall approach of inquiry first. Asking questions to draw out people’s knowledge, to learn from them, and even to challenge them demonstrates that you believe that they have the knowledge, they just need to put it to better use.
3. A leader that believes that people can make a contribution will seek out opportunities to capture that, whether that is participation on kaizen events or the development of best practices. Exhibiting the opposite belief is that any time away from direct labor is inherent waste.

What other behaviors would you like to see?

If you are coaching others, keep in mind that just because someone isn’t exhibiting the right behaviors doesn’t mean that they DON’T carry those beliefs. They may lack the skills to exhibit them, or they may require feedback because they think they are exhibiting them when they are not. Sometimes there is a gap in our own true beliefs and our own behaviors. But in the end, it is the behaviors that make the difference.

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Learning happens in the classroom. Coaching happens through a formal mentor often away from our work. At least that’s what we’ve been lead to believe.  

But that view has many limitations.

As it applies to learning, learning is never internalized in the classroom. There is a difference between information, which is in the head, and knowledge, which is the ability to apply that information. What we ultimately care about is the latter. Except in a few extreme cases such as military simulations and teaching hospitals, application of knowledge is either skipped altogether or is quite contrived and limited.

As it applies to coaching, coaching requires knowledge of the current state, feedback, and active experimentation. None of these can happen effectively or efficiently away from the work. A sports coach requires observing the athlete in action and providing feedback in ways that help expose the gap between what is intended and what is realized.

So the assumptions are flawed. We must discard these ideas that most mechanisms of engagement can be mechanistic, contrived, and event-based. Instead, engagement must be fluid, at the point of activity, and continual. So how do you created that? I propose looking at it from a combination of building the right culture that enables and even values engagement, building the right systems or management infrastructure, and building skills in both employees and managers to make it all work.

In the following posts, I will explore each of these areas.

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