Introduction

COVID-19 brought a wave of change to the world on personal and organizational fronts. Remote work and school, flexible access to health care providers using telehealth options, supply chain disruptions, and changing customer needs are just a few of the changes. While some changes were introduced abruptly, and others more slowly, the wave of change will continue. Organizations need to keep adapting to ensure their sustainability. Building and growing a culture of continuous improvement is essential for organizations to be resilient, adaptable, and to create problem solving capabilities.

Leaders need to be equipped to manage and deal with complex situations. Top managers/leaders possess the following skills to do just that:
o Goal Setting/ Prioritization
o Clear Communication
o Strategic Thinking
o Organization

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Whether in public or private, profit or not-for-profit environments, as organizations we exist to serve our customers. A Lean organization focuses on its customers first by understanding how they define value and assessing its key processes to continuously increase the value being provided (while relentlessly eliminating waste). Constant dialogue with customers is needed to understand how their needs have changed, which creates a ‘north star’ for what to focus on. When people have a clear sense of the organization’s purpose (via mission, vision, and goals) and how they fit into that purpose and provide value to others, they are more engaged and committed.

An organization’s products and services are delivered to its customers via the execution of processes that link together functions. In many cases, customers identify with and judge an organization based on how key processes are executed in relation to customers’ needs. Based on the functional design in organizations, people and teams get a limited view of how their work connects to value-driving activities and are unclear what happens before and after their engagement in the process, which leads to inefficiencies, increased complexity, and miscommunication between functional groups. When an organization and its people think of itself as a larger system of interconnected processes, it enables increase teamwork, communication, collaboration, and ultimately improves the delivery of products and services to customers.

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In order to remain resilient, adaptable, and meet the needs of customers, organizations need to build problem-solving capabilities. A critical aspect of problem solving is to apply a systematic approach that is repeatable and logical. A3 thinking provides leaders with an effective problem-solving methodology. It connects the problem, its root causes, goals, actions to achieve the goal, and the results in a natural and logical sequence. A3 thinking enables a consistent approach to be applied to a broad array of organizational problems. It also serves as a key tactic in storytelling, which is important for garnering support from leaders, key stakeholders, and to motivate others.

Whether you are a people-leader with positional authority, or are driving change and improvement in your organization, influence is a critical attribute to possess and hone to grow as leaders. The ability to influence others is fundamental to getting others to follow, gaining support from others, motivating others towards a common goal, and much more. The essence of influence comes from adding value to others, not having formal authority. influence is a powerful tool both inside and outside of any organization. Learn to use it effectively to carry out tasks and achieve goals successfully. Mastering the art of influence is a powerful way of ensuring one’s own success.

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Leadership and managers are continuously working towards optimizing the responsiveness, throughput, quality, cost, and efficiency of it production and service systems. To do so, key performance indicators (KPIs) need to be defined for core processes and systems, data on those KPIs needs to be collected accurately, and monitoring of the KPIs needs to occur with clear thresholds and accountabilities defined for performance. With robust performance management practices, leaders and managers can obtain advance notice when their organizations are likely to miss critical performance targets. This helps move from a firefighting culture to a problem-solving and problem preventative culture of learning.

Organizations are a larger system of interconnected processes. Due to their organization in functional structures, people and teams have a limited view of how their work connects to other functions, which leads to inefficiencies, increased complexity, and miscommunication. Process mapping captures process knowledge in a visual format. They facilitate easy communication, aide in understanding how processes truly work, identify waste and areas for improvement, and serve as a guide for effective execution of core business processes.

Countless organizations include the com¬mon adage “people are our greatest asset.” However, many times development and im¬provement of one’s skills are only linked to training, which is a partial solution. Coaching is critical in the ongoing enhance¬ment of people’s skills, their potential, and, ultimately, the performance of the organi¬zation. Coaching is unlocking people’s potential to maximize their own performance. Coaching guides people to their full potential and prepares them for success – leading to high performance. In the blog post “Benefits of Coaching Employees to Improve Business Performance,” the website Intellect states that coaching is essential to businesses during times of uncertainty and economic turmoil, helping organizations better manage change. Growing coaching skills across an organization can boost success and help navigate change and uncertainty.

Data is being collected around us at a faster pace than ever before and will continue to increase in the future. The use of data to understand organizational performance is not new, however organizations struggle to understand how to use the data that is collected, or whether the data being collected is relevant. Leaders and managers often use outdated data or lagging metrics which do not allow for an effective understanding of problems and opportunities. Much of the data collected in organizations is driven by technology systems and their capabilities, versus taking a customer and process focused view of what is important to measure and monitor. Data collection is a process that begins with clarifying data collection goals, includes validating data collection methods, and incorporates the continued improvement of measurement consistency. Applying a structured data collection process safeguards from the risk of using incorrect, outdated, and irrelevant data leading to flawed decision making.

