Ep 3: The Process Improvement Leader State of Mind - The Mindset

Welcome back to the Process Improvement Practitioners Show! In this episode, we continue our three-part series on the Process Improvement Leader’s State of Mind, diving into the mindset that drives effective change leadership.

Building on the previous episode’s discussion of key leadership traits, we now explore how these traits manifest as behaviors and thought patterns. A strong mindset is essential for successfully leading process improvement efforts, influencing culture, and fostering lasting transformation.

We cover 11 critical elements of the Process Improvement Mindset, including:
✅ Assuming positive intent in others
✅ Blaming the process, not the people
✅ Developing a process-oriented perspective
✅ Understanding process ownership
✅ Identifying waste and inefficiencies
✅ Practicing customer-centricity
✅ Learning to say no to non-value-adding work
✅ Leading with questions before applying tools
✅ Thinking like a scientist in problem-solving
✅ Becoming a trusted advisor within the organization
✅ Striving to make continuous improvement so effective that your role is no longer needed

This episode is packed with insights to help you cultivate the right mindset, align your coaching approach, and position yourself as a true change leader. Join the conversation on LinkedIn or YouTube—we’d love to hear your thoughts!

Listen now and take the next step in your process improvement journey. 🎧🚀

Transcript

Thanks for returning to the Process Improvement Practitioners Show.   Our mission here is to enable you to solve business problems through change.  As always, please feel free to provide feedback and discuss these ideas on LinkedIn or YouTube.  I’m very eager to receive the gift of constructive feedback.

This is the second part of a three-part series on the Process Improvement Leader’s State of Mind.  You may want to listen to the first part where I talked about the traits of a successful process improvement leader, but it’s not necessary.  In the third episode we will talk about derailing behaviors. In this episode, we will talk about the mindset of the change leader. 

The purpose of going through these is threefold: 1. Identify the mindset that you need to screen for when building your team, and 2. illustrate how process improvement people think and act, and 3. Align your coaching activities to build on these mindsets.  It’s relatively easy to deliver projects, but it’s much harder to change the culture.

            I have 11 thoughts on what your mindset should be.  These are related to the traits previously discussed, but in this mindset discussion, you’ll see how the traits start to manifest into behavior.  If someone wants to do a relationship matrix or a House of Quality diagram connecting the traits and the mindset, I would be very, very impressed!  

Now some caveats: to paraphrase my favorite saying from George Box, “all top 10 lists are wrong, but some are useful.”  That means this list is also wrong, but it is hopefully useful.

            Bottom Line Up Front: here are the 11 elements of the Process Improvement Mindset, in no particular order.  

1.    Everyone in the process is doing the best they can

2.    Don’t blame the people, blame the process

3.    Possess a process mindset

4.    All processes have an owner

5.    Have an eye for waste and organization

6.    Be fervently customer-centric

7.    Be able to say no to work

8.    Questions lead, tools follow

9.    Think like a scientist

10.  Become a trusted partner

11.  Put yourself out of a job

Let’s go through each in detail!

            First, I want you to remember that in any business process, you should assume that everyone is doing the best they can.  I choose to believe that no one wakes up, gets dressed, brushes their teeth, says goodbye to their family, and drives to their employer with the goal of doing a lousy job at work.  In the core of the human soul, I think we all want to be useful and to be of service.  Now we may have encountered some outliers, and sometimes it’s frankly hard to believe this mindset, but it’s better to assume positive intent and to carry that positive attitude forward, than the opposite.  This mindset sets you up for a healthier and more constructive attitude when working to improve the process.

            Next, when we see our operations failing to meet expectations, don’t blame the people, blame the process.  That’s a direct quote from Dr W. Edwards Deming’s famous book “Out of the Crisis.”  (There is a link in the show notes.)  The idea - and the mindset shift - is that a lot of times we’ve inadvertently put people in a condition where success is impossible - or only possible with heroic effort - by giving them a bad process or inappropriate resources.  The shift in thinking occurs in two ways: 1. We are taking ownership of the fact that when we hire someone, we are putting them to work in a situation of our own creation, and that we are doing something to them; and 2. We are accountable for the results that we get from doing this, as well as the worker.  If you hand me a dirty rag and a bucket of water and no soap and ask me to clean your car, whose fault is it the car doesn’t come clean?  Now I might not even try, and that’s on me, but I was also not set up for success, and that is on the process owner.  A real-world example of this is when a processor is asked to copy and paste thousands of times all day between two applications, because we haven’t integrated the systems.  How many times can you copy and paste something error-free?  How do you speed this process to meet increasing goals?

