Too Many Initiatives, Too Much Overload

Having too many initiatives is a common problem in our workplaces. Leaders pile “critical” work onto everybody’s to-do list and stress levels increase. Cracks start to appear in the fabric of our teams as the pressure mounts.

When there are too many priorities on which to realistically focus our effort, the feeling of progress we create is an illusion. Almost every organization I have worked for is trying to do too much, with too little.

Perry Keenan of BCG talks about the ‘increasingly artificial split– between running the business and changing the business’. (You can watch the four minute video here)

He talks about the issues with too many initiatives, saying ‘Arguably, it is in fact easier to add an initiative than it is to stop one because there’s a lot of connection – political, emotional, historic– a set of factors which means it’s not easy to stop initiatives. It’s often not easy even to slow them down.’ He goes on to advise, ‘If you’re going to add in new initiatives, then be very thoughtful about what it means for the initiatives that you already have in play and the demands that you’re placing on your people. Once again, we all too often, in theory, assume that there is an infinite pool of highly capable people available to deliver the strategic initiatives. It’s a finite resource. And therefore, it has to be managed in a very definitive way.’

When we have too many priorities, we agree to take on too much work. The obvious consequences at an individual level include stress, feelings of overwhelm, with the potential for burnout. All of these lead to potential issues with health, wellbeing and disengaged teams.

At a cultural level, there are consequences too. Organizations and the teams within them start to build a culture of failure. People joke about failing projects and expect delays. Teams keep working to the deadline they know is impossible, until someone tells them to stop.

One thing to keep in mind when it comes to priorities is that nothing is important, when everything is at the top of the list.

If everything is a top priority, you actually don’t have any priorities and you’ll struggle to focus your effort.

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do and the essence of execution is truly not doing it. That may sound simple, but most organizations struggle to kill initiatives, even those that no longer support their strategy.

A Harvard Business Review article, Too Many Projects, Hollister and Watkins talk about how to deal with initiative overload. It opens saying ‘it’s surprisingly hard for organizations to kill existing initiatives, even when they don’t align with new strategies. Instead, leaders keep layering on initiatives, which can lead to severe overload at levels below the executive team.’ The article cites six further reasons for why this change overload occurs

1. Impact blindness: executive teams can be oblivious to the number and cumulative impact of the initiatives they have in progress.
2. Multiplier effects: leaders have a line of sight into their own groups’ initiatives but a limited view of other groups’ activities. Because functions and units often set their priorities and launch initiatives in isolation, they may not understand the impact on neighboring functions and units
3. Political logrolling: Executives tend to be strongly invested in some “signature” projects and may garner resources for them through implicit agreements to support their peers with their projects
4. Unfunded mandates. Leaders want a project to happen but don’t have the resources to put to it. Instead just adding it to the ‘business as usual work’.
5. Band-Aid initiatives; this is a proliferation of initiatives designed to solve a problem, but without address the root causes of the problem in the first place
6. Cost myopia; leaders fail to estimate, or underestimate the human cost of multiple initiatives on performance, motivation, morale, stress and so on.

If you want to tackle the problem of project overload, Hollister and Watkins advise taking these six steps:

1) Start counting. Calculate the number of initiatives active across your organization.

2) Assess each initiative. Why is it needed? What is the required budget? How many people are required to ensure its success? What impact does it have on the company as a whole?

3) Encourage communication. Senior leaders must work together to establish priorities in a way that works for every department individually and for the company as a whole. They should also ask for and take on board feedback from below, in order to efficiently assess what projects should stay and what projects should go.

4) Put in place a “sunset clause”. When a new initiative is launched, specify an end date for funding. If the initiative is not having a significant positive impact on the business when that date arrives, it can then be easily killed off.

5) Make regular assessments. Just because an initiative is necessary this year doesn’t mean it will be necessary in 12 months’ time. Make sure each initiative is required to reapply for funding on a regular basis, demonstrating its ongoing value to the business.

6) Spread a positive message. Make it clear that killing off an initiative doesn’t mean it was a failure. Explain there is a limit to the number of initiatives the company can run at any one time.

LEARN TO SAY NO

If your company is suffering from project overload, you have to focus on the benefits of cutting back – and learn to say no.

Leaders must say no to compelling opportunities so that we can say yes to others. Saying yes to everything means we lack strategic focus, just as saying no to everything suggests we lack creativity and a willingness to take a risk. Strategic leaders use no to create the business of the future.

