Culture is King: Give Improvement a Purpose

Bill and I decided to try something different this week. We recorded one of our discussions on the topic of creating a culture of improvement; why do it, why it’s so hard, and things that work (and don’t). I’ve edited out specific names to protect the guilty but below is our conversations in largely raw format. Hope you enjoy!

Why does building an improvement culture matter?

Thomas: So maybe we’ll start with that question of value then. How do you answer questions like this when you’re at that initial engagement chat with an exec or with a team you’re working with?

_{Note: Turns out I use “right” and “ya know” A LOT. I’ve removed this to spare you the frustration.}

Bill: The first thing that comes to mind – I think people understand that process improvement matters. Whether or not they prioritize it is obviously a different matter, when you start talking about “ingraining a culture of improvement” they’ll kind of roll their eyes.

People have very different definitions of culture, but to me it’s really about momentum. You can do something point-in-time, you can deliver a great improvement. But if it’s not part of your culture it ends right there. And you’ll kind of go back to why the team needed that improvement in the beginning because your existing culture is causing your team to do things in a way that is too tactical or sapping all their time. So it’s impossible to consistently improve your process without some flexing of that culture. Eventually something will blow up or your manager starts shouting to do something short-term and three months later you’re right back where you started. 

Thomas: Yeah I think that’s a really good point. I probably use metaphors too much but it’s a lot like a yo-yo diet when all you’re doing is trying to drop 10 pounds for your friend’s wedding or something and you stop eating for a week. If you don’t fix the underlying issues you’re going to end at the same weight as before. I think it’s the same thing with business improvement – if you don’t align the team culture with it you’ll find that no matter how good of a deliverable you deliver in a specific area you’re going to come right back down over time because you still have the same managerial patterns and the same responses to incidents that got you there in the first place.

Bill: We’ll touch on time capacity later I’m sure but I think what the team spends their time on is also a product of culture. So again if process improvement isn’t part of how you define your team then the team will never have time to work in this. They’ll quickly revert to spending their time on what they feel the team values most – like the volume of resolved incidents, instead of eliminating their causes. 

Thomas: You’ll have this kind of situation where a particular high-level exec get’s passionate about improvement, and for the duration while their eyes are on it people will be super motivated. But as soon as that exec’s attention goes away folks will revert back to their previous priorities .

Bill: That’s a great way to put it – “how do I know I’ve created a culture of improvement?” – It’s when you don’t need that type of oversight or whipping of the team to deliver improvement. You don’t need oversight for your team to respond to client queries for example. Process improvement should be as automatic as that if you’ve built a culture to support it.

Why is creating an improvement culture so hard?

Thomas: That’s a nice segue to our second topic; why is creating a culture of improvement so hard? We’ve both seen it frequently, it can be soooo hard to get the traction needed to create that type of true long-term behavior change.

Bill: Yeah, part of it is that it’s not just about execution and management can have a hard time justifying changing something without an immediate benefit – it’s a lagging benefit. For me one of the key ways to change your culture is to create some sort of virtual org that creates that community, creates that support group, that coalesces skill groups you’ve identified you want to build. But to do that it takes time and the virtual organization itself doesn’t create a benefit, it’s an enabler. This is what I’ve found difficult to pitch to management – they just want to hear about the improvements that have been executed against the ROI. 

Thomas: About that lagging benefit issue – if you’re not setting it up so that the little wins that you make are naturally documented and compiled in a place that can be seen then it essentially doesn’t exist in the eyes of someone outside your direct org. They’re not going to see the daily or weekly improvements but you still need to give them something so they can see the impact of what is happening. A common response then is to set massive (and unfunded) goals that will get the attention and support of execs. 

Bill: You see that, where teams will focus only on big wins. The kind that are not going to be accomplished even in a couple years time. And so when this new org tries to think of use cases they end up producing a list that people just roll their eyes at. 

Of course we’d love to automate everything, of course we’d love central data transparency! 

So to what you’re saying – the teams that are not calibrated to appreciate small wins; they don’t capture it, they don’t celebrate it, and they only care about the epic wins. What do they get for their efforts? They come away thinking that improvement is just too hard, and nothing gets done, and it’s better to focus on business as usual. 

Still Bill: Something else, and you’ve written about this before, people tend to be tool-led in how they approach this topic and it feels like often times when teams try to set up a ‘culture of improvement’ it’s because of a new tool that they’ve found that they want to implement everywhere.

Which is fine, that tool probably will bring value, but I don’t think, long-term, that creates a culture of improvement. The team is kind of missing the point as to what they’re doing.

