Lessons from the Basketball Court: Three Expectations for Improvement

(Image courtesy of free clipart images)

I am head coach for my 3^rd grade daughter’s basketball team this season.  For most of the team members, this is their first year playing the game, and there is room for improvement for each person (coaches included!).

On the first day of practice, we discussed the three expectations that us coaches have of the girls as players. Ruminating on these expectations, it occurs to me that they have parallel significance in the workplace when trying to make improvements.  These are:

1. Respect
2. Always Try
3. Play as One Team

I asked the girls what each of these meant to them.  In their case, “Respect” meant to listen to the coaches, treat each other with kindness and be encouraging to themselves and each other.  This seems to be pretty similar to the baseline expectation in a workplace.  Treat each other with professional courtesy and respect; which extends beyond being “nice” into things like being punctual, considerate of new ideas, trusting others to do their job, holding people accountable for their work, and following the golden rule (i.e. do unto others).  One client recently asked me what the client needed to do in order for an engagement with AJC to be successful.   The first thing necessary is to want to change and improve.   Consultants help catalyze change, and when a client actually wants to change and improve, they are demonstrating respect for the work the consultant is being hired to do.

The next expectation is to “Always Try.”  For the girls, this means active participation:  to try to do every new skill or play being taught them.  They may not be perfect, or even very good, especially the first few times, but only by trying will they master the skills of the game.  The parallel here is quite apparent, and brings to mind that Shakira song from Zootopia:  Try Everything!  As was discussed in a recent article about The Beauty of the Pilot, we have to try things in order to find out how/whether they work, and as a very necessary step towards success.  In the case of consulting, for both the consultant and the client – active participation and trying to make things work, providing feedback on areas to modify and improve, and trying again.  Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good – always try!

Finally, “Play as One Team.”  We will win and lose as a team or as a company.  It is of no use to the whole group to have a ball hog; this is not sustainable in basketball or in business.  Like the adage that “a team is only as strong as its weakest player,” everyone needs to work hard to improve.  Naturally there will be differing skills, complimentary and growing; but having a single person assume everything, or worse – optimizing in a silo when the functions or processes up or downstream lag, will not help the company’s bottom line.  AJC worked with one client this past year who was unsure of which of their six main process steps were holding them up in their overall timeline to complete a process.  They were experiencing a lot of personnel “pain” in one area, but when we collected duration data for which step took the longest, it was a totally different area than people expected.  We were able to address both areas; the first to find a better way to minimize the manual work that was causing people “pain,” and the second by changing their capacity and allowing the backlog at the bottleneck to flow more quickly, thus enabling the overall process duration to improve. 

In this way, playing as one team is akin to looking at the overall end-to-end value stream; considering the big picture to delivering a product or service, and using data to ascertain where the weakest area is.  Once we know that, we can improve there, and then move on to the next weakest area.  Always, however, we are working to improve the company or team as a whole.

After explaining the Three Expectations, one girl asked me why I didn’t say “Have Fun!” as an expectation.  Of course, I sincerely hope each girl enjoys basketball and has fun on our team!  However, this is something I cannot require or expect.  It seems to me that this is also true in business.  Sure, it would be great to have fun!  But we can’t make that an expectation as “having fun” is an individual perception.  If we follow our expectations above, it is definitely possible that all of our team members, on the ball court or in a business, will not only change and improve, but have fun too.

Happy Holidays from AJC

How to be both Confident and Humble: Follow Through

Yes, this is yours truly (more than 15 years ago  - boy have digital cameras improved since then ...)

Much has been written on confidence, and especially in regards to confidence in women.  Of course, overconfidence can be a very bad thing; especially when perceived of as arrogance by colleagues or peers.   In fact, much has also been written about humility, and especially with regards to leadership.  Turns out humility is a primary factor in strong leaders, which is actually not all that surprising, considering.  Everyone makes mistakes and it is much more inspiring to follow someone who acknowledges that, learns from his or her mistakes, and moves on.

However, in the workplace there is definitely a fine balance between demonstrating enough confidence to assure others that you will get your work done on time and well; and enough humility to recognize when you need help to accomplish these things.  Furthermore, if you want to be a leader, others need to trust you and your abilities.  This is where follow through comes in.