Necessity is the mother of invention. When we must, we will. Through the seemingly limitless potential of human ingenuity, we continue to make “the impossible, possible.” From a man on the moon to the unprecedented speed of discovery and development of a vaccine in response to a worldwide pandemic. 

Strategic leaders create… and find a way.

Lean Quote: Adair’s Eight Rules in Motivating People

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"People expect their Leaders to help them to achieve the common task. to build the synergy of teamwork and to respond to individuals and meet their needs."   —  John Adair

In many ways, Adair’s ideas in the area of motivating people are in line with those of the classic motivational theorists, such as Maslow, McGregor and Herzberg.

The 50:50 Rule: just as the Pareto principle (or 80:20 rule) is the ratio of the vital few and the trivial many, the Adair 50:50 rule (from his book Effective motivation) states that: ‘50% of motivation comes from within a person, and 50% from his or her environment, especially from the leadership encountered therein’.

Adair’s view is that people are motivated by a complex and varied number of different factors. So, for example, the ‘carrot and stick’ approach is not dismissed by Adair, but is seen, rather, as one of the stimulus responses that can be one factor among many others in motivating or influencing people’s actions.

An individual’s strength of motivation is affected by the expectations of outcomes from certain actions, but it is also strengthened by other factors such as the individual’s preferred outcome; conditions in the working environment; and the individual’s own perceptions and fears.

Adair emphasizes the importance of a motivating environment and a motivated individual. The crucial factor is the role of the leader who must, he believes, be completely self-motivated. In effective motivation, eight basic rules are outlined to guide leaders in motivating people to act:

1. Be motivated yourself

2. Select people who are highly motivated

3. Treat each person as an individual

4. Set realistic and challenging targets

5. Remember that progress motivates

6. Create a motivating environment

7. Provide fair rewards

8. Give recognition 

Adair proposes that understanding what motivates individuals to act is fundamental to engaging their interest and focusing their efforts. The will that leads to action is governed by motives, and motives are inner needs or desires that can be conscious, semi-conscious or unconscious. 

How to Assist Students to get Lean Lessons in Manufacturing Sector

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Over the past few years, a lively debate has emerged about talent management and the skills and competencies future employees need to meet current and future market needs.

When engineering students enter the workforce, they cannot correlate and apply the theoretical knowledge they acquired during their studies to practical contexts due to a lack of professional competencies. That leads to more action-oriented and experiential learning.

To equip students and employees with the skills they need, here we will discuss how you can assist students in getting the lean lessons in Manufacturing Sector.

What Is Lean Manufacturing?

To help students get lean lessons in the manufacturing sector, it is important to provide them with a proper understanding of what lean manufacturing is.

Lean manufacturing is a philosophy that is used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of any process or system by reducing waste and improving quality. It also aims at reducing costs by eliminating non-value-added activities.

In 1991, Womack et al. coined the term Lean Production. The premise was simple: doing more with less. An overview of 5 principles for establishing and sustaining a lean production environment was provided by Womack et al. They are:

1. Assess the value of the product or service from the customer's perspective
2. Separate non-value-adding activities (wastes) from value-adding activities (stream of activities involved in design-to-market)
3. Maintain a continuous flow of activities that add value
4. Put the customer at the center of the production process by implementing a pull system.
5. Continuously improve to achieve perfection. 

Many companies all over the world, including Toyota, Nike, and Intel, have practiced lean manufacturing. The focus of lean manufacturing is to eliminate non-value added activities from the production process.

Lean Lessons in Manufacturing Sector

Here's how you can assist students with learning lean in the manufacturing sector.

Identify the problem

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If you want your students to produce valuable results, you need to tell them:

●      How to identify what is impeding the process.

●      What's going well or what's not?

●      What can they do to improve it?

It may be that one person's work takes an excessive amount of time or that the process is unclear, constantly requiring clarification. This may be due to a process or person being too dependent on another.

An analysis of data in connection with the process can assist in identifying roadblocks. Students can determine whether their improvements are effective by analyzing data points such as time, ROI, output, and output.

Find a solution to the problem

Once the problem is identified, analyze and define it based on data collected from interviews and observations. Using this data, create a hypothesis — a theory based on what students have observed— and test it by trying out different solutions until one works best.

The use of technology ― especially automation tools ― can often help solve efficiency problems. Several regular tools students use already have automation built in. They may not be utilizing it to the fullest extent possible.

Tell them to take a closer look at the tools they are using, and see how they can improve them; or, if the situation warrants it, consider an investment in industrial automation certification for a better understanding.