Thomas: Yeah – in that situation people mis-identify what improvement is. Instead of seeing it as a meta-skill to scientifically approach your work, a celebration of transparency and data-driven evidence – they confuse it with being a particular tool. Then they just pull from that one well until it dries up and are like “welp, that’s it”. Not realizing that’s just one of the thousands of things that are out there – some technical, some policy, some procedural – all these things that they can use.

Face Plants and Things That Work:

Thomas: K, so from there let’s talk a little bit about tactics you’ve seen be effective  as well as some of the face-plants we’ve experienced over the years (we’ve seen plenty of both)?

Bill: Yeah I’ll start with a face-plant I experienced a lot in the construction industry. There’s a few, but it’s anytime senior management wants to put together a “SWAT team”. They have a top-down directive, they force people into the group and essentially say “go find improvement”. 

It’s usually light on direction and it’s firm-wide with a huge scope. The people in the group are high-performers but may not have the skill sets or experience needed to build a culture of improvement. So, as we mentioned before, they generate use cases, but they’re very big and the team runs into massive hurdles when it comes time to execute on anything. Given the senior audience they report to, it’s very hard to walk-back any of the ideas, and the virtual team dies out.  

Thomas: It’s funny because, the life-cycle you describe plays out so many times, with slight variations on format but basically the model is: Senior exec gets excited about improvement (or frustrated with errors), and forms a little “hunting party” of their favorite underlings to “solve the problem”. 

Then because of the mandate they’ve been given, the group is very motivated to find big sexy solutions but they end up aiming too high and eventually it all collapses under its own weight once it becomes evident that they’re not going to deliver anything.

Bill: Yeah, and let’s be clear – I’m a big fan of these working groups, I think they’re great for collaboration, but you have to focus on things that you can self-serve on – think: “what can we accomplish together” and then only look outside as you start to build up that cadence of delivery. 

Thomas: You know, I’d actually go further and argue that it’s a mistake, regardless of size, to start your journey towards a cultural change with “delivery” as the focus. Because often times if you don’t re-frame of the conversation from being just about how big the improvement is, you’re going to kind of have these recurring things where people are stuck on a different track.

My thought is that these things (deliveries of benefit) are actually all byproducts of a cultural change that occurs when people become clear about what their goals are. They become quantitative about what their quarterly or their yearly objectives are and then are transparent across all levels of the organization. Once you start getting that kind of a communication I think then the ideas that start flowing are so much higher in quality. It’s so much easier to demonstrate value when all of these other obstacles, that typically hound you as you’re trying to deliver on small or large things, are already taken care of, if you nail down the basics of what’s your true north is and how you define it. 

_{Here Thomas got off his soap-box and sat back down in his chair.}

Bill: Yeah you need to attract people who are already interested in improvement. There is a clear goal in mind that is either set by management or is something that your team feels is important. And you can iterate on how to achieve that goal. That team, despite having very little external support will progress toward that goal. And that will catch the eye of mgmt and set the stage for the momentum that is so important to making this a regular thing. I don’t think it’s rocket science, it can be as simple as that. 

So maybe in terms of what works, it’s centralizing the community of support and decentralizing the teams that actually execute so you get this bottom up opportunity no matter where it is in the org, and they get the help they need.

Thomas: That’s something I liked in your last post, you mentioned that this has to be an agenda item in your weekly meetings, it has to be something that is a part of the natural cadence of doing work. 

Bill: One more thing on time, people always say they don’t have time. But obviously nobody is working 9 to 5 every single minute of the day.  You get into that conversation a lot, and there’s always, even a half an hour a day that you can find. Now, it’s not going to be found if that person is just not motivated to do this. It only works if they want to do this, but you can do this kind of guerrilla-style implementation until enough benefit has been realized to give you back enough time to make this a part of your normal day.

Thomas: A lot of times people will talk about how they’re not influential enough – they only manage a small team or don’t manage a team at all.

That’s why I think, to your point, it’s about starting with the correct principles and you build it out within whatever realm of influence you have – even if it’s just an individual person’s day today work. You implement these principles, you define what your goals are and what metrics you care about and you build that culture from where you stand today. 

Bill: I think that really sums it up really nice. For me at least behavior is culture in a way. it’s not what you’re doing it’s how you’re doing it.  If you’re focusing on the outcome, you could reach that outcome in many different ways and a lot of them are unsustainable.

So, it’s about getting people excited about the prep work, the analysis, the goal setting and the data generation. A lot of work that is not execution related – but leads you to execution. These are fun things! Experimentation should be fun, but it’s not fun if you don’t have a feedback loop, if you don’t really understand if you’re making a difference, and can’t communicate to your manager that you are.

Thanks for sticking with us! Let us know what you think of this format – we may do future conversations (perhaps even an audio version if I can get my “like”s under control :0)