I googled “confidence humility follow through” and got about 1.3 million hits.  In the first page, however, nothing came up on the strategy of follow through.  Google suggested a similar search on “how to be humble and confident at the same time” which yielded approximately 1.6 million hits, but still did not have anything on the first page about using the strategy of follow through.  Not to be overconfident here, but I’d like to offer a potentially little-discussed strategy that may help one toward the ever so delicate balance of being humbly confident: the strategy of follow through.

Follow through, as the phrase suggests, is the act of admitting you don’t know something or are not done with something, but offering to either find out or complete the work and get back to the requestee/group with the results or confirmed action closure.  It is so simple that it is often overlooked; “Have you done XYZ?” “No, but I’ll do it this afternoon and confirm to the group that it is done.”  “What do you know about ABC?” “Not much, but let me look into it and I’ll get back to you.”  These types of conversations happen daily in a workplace.  The key to instilling trust as a leader, of course, is in actually closing out the follow through cycle.

To illustrate:  when I was just starting out in my career as a Process Engineer at a very large semiconductor company, one of my Ph.D. colleagues asked me how it was that I always knew the right answers for the floor technicians who asked me for direction.  I distinctly remember saying, “I don’t always know the right answer, but I have confidence in my ability to find out.”  I went on to describe that when I didn’t know something, I would look the technician in the eye, admit that I did not know right then, but that I would get back to him or her with the answer or course of action soon.  Then I went about learning whatever I didn’t know and – you guessed it – got back to that person.  Over time, technicians, engineers, and even managers would come to me more and more with questions or requests, and I gained a reputation for getting things done.  Rarely, however, did I actually have all the answers immediately. 

Indeed, even now as a consultant offering process improvement services – I don’t know exactly what to recommend for any given client without research, learning, analysis, discussions, and a lot of collaborative effort.  What works for one company won’t always work for another; it is part of the fun to learn and explore new situations, devise strategies and use tools, both old and new, which will work for each unique circumstance.

To summarize, this is my humble advice: be honest and humble when you do not know, have confidence in your ability to find out; and always follow through with those around you.  Over time, this will help you become a true leader.

Stocking Stuffer Trials, or On the Beauty of the Pilot

 

All Our Stockings In A Row

Christmas is around the corner, and like many people, each member of my family will get a stocking full of goodies from Santa.  As the one who procures the items for Santa to generously impart to each person in his or her stocking, the trick is to ascertain exactly how much “stuff” will fit into each stocking so that it is full, but not overflowing to the point where the integrity of the mantle hook is in jeopardy!

After buying a few things and hemming and hawing about whether it was enough or not, I had an epiphany (no pun intended):  Why not just fill the stockings with what I have and see how much space is left over?  Then I can decide how much more, if anything, I will need to procure for each person, and/or if I need to return anything.  Queue the audio: Duh-duh-DUUUUUUMMMMM!!!   It seems obvious:  Instead of imagining how things will fit, why don’t I just TRY IT? 

Parallel this concept to our professional lives.  Trial and error is one of the BEST ways to determine what works and what does not!  But we don’t want to try things on a large scale initially, because of the risk that they will not work.  If our new ideas fail, we want them to fail on a small scale, and most importantly – in a way that does not affect the customer.  Therein lies the beauty of The Pilot.

The Pilot is a trial period for a new idea, process, or methodology.  It is to be undertaken on a small scale and under increased scrutiny.  It is to be done for a pre-determined amount of time or quantity of trials, with the expectation that changes will be made based on the results.  Speaking of results, the desired results need to be hypothesized (what will success look like?), and actual results measured or compared to the desired result; driving modifications before full implementation.

Piloting a new idea, process, or methodology is not to be confused with continuous improvement, which encourages us to always find ways to make things better in small incremental steps.  Pilots, on the other hand, are typically used for new concepts and/or complete “re-engineering” (kaikaku) of an existing process.

One recent AJC client is a services company that collects information from their customers to begin their internal workflow.  Each information collector had his or her own methodology for what to collect, and how to collect it.  They generally asked for the same information eventually, but often requests were afterthoughts, and “custom” each time, even though 80+% of what they needed was standard for all of their clientele.

We designed a process whereby template letters introducing the required information were sent to clients at specific points in the collection process, inclusive of standardized checklists that could be expanded or contracted based on the specific situation.  The standard content of the templates and checklists were modeled on a few internal best practices, which helped provide credibility to others in the company. Though this methodology may sound simplistic, it was different than anything most people in the company had done before.

