How to Become a Great Finisher

The road to hell may or may not be paved with good intentions, but the road to failure surely is. Take a good look at the people you work with, and you'll find lots of Good Starters — individuals who want to succeed, and have promising ideas for how to make that happen. They begin each new pursuit with enthusiasm, or at the very least, a commitment to getting the job done.

And then something happens. Somewhere along the way, they lose steam. They get bogged down with other projects. They start procrastinating and miss deadlines. Their projects take forever to finish, if they get finished at all.

Does all this sound familiar? Maybe a little too familiar? If you are guilty of being a Good Starter, but a lousy finisher — at work or in your personal life — you have a very common problem. After all, David Allen's Getting Things Done wouldn't be a huge bestseller if people could easily figure out how to get things done on their own.

More than anything else, becoming a Great Finisher is about staying motivated from a project's beginning to its end. Recent research has uncovered the reason why that can be so difficult, and a simple and effective strategy you can use to keep motivation high.

In their studies, University of Chicago psychologists Minjung Koo and Ayelet Fishbach examined how people pursuing goals were affected by focusing on either how far they had already come (to-date thinking) or what was left to be accomplished (to-go thinking). People routinely use both kinds of thinking to motivate themselves. A marathon runner may choose to think about the miles already traveled or the ones that lie ahead. A dieter who wants to lose 30 pounds may try to fight temptation by reminding themselves of the 20 pounds already lost, or the 10 left to go.

Intuitively, both approaches have their appeal. But too much to-date thinking, focusing on what you've accomplished so far, will actually undermine your motivation to finish rather than sustain it.

Koo and Fishbach's studies consistently show that when we are pursuing a goal and consider how far we've already come, we feel a premature sense of accomplishment and begin to slack off. For instance, in one study, college students studying for an exam in an important course were significantly more motivated to study after being told that they had 52% of the material left to cover, compared to being told that they had already completed 48%.

When we focus on progress made, we're also more likely to try to achieve a sense of "balance" by making progress on other important goals. This is classic Good Starter behavior — lots of pots on the stove, but nothing is ever ready to eat.

If, instead, we focus on how far we have left to go (to-go thinking), motivation is not only sustained, it's heightened. Fundamentally, this has to do with the way our brains are wired. To-go thinking helps us tune in to the presence of a discrepancy between where we are now and where we want to be. When the human brain detects a discrepancy, it reacts by throwing resources at it: attention, effort, deeper processing of information, and willpower.

In fact, it's the discrepancy that signals that an action is needed — to-date thinking masks that signal. You might feel good about the ground you've covered, but you probably won't cover much more.

Great Finishers force themselves to stay focused on the goal, and never congratulate themselves on a job half-done. Great managers create Great Finishers by reminding their employees to keep their eyes on the prize, and are careful to avoid giving effusive praise or rewards for hitting milestones "along the way." Encouragement is important, but to keep your team motivated, save the accolades for a job well — and completely — done.

Source: HBR

How Toyota Pulls Improvement from the Front Line

Toyota is famous for its Toyota Production System, an approach that effectively engages front-line workers in improving their work. As I argued in my last post, "pulling" improvement from the front line is critical to continually improve operations, and Toyota does it very well. Companies that "push" work improvements from the top usually generate tepid front-line enthusiasm. Despite some missteps in the last couple of years, Toyota's ascent to the top of the auto industry has been for one reason: quality. And a big reason for its unrivaled quality is worker participation in process improvement. A platitude? Hardly. The company implements an average of nine ideas per employee per year, as described in Chuck Yorke and Norman Bodek's book All You Gotta Do Is Ask. 

How does Toyota do it? There are three essential elements: context, management processes, and people.

The context is crucial: Constant improvement is part of everyone's job description. Toyota's culture encourages front-line workers to suggest local improvements and help make them. Management has established a relationship of mutual trust and respect with the workforce. Managers and workers can make improvement part of their jobs without fear because streamlining work won't eliminate their jobs. Workers make suggestions out of a sense of pride in improving work conditions, and out of a sense of togetherness. Toyota nurtures camaraderie through lots of group bonding activities. In most cases, the firm rewards the team that came up with the improvement, not the individual. Unlike most companies I've seen, Toyota doesn't separate top management from the field with suggestion boxes. Senior managers go to the front line and listen, which shows respect to those far from the executive suite. That energizes workers.