Whether the premise - that we should blame the process and not the people - is accurate or not, think about how the attitude change drives improvement: it creates a BIG shift in accountability in your mind.  Suddenly it is us who needs to take action, not the employee.  Stop focusing on coaching, training, lecturing, cajoling, hiring, firing, and rehiring.  Start focusing on the process, the technology, the conditions, the metrics, aligned to customer needs.  These are things we have direct control over.  Even if you are skeptical, I think it’s fair to say that changing the process is certainly a better place to start than changing people, and it certainly signals to the employee that we care about their work and want them to be successful.  It also requires us to partner with employees, not be in conflict with them.

Naturally I want you to possess the process mindset.  Processes are your unit of measure.  They are your currency.  As I mentioned in the introduction episode, all value is delivered via a process, and that’s where we ought to focus our attention: on the means of value delivery.  This mindset is helpful when in organizations that are so early in their process improvement journey that they don’t even think in these terms.  When you possess the process mindset you will naturally start asking some key questions that will help you drive improvement without even trying: What is your process?  Is it mapped or documented? Who is your customer?  How do you measure delivery success?  Just thinking in terms of process will cause you to lean forward in terms of improvement.  

Let me take a short aside.  This mindset is also useful in large organizations where there are several sub-processes inside one large end-to-end process.  Think of a retail customer purchasing a product: what is the customer’s view of the process?  I shop for an item, I select it, I send you money, and then I get it as expected, and it meets or exceeds my expectations.  End-to-end, that’s the process.  But from inside the firm, you have a sales process, a financial transaction process, a manufacturing process, and a fulfillment process.  How likely is it that this entire process is owned by one process owner?  The sales process owner focuses on acquiring prospective customers and converting them to paying customers.  Manufacturing and fulfillment process owners are worried about meeting up and downstream expectations as well as cost and quality.  Who worries about the whole thing?  Who owns it?

I was in the room when this came up in a Fortune 20 company where a marketing executive had to raise her hand and take ownership of an end-to-end process (which included the challenging fulfillment process) even though that executive didn’t report to her.  But once she did, it was a game changer.  Everyone’s focus was immediately tightened on what we were doing to the customer, end-to-end, not just in the segments that aligned to the corporate silos and functions like marketing and fulfillment.

So that aside is a fantastic build-up for the next mindset: all processes have an owner.   Notice that I put that in the singular, not the plural.  Establishing process ownership does four things.  One, it establishes accountability for a process and the resulting work required to fix it.  Two, it gives you a finalist for the selection of a champion for any applicable projects.  Three, it gives you the person who you will go to for help (money, people, time, patience, decisions, etc.).  And four, it may solve this problem where there are multiple owners of parts of the process, but no single owner for the end-to-end process, which creates a dearth of accountability to our external customers.  For effective leadership, you don’t want to create a situation where your leaders are pointing to each other for accountability.  You want a single throat to choke, as the saying goes.  Customers want this too!  Think about how empowering it is to you as a customer to know the buck stops with one person.  Some companies are bold enough that this process owner shares his/her phone number with external customers.  That customer only has to make one phone call to gain resolution.

Next, you need to build within yourself an eye for waste and organization.  First. people may expect you to be a savant when it comes to fixing their broken operation.  Some sort of guru who can come in, scan a room, immediately see all the problems, derive solutions, and issue out orders.  Please do not attempt this!  Process improvement methodology is done by facilitating a team of owners who arrives at their own solutions in a facilitated process, based on clearly stated customer expectations and the correct measures.  Going on the floor and pronouncing changes isn’t hard, or temporarily squeezing out some measurable improvement.  But it’s a trap!  You also lose an opportunity to begin the long, difficult culture change journey.

On the other hand, you should have a sense for Lean Six Sigma thinking in terms of waste and organization.  Let me introduce you to two key Lean principles.  We will cover these concepts in better detail but know that there are 7 types of waste that you should be able to spot: transportation, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction, overprocessing, and defects (commonly defined with the acronym TIMWOOD).  And in terms of organization, you should be able to notice when a workplace is not sorted, set in order, shine (or clean), standardized, and sustained (known as “5S”).  You should be very comfortable with what an efficient workplace looks like, so when you see one that’s a mess, it will speak to you.  Some examples: are workstations cluttered and dirty?  Are trash bins easily accessible in a designated location?  Are they overflowing?  How is the lighting?  Are people running around frantically at the end of the shift or are they cleaning up?  Is the operation a ballet or a war movie?  The other reason why you need to have an eye for these things is that when coming to a new organization you will know immediately what you’re getting into.  Are you coming into a turnaround situation where there are big opportunities but cultural acceptance is perhaps low or immature, or are you going to be joining a mature team where cultural acceptance is high, but opportunities may be smaller and tougher to find.

