Blog Article by Ray Attiyah, Chief Innovation Officer
My last post discussed how a lack of confidence can creep into an organization. It poses as an overabundance of oversight, checks and balances or controls. While review is vital, it can become counterproductive if it steals from your front-line workers their ability to independently solve problems, try improvements and own their success.
Confidence may be the most important improvement you can bring to your organization. It is the foundation of every sustainable continuous improvement initiative, and it is essential to leadership development. The following five solutions are proven ways to spark confidence.
- Communicate external objectives – Workers become much more confident and engaged when they understand the connection between their task and adding value for the customer.
- Try-storm – Try-storming is a word we use for quickly giving an improvement idea a test drive. When a worker has an idea and a supervisor not only listens, but is willing to try it, even as a temporary experiment, the worker feels valued and becomes more confident.
- Reward top performers – It is common to find yourself spending too much time fighting fires with new or under-performing workers. When we ignore our top performers, they disengage and lose confidence in their ability to make a difference. Make time for your best people and keep them challenged.
- Find quick win projects – Quick wins are the surest way to prove to non-believers that improvement can happen. When your workers see change, they are more likely to want to be part of it.
- Update management systems – Make changes that reflect the progress made by front-line individuals and teams. Re-balance work and responsibilities and set new goals.
When workers are motivated to contribute to improvements, supervisors gain confidence in their front line. With confidence in the daily run, comes time to focus on big picture improvements and growth. It’s a winning strategy with long-tail benefits that are felt all the way to the top of the organization.
Executives often tell me this kind of confidence reduced stress, gave them time to focus on transformational changes that grew the business and allowed them to leave work at work, improving family life. It’s a win for everyone.
(Enterprise Resource Planning) system. I recommend ERP systems to any growing business, but what made Nike’s effort so significant was its intention to combine ERP with supply chain optimization and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) functions. For those that are unfamiliar with the size and scope of this kind of project, trust me, it is a massive undertaking.
Systems and processes are an organization’s DNA; but unlike our own genetic makeup, we have the ability to strategize and select how we want our operations to function. I believe that every employee wants to succeed, but they need appropriate systems and processes that will allow them to do so.
he three above examples, you are setting a low standard. As our good friends at 
The same concept applies to metrics. Metrics are just another organizational tool that people use to make sense of data. So use them to your advantage. There is no hard and fast rule for what a metric should look like. We have grown so accustomed to the typical productivity, profitability and inventory metrics that we rarely think of coming up with new ones.