Refine process and share

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You should instruct your students to share their formalized process with their team once it has been documented. However, they shouldn't stop looking for ways to improve their processes just because they have completed these steps.

Kaizen, a synonym for "change for the better," is a key element of lean management. It involves everyone working together to achieve continuous improvement.

Continue to monitor the team's performance and refine it based on feedback. Changes around the process may also need to be fine-tuned over time as they impact the overall flow.

Analyze the process to find the pain points

Examine the weak points in the current process to discover where improvements are needed. Locate bottlenecks and steps that require multiple steps to complete just one part of a process. Determine which areas need to be redone on a regular basis or where different people are doing the same work.

Take it slow and easy

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The deeper you dive into a problem, the more paths for improvement you will uncover. If you see all of the potential opportunities for improvement and intervention, it's very easy to get distracted from what you set out to accomplish. Maintain your focus on your goal and keep your goal at the forefront of your mind.

Maintaining rigor (being thorough and accurate) is essential for achieving sustainable, meaningful improvements. For what appears at first glance to be an "easy fix" to be truly effective, it is vital to establish a new way to do things.

Conclusions 

In this article, we have provided an opportunity for students in industrial and systems engineering to learn about lean in the manufacturing section. Companies of all kinds can benefit from lean management - not just manufacturing companies. The lean culture promotes problem-solving and continuous improvement in an organization when it is implemented correctly.

About the Author: After the cooperation with the different manufacturers Amir Jones decided that field service engineering services are efficient for the nowadays industry. Moreover, it is very interesting to write about it. So, he helps to clarify with the basic principles and details of the process in such a way today, enjoying the process of writing and assisting people.

Columbus Day and Spirit of Discovery

In the US we are celebrating Columbus Day which recognizes Christopher Columbus who discovered America. It was October 12, 1492, that the explorer first spotted land after a two-month voyage from Europe.

Columbus Day has been a federal holiday since 1970. Today, it is primarily observed in schools used to teach students a history lesson about America’s dawning days.

In October 1892, President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed the first “Discovery Day” and asked Americans to “cease from toil and devote themselves to such exercises as may best express honor to the discoverer and their appreciation of the great achievements of the four completed centuries of American life.”

Rather than a celebration of the man, it honored the spirit of the Americas’ discovery. It was a time of jubilant celebration and displays of patriotism… as well as solemn reflection on the blessings and opportunities we owe to those who came before us.

Those long ago observances celebrated that uniquely American spirit of risk-taking and pioneerism — the same spirit that took a sparsely inhabited wilderness and built it into an ever improving nation rich in freedom, opportunity, and success.

I remember fondly the days when my children were in school, and they would come home after learning their Columbus Day lesson about how Christopher Columbus “sailed the ocean blue” with the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. Columbus Day is certainly a fitting time for that history lesson.

But I can’t help but think that, now more than ever, the real value in Columbus Day can be found not in a lesson from a history textbook, but in a rediscovery of those ideals that made America great.

His journeys inspired other risk-takers and dreamers to test the bounds of their imagination and gave them the courage to accomplish great feats, whether crossing the world's oceans or walking on the moon.

In the spirit of Columbus Day take some time to discover and learn about your company, your employees, your problems, your processes, and your customers so that you can think Lean improvement.

Lean Quote: Great Leaders Encourage Problem Solving

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"Build a culture that rewards—not punishes—people for getting problems into the open where they can be solved."   —  Ben Horowitz, co-founder, VC firm Andreessen Horowitz

When employees collectively work toward solving problems, it builds a team environment, encourages collaborative effort and prompts staffers to have a vested interest in making your company stronger. Problem solving can also create stronger bonds between colleagues and improve the overall workplace dynamic.

Encourage problem-solving by forming employee committees, think tanks and representative groups that contribute departmental feedback to the upper echelons of management. This type of approach helps employees see their input and opinion is valued, respected and sought after. Not only will staffers start taking a more significant interest in problem solving and making the company successful, management will also benefit from getting feedback from frontline employees.

Don't be tied down by stagnant processes or ways of thinking. Promote a philosophy of being open to change and suggestions from employees. Host brainstorming sessions and encourage staffers to voice their opinions and bring new ideas to the table without fear or judgment. Institute a system where employees from all levels can bring new concepts to management, and reward forward-thinking initiatives.

Great managers appreciate the different perspectives their team members bring to the table and create balanced workspaces. They set the expectation that everyone on the team helps one another, values one another, and will work together to accomplish team goals.