We live in a world of data, which gets used in countless ways. The way organizations manage and derive insight from it is changing the way the world uses business information. Tracking purchasing and spending habits, determining what medications are most effective, identifying which piece of equipment in a manufacturing facility is not running correctly, and who are higher risk for insuring are all examples of how data are used. Fundamental to the use of data to drive decisions is the ability to analyze and interpret it to make correct and effective decisions. It is important to understand what graphical and statistical analysis techniques are best suited to different types of data. It’s also important to determine the purpose of and audience for the data to convey relevant and timely conclusions and insights.

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Root Cause Analysis

There is no shortage of problems that arise in our organizations. Whether they are related to how we engage with and serve our customers, how we utilize and manage our resources, or how we grow and adapt over time, problems are continual. To effectively address the myriad of problems, organizations need to establish good problem-solving capabilities. A key component of effective problem-solving is root cause analysis, which uncovers the root causes of problems. The traditional approach to problem-solving often addresses symptoms, which leads to reactionary and firefighting tactics. Root cause analysis approaches, tools, and techniques discover the underlying causes of problems to identify appropriate and sustainable solutions. Root cause analysis provides a structured way to modify processes and system issues to prevent future problems.

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70% of change efforts fail to achieve their targeted impact (Source: Scott Keller and Colin Price, Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage. 2011). Continuous improvement drives change in

To be a change agent, storytelling is an important skill to garner support from leaders, key stakeholders, and to motivate others. Effective storytelling requires the ability to tell a story succinctly and visually to an audience for the purpose of information sharing, knowledge transfer, or decision-making in a creative and engaging manner. Storytelling requires striking the right balance between telling a story and presenting the data.

“When data and stories are used together, they resonate with audiences both intellectually and emotionally for a lasting effect, you need to persuade the rational brain but also resonate with the emotional brain.” — Psychologist Jennifer Aaker

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Executive summary

Performance-Minded Leadership

Complexity is a way of life; we deal with decision making every day and it effects every facet of our lives. We make decisions through the use of cognitive processes such as memory, intelligence, analysis, and evaluation. Making decisions requires making judgements about the nature of the situation, the likelihood of certain outcomes, and the feasibility of certain outcomes. We see continuous improvement in all industries even outside of corporate business. Leaders in the healthcare industry throughout the world are working harder than ever to ingrain the concepts of continuous improvement in their companies. Results can significantly improve when staff members are given the tools, they need to offer reliable, high-quality care.

We saw a juristic change in the way business was conducted due to the recent event of COVID-19. There were an all-time high of over 8 million job postings as a result some companies reporting that they haven’t been able to hire employees rapidly enough to keep up with their growing labor needs. Others don’t have enough of their products on hand to prevent stock shortages. Businesses with intricate supply chains have found the going particularly tough since their production is prone to interruption from other companies’ input shortages. The more complicated a solution or process is, the less likely people are to follow it, the more likely things will break, and the lower the quality will be. Continuous improvement allows us to evaluate situations and consistently work on was to adapt and work more efficiently.

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Performance Leadership And Where To Start

If you feel as a business leader or senior executive that your sole work setting is “urgent” and that you are continuously putting out fires, it may be time to pause and consider the impact this may be having on your organizational performance and your immediate team.

This reactive leadership style might leave individuals with the impression that obstacles and issues are impossible to anticipate, and it can jeopardize an organization’s long-term performance. It is also widely established that organizational culture has a direct impact on employees’ perceived stress levels, implying that there is a short-term impact with long-term consequences.

Open letters by disgruntled employees to their bosses have recently become more prevalent, in which employees use the collective power of social media to shed a light on perceived leadership failings. Combined with recent global events, alterations in the global economic model, and a new generation of employees with drastically different ideas about work than their predecessors, it is no surprise that the buzz about performance leadership has grown.

What Exactly Is Performance Leadership?

Performance leadership occurs when a leader is able to adapt their leadership style to the scenario at hand. Performance leaders strive to accomplish remarkable achievements over a long period of time and must manage their brains, emotions, and time in order to get the greatest potential results. A performance leadership style necessitates leaders’ commitment to developing their leadership qualities, which helps to explain the recent surge in executives seeking executive coaching guidance.

Dedication to creating a performance leadership style necessitates a senior leader’s continual reflection on what leadership style is best suited to the scenario at hand. Furthermore, these leaders express a willingness to take risks in order to improve their team’s commercial capabilities, and they are proud of their commitment to a trial-and-error approach. From their perspective, making mistakes and being able to pivot demonstrates to your stakeholders that you are a resilient leader who values long-term wins over short-term benefits.

