How mature is your Lean Six Sigma program within your company?
Are you checking boxes or empowering actual change? Both can look the same, but they have opposite effects on your workforce.
What happens when your Lean Six Sigma organization is there to check a box?
You will be doing process improvement activities
You will kick off projects
You will be making the culture TOXIC by always talking about change but never actually making any visible improvements.
If you have multiple projects opened pertaining to the same topic over and over again you might want to think about strategy and work on a permanent solution by finding the root cause of the problem.
Lean Six Sigma Strategies work if you follow the steps below:
Find people who WANT to be part of the project
Sometimes the subject matter expert may be someone who is NOT the most knowledgeable but the most PASSIONATE about the work and will ensure the project be completed.
Understand capacity
If colleagues are working on projects outside their full workload, you need to reduce capacity so they can fulfill project requirements.
Goals
If projects are not goals and there is no accountability you are setting yourself up for failure.
Make projects directly affect incentives to ensure project completion.
Communication
Communication is important; leadership understanding hurdles, capacity and project requirements are very important, after all people can only succeed if the process is laid out correctly for them to follow.
People
Knowing people are at the heart of the improvement, if you cannot convince colleagues or incentivize them, why should they do the extra work?
Remember it’s the process NOT the people!