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Your mindset must be customer-centric.  This one may seem obvious, but it’s not.  When you think of a customer, who do you imagine?  Your first thought perhaps is of a person standing next to a cashier handing money to someone.  You’re thinking of money being exchanged for goods and services between two external parties.  But think deeper.  Everyone has a customer.  Who consumes the product of your labor?  Who depends on your labor to produce a product for another?  So, the first step is to identify that entity, knowing that this person or organization or team doesn’t have to be a paying customer, and likely isn’t!  It could be a co-worker.  It could be your boss.  It could be your children.  The next step is to ask if this entity is the center of your process?  Does the process exist to serve this person?  Does the process respond to this customer’s needs and wants?  When you pack your child’s lunch, have you taken their wants and needs into consideration?  If your child has food allergies you’ve hopefully considered their needs, but if they wanted Beef Wellington instead of a ham sandwich, then you may have ignored some of the wants.

Every process must have a customer, and for that process to be successful, it must meet the customer’s wants and needs.

            Now that I’ve convinced you to take care of a customer’s every want and need, I want to give you, the process improvement leader, a tough concept that may be controversial: not all process improvement work is good work.  You need to be able to say no.  Let me give an example.  Ages ago as a full time Process Improvement Leader I went to work with one of the lines of business on a project.  When I arrived, I found that my process improvement colleague who was assigned to support this business really wasn’t doing “Process Improvement” work.  Instead, he was spending his time as a business support leader for the executive.  

            I think this is a bad practice that is super-easy to fall into.  You get assigned to support the business, you want to do work and add value and be helpful, but the business may not want you there in the capacity of a process improvement leader, or they may not know how to use you.  Our natural inclination is to be helpful and productive, so it will feel good to you to, for example, create the agenda for the senior leader meeting, print them out, and make copies and distribute them to all the attendees.  But is that why you’re there?  At the end of the year, what will you have accomplished?  Did you move the needle on the key metrics?  Did you improve acceptance and buy-in of process improvement?  No.  You weren’t working on the right things, so it’s pretty unlikely you will achieve your goals, and given this scenario your goals may not have been very well crafted in the first place.

            Are there any caveats?  Yes.  When coming into a new situation you do need to build credibility.  The business may not be familiar with Operational Excellence work.  They may be worried you will make them look bad.  They may not want change.  They may think you will slow them down with statistics and slides, or just get in the way.  Are you worth the seat at their table?  Are you worth their time and resources?  Are you helping or hurting?  Are you going to fit in or be a pain?  Are you adding value or are you someone’s spy?  To address this I definitely think you can - in the short term - do what I call loss leader work, and I’ve done this in the past within reason.  I think if the work is tangentially related to process improvement work, if it sets the conditions for you to do quality follow-on work, if the work is very limited in scope, and if it will build credibility or enable you to learn the business, then it’s fine.  I would set those expectations up front that this isn’t our normal work for these reasons, and then get to it to grow the relationship and the engagement.    

            One of the mantras I heard time and again during Lean Six Sigma training really stuck with me.  Hopefully you’ve heard it: questions lead, tools follow.  One of the criticisms I have for Lean Six Sigma certification processes is the focus on doing tools for the sake of doing tools.  We will cover tools in-depth later, but when I talk about tools, I’m thinking about things like regression analysis, statistical tests, failure mode analysis, cause and effect diagrams, and the like.  These can be pivotal when used in the right way, and they can be wastes of time as well.  I think the word “tool” should say it all.  Mechanics don’t seek to use every tool in the tool chest - why should you?  Instead, you need to know about the tools, what they can do, and how to do them.  Always use the right tool for the job.  Certification projects may require the use of certain tools to give the student the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge of that tool, and that’s great when done for certification purposes.  But don’t do it for the customer.  The customer is going to be wondering how much time you wasted on this beautiful but unnecessary chart that does nothing for them!