Employees need the freedom and authority to solve problems that relate to their work. Encourage increased levels of problem-solving among employees by providing training on problem-solving best practices in your industry. Today’s workers want training that helps them advance their knowledge and career.

When your employees feel confident in their ability to solve problems, as well as their manager’s confidence in them to ask questions and solve problems, the organization and the individual benefits, and you, as their manager, have more time to work on what you want to get done.

How To Ensure Open Communication In The Workplace?

Source: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/man-business-people-woman-business-162951/

Effective communication in the workplace is the key to the company’s success. The problem is that working together and ensuring that everyone is on the same page may be challenging. Discover some helpful tips to encourage open communication in your workplace.

You have probably heard that communication is the key to a successful relationship, and the same is true for work relationships. When open communication is lacking, misunderstandings occur, and trust is lost.

It is critical to have effective communication in the workplace to build trusting relationships, foster creativity, and increase productivity. Let’s look at five effective strategies for improving open communication in the workplace.

The Top 5 Strategies to Improve Open Communication in the Workplace

According to statistics, approximately 86% of employees and executives report a lack of effective communication at work, which leads to poor performance and failure. Here are some things you can do to promote open communication among your employees and improve results:

1. Talk It Out

If you have a problem, you bottle it up, and eventually, it all comes out in a messy explosion. That is why you should have an open line of communication in the workplace. If you do not talk about your problems, they are going to fester and get worse.

The first step is to make sure that you and your coworkers understand the goals, methods, and required tasks. It means having regular meetings to discuss updates, goals, and any issues that might be brewing. It also helps to be proactive about communication.

If you see a problem starting to develop, address it before it becomes a bigger issue. Another key to effective communication is listening. Make sure you are giving your coworkers your undivided attention, and do not jump to conclusions or interrupt them. And lastly, be respectful of everyone’s time. If someone does not want to talk about something, let them off the hook.

2. Listen Up

Listening is an essential part of open communication. When you listen to someone, it demonstrates that you are paying attention and are interested in what they are saying. It is also a great way to connect on a personal level with your coworkers. Take the time to listen to what someone is saying the next time they share something with you.

Check your understanding of what you have heard, and ask questions if necessary. And keep in mind that because you are paying attention, it does not mean you have to agree with everything they say. As long as everyone is respectful of each other, healthy debate is part of open communication.

3. Get Everyone on the Same Page

When it comes to workplace communication, you should ensure that everyone is on the same page. This way, you will avoid misunderstandings and wastage of time. You may wonder, “How can you accomplish getting everyone on the same page?” The answer is easy – by establishing a communication strategy.

This document should outline the dos and don'ts of workplace communication and be something that everyone is familiar with. Regular team meetings are another way to get everyone to look in the same direction. It is a great way to keep everyone up to date on what is going on while also providing an opportunity to brainstorm and come up with new ideas.

If writing organizational documents is not your strong suit, or if you are unsure whether they are as precise and clear as possible, you should consult a professional or visit online writing review services to help you overcome the problem.

4. Set Some Ground Rules

Before you start communicating with your team, you should develop a list of the ground rules. This way, everyone will know what is expected of them and there will be less room for misunderstanding. Some things you might want to consider include:

·        How frequently are team members expected to check in?

·        What are the best ways to communicate (email, chat, phone, or in person)?

·        When is it okay to interrupt someone?

·        How much detail is needed in messages?

You can create a friendly environment where communication is less stressful and more efficient by establishing some ground rules ahead of time. Writing rules can be challenging at times. Furthermore, your policies should not violate employees’ personal freedoms or rights.

5. Keep It Positive

Even if you are the head manager or the leader of a company, you should not be harsh with your employees. To foster trust, you should positively treat your teams so that they are not afraid to tell you about workplace difficulties or problems. One of the most important strategies for improving office communication is to keep things positive.

Negative things are known to increase tension and division. That is why you must stay away from them. Focusing on the positive brings the team together and makes them feel more connected, creative, and productive. Celebrate your victories and look for the good in each other.

Conclusion

Open communication is the cornerstone of a productive workforce, and by “open,” one means clear communication between everyone from the employer to the employee. An open workplace leads to a more positive, friendly environment where everyone can be free to speak their mind, ask for help when needed, and express any concerns about work. If there is no open line of communication in the place where you work, your business will never reach its full potential, and sooner or later, it may crash and burn.

About the Author: Nancy P. Howard has been working as a writing expert at Trust My Paper writing company for a year. She is also a webmaster at best essay writing service. She loves travelling, photography and is always welcome to meet new people.