How work improvements work their way up the organization chart isn't happenstance. Toyota has explicit management processes for it. Toyota defines standard procedures for how to execute work as a baseline for improvement and to ensure organizational goals are implanted in the front lines, where the real work of the organization takes place. When front-line workers spot a work problem, they have a clear way to suggest improvements. Their idea goes through a quality circle of peer workers, which then must be approved by their manager. Upper-level managers view the ideas, then take action. This is a bottom-up, not top down, system.

The last reason this works at Toyota is because of the roles and skills of the people. Front-line workers know the true meaning and value of each standard procedure — not only in theory. They have the skills and knowledge to solve problems and an end-to-end process perspective. The supervisors are pivotal in developing these competencies. They check and confirm that the standard procedures have been put in place and that workers are following them exactly. Supervisors can improve processes through coaching, questioning (not ordering), and making front-line workers think and take responsibility. Managers (supervisors, managers, directors, and above) motivate workers by meeting with them to communicate the corporate vision.

Would Toyota's approach work at your organization? Not easily.

Most organizations I've seen would find Toyota's approach difficult to digest. Their context doesn't allow work improvement to be part of everyone's job. The workers are too busy doing the day-to-day work, so they don't have the time to suggest improvements. Managers are skeptical that workers will do what's best for the company and not just for them. That attitude obstructs any serious initiative to solicit worker feedback. The mindset is that managers have all the answers and their jobs are to dictate them — not to learn from workers. These beliefs run very deep in most organizations I've seen. They are not easily changed.

The management processes of these companies don't support bottom-up improvement. Work isn't standardized (standards may be written down, but aren't followed consistently), and formal suggestion systems (e.g., quality circles) are rare. 

Lastly, the roles and skills of the people aren't conducive to change coming from the bottom of the hierarchy. Supervisors don't make sure workers follow consistent standards. They dole out work but don't have time or expectations that they should improve the way the work is done. They move frequently to new assignments, and they manage by the numbers, not by the process. Without knowledge of the work, they can't coach effectively. They don't know what the optimal process is. They can't ask probing questions. They don't have the confidence to say they don't know; they got to where they are because they had the answers.

If you want continual process improvements by engaging the front line but aren't ready to adopt Toyota's revolutionary approach, is there another way? In my next post, I'll share stories of other organizations that have turned up the dial of front-line engagement. As I mentioned in a previous post, you need to be careful in trying to emulate others' successes. Just because it works at Toyota doesn't mean it will work elsewhere. The art is knowing how to take pieces from others' successes and create your own. 

How Toyota Pulls Improvement from the Front Line
Brad Power
Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:30:00 GMT

Lean Manufacturing Vs. Continuous Improvement

Let’s start off by defining Lean Manufacturing. Lean (as described on multiple on-line resources) is described as a production practice that focuses on the elimination of wasteful elements in all process to increase the value to the customer. Sounds great! What organization wouldn’t want to implement a program to eliminate waste? The problem is that some organizations misuse Lean Manufacturing to overwork and reduce headcount.

Sure reducing headcount will save money in the short term. Let me assure you, it comes at a higher cost.

Let’s say a manager forms a team of skilled individuals to rebalance processes on the line to remove operators. Soon, the operators who are left on the line will start noticing, leading to refusal to cooperate with any effort to make improvement. They will begin to resist changes due to the fact they are scared to lose their job or contribute to a co-worker loosing theirs. This causes stress, conflict, finger pointing and ultimately failure.

This is a sure fire way to pit management against the shop floor. It is due to this lack of understanding that Lean has left a bad taste in many shop floor employees’ mouths. This leads me to the opinion that maybe the word Lean needs to be eliminated from our vocabulary.

I think that when we focus strictly on Lean we inevitably pay more attention to the dollar numbers. I am not saying that the dollar numbers are not important. They are, but there are other elements within an organization that far outweigh the bottom dollar, create flexibility and opportunity for future growth.