Instead of rolling out the templates and checklists to all the employees at the same time, however, the project team decided to instigate a Pilot.  We worked with 25% of the personnel and trained them on the new templates and lists, and asked them to Pilot them for a period of 6 weeks.  Over the course of that time, the project team checked in with the pilot personnel regularly.  We had a cloud-based “issues” list where people could input their real-time feedback or issues with the new materials, and improvements were evaluated and made immediately when possible.  We tracked completeness of checklists for required information at the point of submission to the next internal step, and rework if the recipient found errors and had to return the form throughout the Pilot, and setup internal visual cues to prompt completeness within the checklists themselves.

At the end, the data was reviewed and baseline metric established, and I met with each pilot team member personally to solicit feedback on the new templates and lists.  The overwhelming consensus was that the templates were helpful, but the lists were too cumbersome.  I received lots of practical and specific recommendations and requests for simplification, which were made and re-tested on a shorter timeline.  After the Pilot team felt comfortable with the new materials, we updated the training and rolled out the new process and materials to the entire company.

Piloting is definitely a sound, tried and true practice which allows companies to test new ideas, processes, or methodologies in a safe environment.  Often it is difficult to predict performance without actual experience, and in general, people feel more comfortable knowing that they can always “fall back” on the old way of doing things if the new way doesn’t work.  And by soliciting and incorporating feedback from the pilot group, the change agents instill trust and a sense of ownership resulting in “champions” of the new idea/process/methodology with the rest of the company.

Hopefully this testing idea will work as well for my stocking stuffing activities this December.

Rip Off the Red Tape Band-Aid!

“Red Tape,” according to the ubiquitous Wikipedia, is “an idiom that refers to excessive regulation or rigid conformity to formal rules that is considered redundant or bureaucratic and hinders or prevents action or decision-making.”  What amazes me is that many companies forget who put on the red tape in the first place.  “We can’t do that, it doesn’t follow our protocols!,” “We have to do it this way per our procedures,” or “This is what our process requires us to do.” 

When asked if these protocols/procedures/processes are required by some external regulatory body, most of the time the answer is no.  The company themselves wrote the protocol, procedure, or process; there is no external governing body which holds them to maintaining a legacy practice ad infinitum (or who even cares in the first place!).  Yes, sometimes companies are ISO, SQF, or certified by some other body – but guess what?  Even those certification bodies mainly care that the company does what it claims to do.  They just hold you to your own standards.  Effectively, the company itself decides how much red tape to put on any given process or procedure.

So why don’t companies just CHANGE their outdated/ineffective/excessively complicated/disorganized/ambiguous (etc.) “red tape” methods of doing things?  One reason is that they are stuck in a “fixed mindset,” where they cannot even conceive of making changes.  Change is never easy; we human beings tend to fear the unknown.  Many of us have heard the proverb that it is better to choose the familiar but unpleasant situation rather than the unfamiliar one because that may turn out worse.  But guess what… it also may turn out better, and there’s only one way to find out.

One very exciting company that AJC works with has really embraced the “growth mindset” as described in the book Mindset by Carol Dweck.  This company is ready to embrace change; they recognize that putting processes in place and writing out protocols and procedures does not bind them forever; it just binds them until they recognize a better way of doing things, then they make (and effect) improvements!  A few months ago, we conducted an internal audit of their laboratory.  The laboratory does not use large amounts of hazardous chemicals, but they do use small amounts occasionally, and they have an eyewash station in the lab.  Their safety shower, however, is in a different room and there is a door between the lab and the shower which is typically shut while lab personnel is working.  I pointed this out as a potential safety issue to the manager. 

Within minutes the manager had created a sign and hung it on the door stating that the door was never to be closed when a worker was in the lab alone.  Additionally, she verbally informed all the lab staff of this new rule right away.  By the next week when I arrived, the sign had been printed and laminated on both sides of the door, and all the surrounding personnel in every department had also been trained on the rule.

Needless to say, I was super impressed!  Not only did this company push back on their “protocol” of how they typically operate in the lab with the door closed, but they had made the change within minutes and formalized it within a week.  Everyone recognized that a change was needed, and embraced it without reservation.  This is just one example of the many improvements being made at this company where almost everyone has a growth mindset.

Since the only constant is change itself, we may as well train our mindsets toward growth and Rip Off the Red Tape Band-Aid!  What will it take your company to do this?