Develop a Five-Year Roadmap and Evaluation Criteria for the Excellence Journey
It’s only the last turn of the bolt that tightens it, the rest is just movement.
—Shigeo Shingo
As a leader, it is your responsibility to paint a picture on a blank canvas along with your team of what “good” looks like at the end of a particular period in an excellence journey. The picture of the future has to be compelling enough to create an interest and passion for others to follow. Visionary leaders make people discontent with where they currently are. They inspire people to be courageous, take risks, and endure challenges to get to where they could be. In my experience, five years is a good time horizon to consider in an excellence journey for people to relate, as any shorter period seems overwhelming and stressful, and any longer becomes delusional.
Let’s assume, you’ve got your team energized and you’ve created an inspiring picture of the future. Now what? At this point people want to know how the rubber hits the road—how we get there from here. Since most people have an operational mindset with a horizon of one year, they want to know what happens year on year for the next five years. The challenge then is to decide whether the design of the roadmap should be based on the number of staff trained, or the number of projects implemented, or something else.
In Chapter 20, I shared the five-year training plan for engaging employees in the More Time to Care journey at Hospital Heal. In Chapter 23, we learned about the tollgate approach for implementing and evaluating projects. Having a standard tollgate process is good, but not good enough. Why? Because implementing projects only addresses the efficiencies and effectiveness part of the operational excellence component in an organization and does not address the bigger aspect—the behavior change component of people, a prerequisite for achieving organizational excellence and culture transformation.
To evaluate movement on the culture change needle, what is required is a maturity scale that defines the levels of maturity in staff behavior that an organization wants to attain over a period of time.
Hospital Heal chose to define its culture change through the adoption of the management system elements in all areas of the organization. The design of the maturity scale included Levels 1 through 4, with the expectation of the employee behavior graduating from learning to applying to aligned, and finally to integrated. The adoption of the management system was defined under three categories, namely, spread, reliability, and sustainability, with each having a specific standard criteria for evaluation (Table 24.1). Standard work observation templates were designed to evaluate the adoption of the management system elements in the organization and corrective measures were undertaken when the adoption level was less than 80%.
An important thing to note here is that the standard work for project sustainability and the standard work for the adoption of the management system to support behavior change have to run synchronously. A bird’s eye view of both standards working together at Hospital Heal is shown in Figure 24.1.
Now let’s go back and respond to the challenge posed on the roadmap for the excellence journey. In my experience of leading both small- and large-scale change in many organizations across different industries, I have found that developing and implementing a roadmap based on the principles and the elements of the Kumar Management System has been instrumental in successful deployments. Let’s understand why adopting the Kumar Management System delivers results. Some of the key reasons, among others, include
The principles and elements are a compilation from several best-practice frameworks.
The elements impact all the key categories of business, namely, customers, leadership, strategy, operations, workforce, measurement, information, and knowledge management.
The combined effect of implementing the twenty-two elements results in sustainable change at an organizational level.
The model helps break the silo mentality of strategy and operations working in isolation.
The model establishes focus on changing employee behavior to change organizational culture.
The simplicity of the model makes it relatable to people at all levels in the organization and makes it a great communication tool.
The model helps establish a robust structure in the organization to tame the culture beast.
The model forces projects, continuous improvement initiatives, and training to work in the background to reinforce the elements supporting behavior change.
It sets clear expectations from leaders and staff in the initial crucial years of the excellence journey.
The elements can be integrated with employee performance reviews for delivering on organization strategy.
Table 24.2 provides an example of the five-year roadmap developed for the excellence journey at Hospital Heal.
The roadmap clearly laid out the elements to be implemented over the next five years. The plan strategically included elements that would be implemented across all areas of the organization without exception and the additional elements that would be implemented exclusively in the deep dive area (pilot). Since the organization was in an urgent need for transformation to address major internal and external challenges, an aggressive plan was made to undertake the excellence journey with appropriate resource allocation. In the first year, nine out of the twenty-two management system elements were introduced across the organization and a total of sixteen elements were introduced in the deep dive areas. The implementation of the respective elements became the organization’s strategy in the first two years of deployment. This approach created focus in the organization, built momentum, and enabled the organization to cross the threshold needed for change. During the implementation, the teams saw themselves evolve on the Kübler-Ross change curve (Figure 24.2).
Upon reflection, all of us who were involved in the transformation are amazed as to how much we accomplished during the first three years, and how clear strategic direction, relentless focus, appropriate resource allocation, compassionate assertiveness, team execution—all have courageous leadership as their lynchpin, and that’s what makes a difference in transforming an organization. The reason Hospital Heal could do nine elements organization wide in the first year is that the CEO and the senior leaders were committed to establishing the key foundational elements required to turn around the organization that was in fiscal and operational crisis, using the philosophy of Lean management. While the commitment to Lean from the CEO and senior leaders continued to remain rock steady over the subsequent years, the pace of implementation and introduction of new elements were strategically reduced to focus on sustaining what had been implemented, and to build an organizational culture of excellence.
Readers are encouraged to draw upon lessons from the real case examples cited, as well as to develop maturity scales and a roadmap for the excellence journey that are meaningful to their respective organizations. Leaders have the option to either show all twenty-two elements of the Kumar Management System together as a big picture to staff or to introduce the elements in phases to not overwhelm their staff. At Hospital Heal, the leadership shared all twenty-two elements with their staff upfront to set clear expectations at an organizational level and more specifically with teams electing to undergo the deep dives (pilot areas).
Sensei Gyaan: Never underestimate the hidden potential of employees in a crisis situation. Instead, learn to tap into it. Plan the pace of implementation and resource commitment depending on the criticality of the organization’s need. Select a maximum of three management system elements for organization-wide implementation in any given year, based on priority. Invest time and resources in building a robust foundation for those elements. Begin implementation.