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Here’s a fantastic place to start if you want to establish a more high-performance leadership style:

Make your argument for change.

Consider times in the past when others have come to you with an issue; how have you been frustrated? What prompted you to enter problem-solving mode? Was this exactly what the circumstance required? In the previous three months, what percentage of concerns brought to you have been classified as simple versus complex? How often did your employees try to solve the problem on their own? What was the source of their hesitancy?

Raising awareness of what is truly going on is critical if change is to occur. You are more likely to understand when your leadership style has not supported your personal or organizational goals if you ask the questions above.

What will you do differently this time?

Is there a pattern emerging from the preceding instances that illustrates the point at which your workers cease attempting to solve a problem for themselves? In what circumstances is this most likely to occur? And what work, as a leader, can you undertake to address this trigger point?

Creating a high-performance leadership style is all about helping your people to empower the business. By asking the following questions, you are more likely to empower your team to establish an ownership mentality and drive internal responsibility, which will provide the groundwork for your high-performance team over time.

How will you know what is effective?

Consider who will be most impacted by a new leadership style. And why is their feedback so important? What are the most important elements that must be measured?

When and how should opportunities for input be created, and who should be involved? And how do you intend to create time for the self-reflection that is required to constantly alter your approach?

As a leader, the work you take on yourself may not always be evident to others and may be difficult to track at times. Taking the time to consider what metrics are important to track can make a significant impact in a leader’s impression of where their valuable time is best spent.

The Case For Continuous Improvement

The term “continuous improvement” refers to a continuing, or continuously made, endeavor to enhance or better something. In the context of business, this can refer to a wide range of items, including the goods and services that an organization provides as well as any and all internal and external procedures. The key to operational efficiency is continuous improvement, which is particularly crucial for individuals pursuing innovation and for those looking to launch or grow new enterprises. In other words, it’s essential for every business aiming to improve.

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Case Study: Google

Many organizations have already integrated the concepts of continuous improvement and have seen success. Some of these companies include the large and highly successful multinational technology company Google. Employees at Google, which is renowned for its playful and creative work environment, believe that they are engaged in continuous improvement “at breakneck speed.” Google uses the continuous improvement tools and processes for driving internal process and accelerating rapid product innovation. Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs, are the foundation of Google’s Continuous Improvement approach and aid in uniting the company under a shared vision and performance indicators. With the use of this approach, each employee is required to commit to a set of measurable improvement goals that further the organization’s overarching goal of “organizing the world’s knowledge and making it widely accessible and valuable.”

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What is the significance of Continuous Improvement?

Now that we know what continuous improvement is, we can look at its advantages.

We’ll start with some of the more particular things that solid continuous improvement procedures and practices may do, and then move on to the more broadly applicable benefits.

Advantages of Continuous Improvement

As previously said, continual development presents itself in a range of very real benefits that any firm would welcome. Some of the more common ones are listed below:

• Savings on expenses
• Less waste (time, resources, money)
• Enhanced operational effectiveness Enhanced customer satisfaction
• Reduced capital requirements and inventory levels
• Better knowledge exchange and organizational learning Improved product/service quality
• Reduced feedback loop and time to value creation
• Increased employee engagement and culture

Everyone associates the first three with constant improvement. They naturally contribute significantly to an organization’s bottom line. Most leaders and managers are aware of the role that continuous improvement may play in these areas, therefore we won’t go into further depth here.

Yet the following three rewards are the most intriguing for those of us who are engaged in innovation and value development.

The key is to understand that, in addition to the bottom line, when done correctly, continuous improvement can help to drastically raise your top line outcomes.

This type of continual improvement is far more vital for your organization’s long-term performance than pure cost and efficiency improvements. After all, it is these kinds of enhancements that keep your customers happy and keep you relevant.

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Case Study

Take the example of If P&C Insurance, to provide some context for how these kind of processes might operate in practice. As part of their strategy, they have a clear focus on customer happiness, and to reach that aim, they started out on a route to methodically uncover any potential frustrations or pain points customers may have by engaging the individuals on the frontlines of the business.

By systematically mapping out, prioritizing, and implementing as many of these ideas as feasible over time, the company has been able to dramatically enhance its position and become the clear industry leader with exceptional customer satisfaction, growth, and financial success.

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The Big Picture and Return on Investment of Continuous Improvement

Let’s return to the big picture of why investing in continuous improvement pays off.

