I have got to get out of this place

Congratulations you have been designated a high performance, high potential human capital asset. You have achieved the goal of getting the corner office. Your career development plan/succession plan is on target with this stop only going to last about three years and then you are off to another assignment. These plateaus are enhancing your career portfolio but along the way you have missed out on a golden opportunity to take your career to the highest level it could go. Do you really know what is going on in your organization? Do you know the true nature of the current conditions? Do you have a strategic plan to carry the organization into the future?

In his book Out of the Crisis, Dr. W. Edward Deming presented his 14 points of quality of which number six is institute training. He was not talking about creating some new training program. What he was talking about was creating this opportunity we mentioned above about the missed opportunity. Deming said that in order to turn around an organization and change the culture both managers and employees must understand the entire organization. The entire organization must learn the flow of “materials” from the front door to the rear door. The entire organization must understand the corporate financials from all aspects.

The question becomes how do we gain that knowledge? We do that by getting out of the corner office. We gain that knowledge by walking the workplace and observing. We gain that knowledge by really seeing the problems in the workplace and how those problems affect the entire organization and their stakeholders. We gain that knowledge by using those insights to change the corporate culture.

Tachii Ohno tells us that “the past is the past and what is important is the current condition and what we will do next to go beyond where we are today.” By getting out of the corner office we can establish the current conditions which answers the first question we posed - Do you really know what is going on in your organization? It is from there we can begin to implement innovative solutions, which respond to the final question - Do you have a strategic plan to carry the organization into the future?

By getting out of this place we learn how to empower organizational change to make the organization a better place to live and work. By getting out of this place we learn how to engage the human capital assets in the entire organization. We demonstrate that we value their suggestions and show them that we recognize their ownership of the processes on a daily basis.

10 Strategies to get out of this place

We talked above about the necessity of getting out of the corner office for process improvement to take place. There are 10 strategic initiatives to aid you in that journey towards the new corporate culture:

Strategic Initiative #1: Visit a customer – Set aside one day a month to get out of the office and visit with your organization’s top clients. Begin a dialogue with them as to what they expect from your organization. Understand what traits they expect from your human capital assets, they will write your job descriptions.

Strategic Initiative #2: Job Shadowing – Your everyday employees know more about the problems with your processes than management does. Spend some time out of the office working side by side with an employee observing what they see and where they see the problems are. Then take concrete steps to remedy the issues.

Strategic Initiative #3: Process Maps – Take a blank sheet of paper and draw out the various processes within your organization. In the end you should have a process map for everything within your organization It is an eagle’s eye view, so it does not have to be finite. It just shows the basic steps involved in each process.

Strategic Initiative #4: Walk the Floor – Even more important walk the process. A leading financial services organization did it and found that a mortgage application from start to finish walked the equivalent of 8 miles. Map out your steps in a spaghetti diagram and see where it takes you. Are there wasteful steps in your organization that can be eliminated? Can you simplify the process by removing a wall, so people do not have to travel extra distance to get to the next step?

Strategic Initiative #5: Stand in the Circle – Tachii Ohno used to ask his managers to go out on the factory floor and stand in a circle and observe what is going on around them. He required them to stand in this circle for at least 25 minutes. The purpose was to observe where there were problems. Try it in your organization. What did you find?

Strategic Initiative #6: Benchmarking – As HR professionals we are great at talking to our peers. Try talking to your peers in other similar companies to discover how they are dealing with the same problem. Their solution may not be a fit for your culture but gives you an idea of innovative ways to complete processes in your organization.

Strategic Initiative #7: Town Meeting – Take a page from the GE Workout and set up a companywide town meeting where the employees are free to bring up problems and proposed solutions and get immediate approval to go about resolving those issues. In the GE Workout, a team proposed a solution to a problem and then management gave them 90 days to resolve the issue.

Strategic Initiative #8: Visit Supply Chain Components – In Strategy #4 we discussed walking the floor. Do the same with your suppliers. Walk their processes to see how their processes feed into yours. See their problems, feel their problems and create a new normal where you help remove those constraints.

Strategic Initiative #9: Take an Employee to Lunch – Get a feel for how they feel about your organization. Learn what bugs them. Learn what delights them. Show them that you truly have an open-door policy when they have issues with how the organization runs.

Strategic Initiative #10: Eliminate the corner office – Consider migrating to an open office floor plan where your workspace is on the floor with the employees. Be in the place where you are in the middle of the process not looking at it from the outer edges of it. This will lead to higher employee engagement.

If I only had that tool. Daniel Bloom & Associates, Inc. provides you with a free download of the TLS Continuum Toolbox on Google Drive. Get your copy by clicking the link for the TLS Continuum Toolbox