It is my opinion that running an organization Lean is actually a by-product of Continuous Improvement philosophy. When we focus our sites on Lean and Lean alone we are really missing the bigger picture. Culture is the most important element to true organizational maturity. Continuous Improvement philosophy zeros in on culture and stimulates its development.

Continuous Improvement philosophy focuses on the people and the success of the organizational team. It requires everyone’s engagement, commitment and trust. It is therefore culture driven and will help the company grow for years.

Everyone should be trained on its ideals and philosophies. For a continuous improvement organization to thrive organizational leadership must dedicate 85% to development of other employees through training, influence and OJT. Once the majority of the organization understands the philosophy then, and only then is it time to move to the next step.

The remaining 15% then can be dedicated to implementing the actual tools and engaging the employees. The employees that own the process need to make the change and improve the organizations current state. Not only does this encourage them but it also increases the chance that the change will be sustained and standardized.

We must be careful as organizational leaders to not put the cart before the horse. Don’t expect significant, highly profitable changes too fast. Let the cake sit in the oven for a while, trust me in the end it will taste much sweeter.

Let’s get “Lean” out of our heads and start communicating CI. It’s broader, includes everyone (especially the operators) and will give us long term gains. Let’s train, empower and engage rather than cut time, rebalance and lay-off.

Source: ASQ

Lean Manufacturing Vs. Continuous Improvement
Tue, 21 Jun 2011 22:40:20 GMT

Balancing Push and Pull Approaches to Improvement

Almost every process improvement initiative I've researched over the last three years in more than 50 organizations has been pushed from the top. These mandated-from-above programs include Lean Six Sigma initiatives with experts ("Belts") in command, big IT implementations, and reengineering of major end-to-end processes. While most of these interventions produced tangible business benefits, they often didn't stick. Because the top-down pushes imposed changes from the outside, front-line people went along, but they didn't own or internalize them.

For me the lesson is this: Companies should complement a top-down push with as much bottom-up pull as possible to sustain momentum and avoid regression back to previous, inferior levels of performance.

Consider the competition between push and pull camps in a major oil company. An executive in the company's finance operations adopted a Six Sigma belt-driven approach to reduce costs in the company's global shared service centers. (The centers employ several thousand employees who provided accounts payable and receivables services to the firm's business units.)

The company put 10% of its service center employees through a very practical, low-cost "green belt" training program. The firm then tasked each employee with a specific project to cut costs, armed with their tools and training. In the first year, each service center worker identified cost cuts from $15,000 to $30,000. The oil company lopped off 10% of the service centers' cost base in the first year, followed by 11% the next.

However, the program had several internal critics, who believed the belt-driven approach offered only transient benefits. They would have preferred a lower-profile approach that relied on service center managers — not Six Sigma experts — to do the heavy lifting of identifying inefficiencies and making changes. In other words, this camp favored a bottom-up pull approach, although it would have allowed for a few experts and training focused on managers and supervisors as part of their jobs.

Which camp is right? Many executives are attracted to push approaches, especially senior managers who need big results fast. They like the notion of using experienced improvement experts (internal or external) to drive projects with short ramp-ups and delivery times. For example, GE runs process improvement projects with Six Sigma Master Black Belts, Black Belts, and Green Belts armed with explicit financial targets. GE's attitude is, "Tell me how much money you want to save, and I'll tell you how many Belts you need."

If you want to shake up your organization in a way most of your people are not positioned or predisposed to attempt, the top-down approach is very alluring. You get immediate attention by announcing a program, paying for external or internal advice and training, and setting clear financial targets. Using experienced consultants can lower your risk. At the very least, they can give you political cover if the initiative fails; you can blame it on them.

However, the push approach comes with complications. Project interventions led by outside experts usually carry the promise of sizable results, but they often aren't sustained. When the project is over and the consultants leave, the process tends to revert to its previous state. Accountability for sustaining the changes often isn't transferred from the consultants to someone in the organization. In addition, using outside experts implicitly demonstrates management's distrust of the workforce, which is de-motivating. Further, a company can miss the opportunity to transfer knowledge from the process experts to its people. Finally, the improvement experts (and I am one!) can often have a superior attitude and be zealots with a hammer, so that everything looks like a nail.