To begin, it’s critical to recognize that tracking the complete ROI of continuous improvement is very impossible. The reason for this is simple: with good companies implementing thousands of improvements each year, the majority of which have many different types of benefits, some soft (time saved, improved quality and customer satisfaction, etc.) and some hard (saved money, decreased waste, etc.), it is impossible to keep track of all of these no matter how hard you try.

Because of this background, and the fact that many other variables are at play, such as the company’s industry, the level to which continuous improvement is embraced, and so on, financial returns for continuous improvement vary greatly. As a result, there isn’t much reliable study that could have quantified that accurately, or even attempted to.

On the other side, I have yet to hear anyone genuinely suggest that no organization would benefit from continual development or that it would result in negative returns.

Thus, in the end, the broad picture is fairly straightforward.

If you do not systematically focus on improving the way you operate and do business, you will gradually lose ground to your competitors until you become obsolete. The graph below starts at that point.

Yet, if you embrace continuous improvement and apply it to all aspects of your organization, you will improve a little bit every day, or at least every week. What makes this particularly intriguing is that the outcomes compound.

Therefore, if you just keep doing that for a long enough amount of time, the difference will be tremendous, and the competition will find it extremely tough to catch up as long as you keep your foot on the metaphorical gas pedal.

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But that’s not all. I frequently observe that folks in our audience, who is mostly made up of innovators, aren’t all that enthused about these minor enhancements here and there. Many people consider themselves visionaries, and hence deem these minor details to be ordinary or dull, and thus unworthy of their time.

That, however, is a huge error. If you’ve ever gone through the painstaking process of bringing an innovation to market, you know that there is no such thing as overnight breakout success in innovation.

You can look at any great breakthrough, be it the light bulb, an electric car, and you’ll see that there’s always years of hard effort to get that idea to work, and to deliver it to the world at scale. And how do you make that work? You consistently enhance every aspect of the innovation, as well as the techniques by which it is brought to market.

You can’t refute the importance of continuous improvement and the role it plays in determining whether you end up with a success narrative – or a failure tale, even if you profess to be an inventor who is only interested in those huge breakthrough discoveries.

5 Benefits of Continuous Improvement

Lean and continuous improvement necessitate a lot of labor, which is not surprising. It is critical to comprehend the advantages of a continuous improvement program before beginning one. Understanding the benefits of the process can spur action, allow for optimal resource allocation, and inspire everyone to put in the effort required to pull off a successful program. The following five advantages of implementing continuous improvement are listed.

Benefit 1: More Engaged Workers

According to a Gallup study of American workers conducted in 2015, 32% of employees were engaged in their jobs. The poll also revealed that the majority of employees (50.8%) were “not engaged” and 17% were “actively disengaged.” The figures reveal a significant scope for development, as there are several financial and social benefits to having people who care about their work. According to a 2009 Towers Perrin study, organizations with highly engaged employees produced 19.2% greater operational income than their baseline peers.

This issue is addressed immediately by a Lean and continuous improvement program. At its essence, continuous improvement aims to empower people to tackle problems that irritate them while steadily increasing the efficiency of their work processes. Lean communicates to employees the importance of their ideas. When an employee makes a suggestion for improvement, the concept can be thoroughly tested and, if successful, implemented company-wide. This shifts the employee’s role and responsibilities from passive actor to active participant in corporate processes.

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Benefit 2: Reduced Employee Turnover

Organizational turnover is quite costly. In addition to severance, the corporation must pay for the costs associated with searching, employing, and training a replacement for the position. In many jobs, it can take several years of on-the-job training for a person to achieve the essential experience to excel at his work. Increased employee engagement and lower turnover rates have been linked to a culture of continuous improvement. Workers that actively contribute to the company’s improvement feel a sense of satisfaction and success. This results in a stronger sense of belonging and fewer reasons to abandon the organization.

Benefit 3: More Competitive Products And Services

The improvement of processes and products is driven through continuous improvement. Businesses that constantly seek methods to improve their operations will invariably raise the value of their products and services. This will result in more sophisticated and economically competitive offerings.

Benefit 4: Improved Customer Service

Understanding what the customer values and working to offer that value are the first steps in providing excellent customer service. Lean and continuous improvement give a framework for identifying and reducing waste in the value delivery process. Lean organizations are better equipped to align their products and services to latent customer values. This will result in products and services that “predict” customers’ requirements even before they are aware of them.

Benefit 5: Proactive Learning Culture

Understanding what the customer values and working to offer that value are the first steps in providing excellent customer service. Lean and continuous improvement give a framework for identifying and reducing waste in the value delivery process. Lean organizations are better equipped to align their products and services to latent customer values. This will result in products and services that “predict” customers’ requirements even before they are aware of them.

In the modern workplace, information and technology quickly become obsolete. If you continue to do business the same way you did 5