In creating your company’s value stream, planning, assessing and determining practical and useful benchmarks and goals for improvement is important, but the hardest part is making it all actually work. Your employees may believe “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” A new program or new incentive is posted on a bulletin board, generates some enthusiasm at first, and then months later, it’s all forgotten, lost amidst deadlines, overtime, client meetings, breakdowns, praise and complaints. By failing to follow through, all of your planning may come to represent just another source of wasted time and effort.
Conducting a redesign of your operation requires the active buy-in of all of your employees, and also a firm commitment at the management level. Your employees must participate in developing and sustaining the value stream, but they probably will only take this project as seriously as you do.
U.S. Army General and former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower explained effective leadership by using a simple example. Lay a string on the table, he said, “Pull the string, and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all.”
The leaders in your company, from the owner and CEO to the managers and supervisors, must all participate in the program, and all be willing to accept as well as give constructive criticism. Well, let’s not call it “criticism.” No blame or accusations, rather encouraging close observation and developing feasible ways to work smarter and more productively.
Each employee knows the details of his or her role in the organization better than anyone else—they do this every day, they own it. Very likely, they’ve already made changes in their work areas and acquired or invented their own tools to make their jobs easier and more efficient. Encourage them to do this, listen to them, and whenever necessary and possible, lend support. Veteran employees may be resistant to change, but their skills and experience can also make them valuable sources of effective ideas.
Training also is important, particularly if you decide to purchase new hardware or software, or learn a new and better production method (perhaps one created by an employee.) The bells and whistles really don’t matter if no one knows how to use them properly, or if employees ignore them all together. Learning curves can be tough, even humiliating—another opportunity for encouragement, support, and maybe even a little humor.
And look to your vendors for their support, as well as your customers. We are all in this together, all able to learn from each other. That’s how we all grow.
