Organization Improvement

Challenge: If you, as a business owner, manager, supervisor, co-worker are not working with people to improve your, and others, performance, you are not doing your job. Key Principle: everyone lives in the room for improvement. The only way to get better is to improve. If I’m not improving, I’m getting worse. I’m on the slippery slope to mediocrity at best and failure at worst.

Subtly drive home: Everyone’s livelihood relies on everyone improving

The 6 steps: 

1. State the behaviours you are seeing happen. 

“I notice that you have made errors on your last 10 invoices.” 

Your observations are specific, timely and precise. 

2. Wait for a response. 

Button your lip. The first person to talk loses the game. 

Wait to hear how and what the person responds to your observation. This will help you figure out what to do and how to do it next with the person or team. 

3. No matter what the person’s or groups response, remind them of what we are trying to accomplish re: this specific set of behaviours. 

“We need to have 100% accuracy on the invoices. When the invoices are not accurate the customer will point the error out to us. We will have to correct it. Send out another invoice. This all takes time, which means it will take longer for us to get paid. We also lose the respect of the customer too. 100% accuracy if the goal.” 

Gently remind people that all of our jobs relay on this. 

4. Ask people “How can we work together to solve this problem?” 

Engage people in the solution so they “own it” and will be committed to it. When people are part of and committed to the solution it takes a heck of a lot less energy to keep things on track and improving. 

5. Get everyone’s agreement on the plans of action. 

6. Return to the scene of the accident regularly with questions like, 

“So what’s working well?”; 

“What do we need to improve on?” referencing the specific behaviours observed in #1, the goal in step #3 and the plans of action in step #4. 

Do this regularly. At first it will likely take about 20 minutes. When you learn to do it well. It will most often take you about 8.5 minutes.The payoff? You become a better manager of your business — should you choose to take the profitable route.