This leads to the next mindset, think like a scientist.   Science is a truth-seeking process, and one of the 16 traits mentioned in Episode 2 you should embody is Truth Seeker.  Believe it or not, you are a scientist!  You will seek facts, ask questions, create hypotheses, and test them to answer your questions.  If there is sufficient evidence and proof, then you will uphold your hypothesis.  A good scientist doesn’t have an agenda, other than pursuit of truth.  The scientific method depends on work built upon past work, so the past work must be rigorously done.  Like the foundation of a skyscraper, you can’t skimp on materials and quality or the whole project will collapse.

Always in your mind should be the desire to become a trusted advisor.  What is a trusted advisor?   This term comes from a book that was the basis of a class I took many years ago.  The object is to build trust with your clients and colleagues through emulation of integrity, objectivity, and competence, and the ability to communicate.  Achieving this with a project champion or sponsor takes a long time but once you reach that level of relationship you will become someone who is a go-to person.  A significant end goal for you as a process improvement leader is to be a trusted partner who will be included in decisions before they’re made, instead of the expert called in to help clean up the mess made by a decision you were not included in.  Also you will become someone who others will reach out to with more work!  This is a very good thing!

When I think of a trusted advisor, I think of Tom Hagen from the classic movie The Godfather. (link in the notes!)  If my Millennial and Gen Z fans haven’t seen it, please do!  I think it really holds up!  I don’t know if the Trusted Advisor book uses Hagen as an example, but maybe it should.  Hagen is the Godfather’s Consigliere and is in the movie literally at his right hand, providing advice and counsel to the boss.  He’s a lawyer who comes from sort-of outside of the family so he’s more objective, and he presumably has built a reputation of trust and competence that is a real asset.  You cannot imagine the Godfather making any big decision without asking Tom’s opinion first!

            I saved perhaps the most challenging mindset for last: success for you is putting yourself out of work.  Let me give you the context.  I assume you have been assigned to a process excellence initiative, and that you’ve been assigned some span of the business that is yours to improve.  You’ve been given this assignment because the business can’t do the work without you for whatever reason.  Now ask yourself: if the business could drive the improvements on their own, would you have a role there?  Probably not!  Change management and Process Improvement, ought to be core competencies of any business leader.  All business leaders ought to possess the skills and abilities to drive change in their own organization.  In your case they perhaps do not, and that you’re there to coach and train as well as lead. 

            Given that all organizations need to develop their own change capability, and given that all business leaders ought to possess the process improvement and change management toolset, mindset, and traits, then it follows that permanently assigned internal change resources should eventually work themselves out of a job.  As the organization matures and as you help it mature, you should be working yourself out of a job!  Now isn’t that comforting?

            What’s the point of sharing such a dire message at the very end?  First, you will have figured this out sooner or later.  You may have already realized it.  And I don’t want this knowledge compromising your behavior.  Remember to be a trusted advisor you have to have integrity, and that means doing what’s best for the organization, not you!  Second, I want you to begin with the end in mind, meaning your goal is to work yourself out of a job, which means you need to build the process improvement culture and capabilities within the team so you can step back.  That’s your target and it’s an audacious one!  Of course, with a challenging goal, you’re not likely to achieve it anytime soon.  As the organization matures from simple improvements to complex ones, they will need more advanced training that you will provide.  Few organizations reach the level where every leader has a full suite of process improvement skills and abilities along with the correct culture.  So, you have some time.

            Ok, that’s plenty to chew on!  Today we discussed the mindset of the process improvement leader.  We covered 11 elements of the mindset: please remember that everyone is trying to do the best they can in their work, that is it the process that stinks, not the employees.  Always think process process process!  When you recite that mantra, also ask, who is the process owner?  There ought to be only one!  Develop an eye for waste and organization in all its forms.  Be customer-centric in your work - who is consuming the fruits of my labor and why?  Be able to turn down bad work - don’t let your precious and unique skills go to waste.  Questions lead, tools follow.  Think like a scientist, always seeking the truth.  Work towards becoming a trusted advisor to your customers.  And know that if you are truly doing the right things, you should be gradually putting yourself out of work.  Don’t be a set of training wheels for the business.

Thanks again for listening, if you found this helpful, please tell a friend.  If you found this unhelpful…please tell me why.

            I cited 11 elements of the PI mindset, surely I forgot some!  Please kindly add yours to the YouTube or LinkedIn conversation.  I welcome your constructive feedback!  

Let us proceed, Onward and Upward.