One company that recognized the downside of the Six Sigma approach — which is fundamentally a push approach — is identification and decorative solutions manufacturer Avery Dennison. The $6 billion company launched a Six Sigma initiative in 1998 in one of its major groups with help from consultants from GE. A senior operations leader I spoke to was skeptical that the quoted financial savings from Six Sigma projects, while valid, were having long-term effects on their cost structure.

"Today we're 90% Lean and 10% Six Sigma. The value proposition for Lean — fundamentally a pull approach — is not a cost-saving program, it's a growth program. It's about attuning your whole organization to customer needs." Avery Dennison doesn't certify or have anyone called Black Belt anymore.

The push approach to process improvement has serious limitations — in order for it to be successful, senior executives must also create pull from front-line workers. If there are continual changes in a company's markets or strategy, that company will most likely need to make productivity improvements part of everyone's job. To increase worker commitment and satisfaction, it will need to inspire every one of them to think about how they do their work and how they can improve it.

Source: HBR

Scheduling a Meeting the Right Way

Back in the days of Mad Men, there were clear delineations between administrative and professional roles. Secretaries, as they were then called, existed expressly to type memos, fetch coffee, serve lunch and schedule meetings.

Today, the once-clear lines between administrative and professional roles have changed. While it would have been unthinkable to ask an assistant account manager to schedule a meeting at Sterling Cooper in the 1960s, today it is not only common, it arguably commands a degree of respect and aptitude.

When your boss asks you to schedule an important meeting with Boeing executives, it is a reflection of your competence: you can handle this. Yet the honor goes hand-in-hand with the misery of being in charge of the administrative tasks involved — how in the world are you supposed to find a time that works for fourteen professionals across three firms in two different time zones?

No doubt the scheduling of meetings has become the bane of many a junior professional's existence. This role didn't use to fall in our court and in theory shouldn't be that hard. Yet coordinating calendars can become treacherous.

The first and most important question to ask is this — whose priorities come first? Who is the most important person to schedule the meeting around?

If you work in the client service business, the answer is easy: the client comes first. If you're including members of your own team along with outside vendors or service providers, than the most senior person in your organization typically holds the trump card. And if you're an attorney trying to get three managing partners on the line, you'll generally have to tap dance delicately to make sure all three are held in similar regard.

If you're unsure, go ahead and ask your manager ("Who is the most critical person that needs to attend/whose schedule I should accommodate?") Try and offer up your own suggestions of what you think that order of precedence should be and why.

Once you know your hierarchy, you have two options for proceeding:

1. What works for you?
2. Here are three times that work for the team, please let us know which is best for you.

What Works for You?

Often, there are one or two VIPs on a call who everyone else needs to jump through hoops to accommodate. In that case, start your search with that person's assistant and ask for several times that will work for them. Then go back to the rest of your team with the possibilities and ask which one works best for everyone. You may have to side with the majority or circle back to people to double-check if everyone can't agree the first time around.

Here Are Some Times That Work

The second option is to query your internal team first and then reach out to your client or external participants with two or three options of dates and times that work. This option still puts the priority party in the driver's seat but sets the table for them: you're messaging that they have first choice of a date/time but you've already worked the back channels to ensure that those options work for your team.

The caveat is that if none of the times you mention work for the other party, you need to give them free reign to suggest an alternative. Then you and your team must scramble/change/adjust priorities to meet the client's needs. You've done your best to make the meeting work on your terms, but sometimes it's just not possible.

Finally, a few additional pointers to keep in mind:

• Don't ask all attendees blindly for times that work — it's too ambiguous and open-ended. Give your team some ideas/options that they can respond to — it will prompt them to check their calendars and really make sure Tuesday afternoon is open or Monday before 9 am is off-limits.
• Don't commit to a date or time without making sure you have sign-off from the key players. You never want to have go back to a senior person and tell them their preferred date/time doesn't work.
• Keep a paper trail — save emails with people's availability to make sure you cover your bases in the event someone comes back and complains about a time they OK'ed.

Source: HBR