I describe culture as the collection of spoken and unspoken conversations. A culture is determined by what you can say, think you cannot say, and how sincere you are when you say it.
In that context, a culture of continuous improvement is build around the following attributes:
- Develop strong leadership capability. Leadership is the ability to create a future that would not ordinarily exist. Although leadership needs to exist throughout the organization, it are the leaders at the top who will drive creation of a new future by defining and enrolling people in the mission. The latter is a measurable goal within a defined time frame that you want to achieve. That will give you the baseline for continuous improvement. This all happens in language.
- Align practices, process and metrics to achieve the mission. There always needs to be a balance between those three to have an organization that produces systemic results while keeping its flexibility.
Companies are not creating continuous improvement, it is the people! . It is the people’s practices, engagement in processes and measurable performance in metrics that will create continuous improvement. The alignment between the three is important, as I have seen companies become so bureaucratic where people seem to have lost common sense and continuous improvement is smothered. At the same time, when there are no sufficient processes, there is lack of continuous improvement as now everyone is trying to imitate the ‘best’ producer while making the same mistakes over and over.
- Develop and nurture the team dynamics. There is only continuous improvement when people can work together with people. This is not a capability you necessarily hire, it is a capability you have to develop within your culture at your organization.
Nobody is perfect, but a team can be! This only happens when you have the right team dynamics as it determines how a team works together. I am sure you have been part or have seen a team of experts, where each individual is a brilliant individual performer in their respective field. Yet, once they come together as a team, it is very dysfunctional and therefore not very productive. This is caused by lack of the right team dynamics. In such a team, there is insufficient relationship and trust, and a lack of conversational capability to bring the team together. Often in these cases, people are more focused on advocating their own ideas, and are not listening and inquiring into the ideas of the other team members.
All these attributes come into existence through language and the conversations that you are able to have on an ongoing basis within your company.
When these are implemented, you have the foundation of creating a culture for continuous improvement, which will result in a high-performing organization.
