Last updated: 24.01.2024
Any leader can make employees and the team follow him and want to improve themselves. People must know the meaning of the organization and have a sense of belonging to it. Everyone in the team should understand their role and their place in achieving strategic goals. Only then will they identify with the company, follow the leader and willingly participate in improvement. The change will not be just a spurt, but will be permanent, to the benefit of the entire organization.
In Article:
- If a company wants to improve, change and increase the efficiency of its processes, it will not be possible without employee involvement.
- Underlying this change should be an understanding of the role of the leader in the company. After all, the growth of a company depends on how its leaders manage and lead it.
- These days we need leaders who, instead of saying they are leading, simply act and can prove the results of their work both in numbers and in the commitment of their team.
- The modern leader builds a culture of change and a commitment by every member of his team to continuous improvement, and his work produces tangible results.
- Every change in the organization begins with a "go and see," a visit by the leader to the Gemba.
- The leader looks at the process together with the team. Without the involvement of every employee, it will not be possible to carry out the change and then lead the improvement. The leader should plan the work and the way to ask people questions in such a way that they themselves want to identify problems and measure their processes.
- We have given a sense of existence and built a sense of belonging, each employee understands his or her role, the leader together with the team has reached a consensus on the current state of the process - change can be implemented. At this point there is usually resistance and rebellion in the team, so the leader's task is to lead people through the change.
- If everyone on the team knows what's going on in the process and what the problems are, people get a boost and sooner or later they themselves will be eager to catch problems and initiate change as a team.
- Really, any leader can make the team and employees follow him and want to improve themselves, be both effective and engaged at the same time.
Table of Contents:
- Mission, vision, values of the company
- Leadership and management
- How to implement the change?
- Why are people demotivated?
- The team in the shift
- Commitment vs. improvement
See also: Job satisfaction as the greatest social value
Mission, vision, values of the company
Team engagement is a major challenge for today's leaders. Not because the results they are held accountable for come first, but because employees are increasingly aware. This means that they know exactly what they want. Maybe not all of them, but really many of them. Today, people choose companies that have a well thought-out, well-defined business context. They are looking for an employer who is guided by certain values, who stands out in the labor market.
If they hear fine words during a recruitment interview, and they don't get coverage once they start work, they leave. Reality quickly verifies the facts. If a company wants to improve, change and increase the efficiency of its processes, it will not be possible without the involvement of employees. And certainly not at their expense.
Human capital in any organization is like a treasure hidden in a trunk. What gems will be found when its lid is lifted depends entirely on the leader, since it is he who has a direct impact on how his team functions. It is no accident that we say that organizations are built on leaders. That's why we start from the premise that people come first.
Leadership and management
Any transformation in an organization should start with the leaders, with their change. The basis of this change should be an understanding of the leader's role in the company. What leadership is in its performance, and what management is. This is because the development of a company depends on how its leaders manage and lead.
Leanpassion's definitions of leadership and management, or how we understand the work of a leader:
Leadership
is the ability to connect people and processes to the company's strategy.
Management
is the way a leader works every day.
Nowadays we need leaders who, instead of saying they are leading, simply act and can prove the results of their work both in numbers and in the involvement of their team. They provide the right conditions in which everyone has common goals, everyone understands their role in the implementation of the company's strategy, no one has to guess at anything, and employees are involved in and develop the company.
True leadership can be seen in times of crisis. The modern leader builds a culture of change and a commitment by every member of his team to continuous improvement, and his work produces tangible results.
How to implement the change?
For an organization to be Lean it simply has to become so. This does not happen when the leader decides to change, to "implement" Lean. The organization and all employees will be Lean when the leader himself becomes Lean. At the very beginning of our work with organizations and leaders, we place great emphasis on creating a sense of existence and a sense of belonging in the organization, that is, from the "why." By knowing and understanding the company's mission, vision, values, strategic goals, every manager, every leader and every employee knows and understands their role. The organization acquires the ability to adapt, to adapt to any conditions with the guarantee that people will face crises together.
Visit to Gemba
Every change in an organization begins with a "go and see," that is, a leader visits the Gemba - the place where people work - and observes. In this way, the leader verifies hypotheses - determines what is just opinion and what is hard fact. Employees join in to look at the observed problems together. This is teamwork; nothing happens without people's participation. You can't introduce changes to people based on your own observations. You can't declare success, the implementation of a change without the people affected by the change. A change implemented in this way has no chance of being sustainable. For this, a leader needs the involvement of the entire team.
Identification of problems in the process
The leader looks at the process together with the team. Without the involvement of every employee, it will not be possible to make a change and then drive improvement. The leader's task is to plan the work and the way to ask people questions in such a way that they themselves want to identify problems and measure their processes. In practice, the team may see completely different problems than those observed by the leader. All of them should be taken into account in order to achieve unanimity between what the leader thinks and what his people think.
Diagnosis of the current state
If the leader together with the team conduct a diagnosis of the current state of the process and agree on what the process actually looks like, if they have a similar understanding of what is going on in the process and why they are studying it together, the team's commitment will begin to increase. The process analysis is designed to bring a consensus between the leader and his team about what is going on in the process and what is the problem in the process. If people get the impetus to act, they will be eager to catch problems and initiate changes themselves.
Why are people demotivated?
Many leaders signal that people are often demotivated and engaging them in anything is challenging. Few realize, however, that the reason employees are demotivated can be the simplest things, such as lack of space to speak freely about what bothers them at work. Most often, leaders ask people what they would improve, not what annoys them. If a leader lets people talk, if he hides his ego and lets them talk, people will start to open up and their involvement will start to increase.
Another issue is that sometimes people have the space to speak up, to report what annoys and disturbs them, but the leader doesn't take any action on it. This is the basis for further engagement with the company. People come in, do their business, leave. They become discouraged. That's why a leader should be conscientious about what employees approach him with. Without this, it is impossible to build commitment.
The team in the shift
If we have given a sense of existence and built a sense of belonging, each employee understands his or her role, the leader together with the team has reached a consensus on the current state of the process, change can be implemented. At this point, there is usually resistance and rebellion in the team. People are no longer as eager to propose solutions that they were so eager to propose at the time of implementation, and commitment declines. The leader should remember that this is natural and the time has just come to lead the team through the change.
Every person in change goes through certain stages:
- Denial phase - the employee pretends that nothing is happening
- Resistance phase - efficiency and commitment decreases, the task of the leader is to turn the employee's resistance into a willingness to try to change
- Trial phase - in this phase efficiency begins to increase
- Adaptation phase
Employee resistance is not a negative symptom. It may indicate that the employee is aware of the change and with the help of the leader will eventually adapt to it. The same is true for a team in change. In each phase of the transition through the change, there will be ups and downs in efficiency and commitment, depending on which phase its members are in. Therefore, during the change phase, the leader should focus not on the results, but primarily on the people and their transition through the change. The more people are convinced of the change, the faster it will happen, and commitment and efficiency will increase.
Commitment vs. improvement
Any leader can make employees follow him and want to improve themselves. People must know the meaning of the organization and have a sense of belonging to it. Everyone on the team should understand their role and their place in achieving strategic goals. Only then will they identify with the company, follow the leader and willingly participate in improvement. The change will not just be a spurt that ends after a pilot period. It will be permanent, with the benefit of engagement, efficiency and growth for the entire company.
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