Ep 4: The Process Improvement Leader State of Mind - The Derailers

Join us for Episode 4 of the Process Improvement Practitioners Show (PIPS),  In this episode, titled "The Process Improvement Leader State of Mind - The Derailers," we dive into the third part of a three-part series exploring the mindset of an Operational Excellence and Continuous Improvement Leader. This time, we’re tackling the pitfalls—those subtle yet critical missteps that can sabotage your success as a change leader. Whether you're a seasoned professional or new to the field, this episode offers valuable insights into what not to do when driving business transformation. We’re flipping the usual positivity of the business world on its head to discuss nine key derailers that can undermine your efforts. Tune in for practical advice, real-world examples, and a touch of humor (including a nod to Tina Turner’s “We Don’t Need Another Hero”). Feedback is always welcome—connect with us on LinkedIn, YouTube, or DutchCedar.com to keep the conversation going!

The 9 Derailers Covered:

• "We’ve Always Done It This Way"
• Show Up and Tell Everyone What to Do
• Inflexibility
• Hero Mentality
• Customers Are External Only
• Siloed Thinking
• We Are Going to Make Someone Lose Their Job
• Letting Perfect Get in the Way of Good Enough
• Working Hard Means Progress

Transcript

Thanks for returning to the Process Improvement Practitioners Show for Episode 4 – The Derailers.   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 third part of a three-part series on the Process Improvement Leader’s State of Mind.  If you’re returning, thanks for sticking with me!  If you’re new, you may want to listen to the other segments on the Process Improvement Leader State of Mind where I discuss the Traits and Mindset of an Operational Excellence/Continuous Improvement Leader.  You can also start listening here!  Honestly, talking about derailers is kind of interesting, kind of negative in a way; we aren’t used to talking this way in the Business World.  So, I could see that this might be a little more interesting place to start.  

Let’s talk about what kinds of things process improvement and operational excellence change leaders do that are bad things.  Not bad-bad, but maybe shall we say, poor choices that will make sure you will not succeed.  In the spirit of “bottom line up front,” let me give you the nine derailers I will talk about today.

1.    We’ve Always Done It This Way

2.    Show up and Tell Everyone What to Do

3.    Inflexibility

4.    Hero Mentality

5.    Customers are External Only

6.    Siloed Thinking

7.    We are Going to Make Someone Lose their Job

8.    Letting Perfect Get in the Way of Good Enough

9.    Working Hard Means Progress

First: what is a derailer?   I heard this term first when I worked at a big bank.  It was actually published in materials distributed to all employees to help with performance planning.  I thought it was very interesting that they would put out in a written leadership development material that says clearly, “these are the things you should not do and if you do, you won’t be working here very long.”  And two decades later, it’s stuck with me!  Not only is it clear, but it’s helpful as a concept.  In the business world, in the world of doers and builders (especially in the change management world), we are by necessity a positive culture, we talk about things we want to do and will do, but we don’t talk about the inverse case, and we really should.  In one of my previous companies, we did very dangerous construction work and in the training, there is a term used called STCKY, which stands for “stuff that can kill you.”  The term gets your attention in a different way than just explaining the right way to do a task, which will ensure you don’t die.  Death is the ultimate “derailer.”  So hopefully I’ve convinced you that telling someone what NOT to do is helpful.  

The first derailer is a classic: “but we’ve always done it this way.”  If you have this attitude, then change leadership is not for you.  This is one that everyone knows so well to the point where most people won’t say it out loud, but some will still think it or otherwise exhibit it.  The whole point of process improvement - really any other change project - is that the way we did it before is no longer good enough.  We are willing to spend money and take on various risks, including the risk of making things worse in order to make a change.  That’s how much we don’t want to do it the old way anymore.  I think people have learned not to say this phrase out loud, so they don’t, but they still resist the change because they still possess the attitude.  If someone is willing to say this out loud, take it as a gift of honest candor.  Resistance is easier to gauge when the people come out and say “we don’t want this” sooner than slow-walking or otherwise sabotaging the change later.  Now we can have a dialogue to get to the root of this and solve it!

In short, this attitude is simply antithetical to a leader of change.  You could sooner be a surgeon who faints at the sight of blood.  I don’t think I need to explain it further.

Ok, that was an easy one, let’s do a more controversial one.  I think a derailing behavior for a process improvement leader is to be one who arrives and tells everyone what to do.  You think you know exactly what’s wrong, and what’s needed to right the ship.  Perhaps you managed this team before, or a team like it.  Perhaps you’ve run an operation just like this before, and you slip into old habits.  Or you just would rather take a short cut to a solution.  But in reality, it is a short cut that short circuits the change acceptance process.

So, this one comes with a couple of caveats: 1. You may truly know exactly what needs to be done, and maybe even how it needs to be done.  2. If this is an emergency, this mode of operation is more likely required.  3. The action in question may be a small item that doesn’t require much change acceptance at all and is a truly “just do it” kind of thing.  4.  The action in question will bring the organization back into safety or regulatory compliance.  Naturally, please use your best judgement.  By exercising this “direct” form of leadership you can derail your longer term desire to drive three key things: collaborative problem-solving, change acceptance or team buy-in, and overall continuous improvement culture.  Remember that although your presence will undoubtedly drive a lot of behavioral changes, someday you will have to leave, and unless the team truly accepts the change and owns it to the point that they teach new people the new process and procedure, they will backslide for sure.  And all your effort will go to waste.  Believe me, I’ve seen it!  Nothing worse than starting a project, and bringing in a subject matter who tells you “Yeah I was coaching this same exact team for this exact same project scope 18 months ago.” 

Also, problem solving methodologies like Kaizen depend on the team self-organizing around a problem and a goal and then it works out the solution.  You facilitate.  Give a well-chosen team the problem, the time, space, tools, and management support and attention, and it comes up with new ways of working that it inherently owns, and are most likely better and more sustainable than anything an outsider like you can come up with.  And given the choice between a perfect process the team doesn’t own, and an effective process the team does own, I would choose the latter every time.  General George Patton once said, “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”

To the point of that great quote, inflexibility is a derailer.  You will need to roll with the punches and the constant struggle for resources, attention, and priority.  You will claw your way to victory inch by inch and you won’t have the luxury of winning in the way that you want to win.  You need to find a path to success and that path is likely not what you imagined.  Another great quote, this time from Mike Tyson: “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”  Yes, some operational excellence projects will metaphorically punch you in the mouth!  

A large-scale example of this is in Continuous Improvement deployments at the enterprise level.  Senior executives may envision the deployment to be focused on a specific business unit where they perceive the most opportunity.  Business conditions or frankly, a lack of support present challenges.  Meanwhile, other business units who want the help are actively pulling for the support.  Executives in this unit may have been exposed to successful Operational Excellence deployments outside the organization and crave more.  They may have the vision to see the opportunity.  So ,a wise OpEx deployment may consider engaging in the unit that wants them as a stepping stone to find their way into the other organization, through building a positive reputation, credibility and attractive results.

Inflexibility means you won’t be able to find that unforeseen and unique path to success, and instead you will beat upon rocks trying to do the improbable, while frittering away your goodwill, labor, and management support, until they are depleted, the project is naturally cancelled, and you go find new work elsewhere.

There are a few things that you must be inflexible about, however. First, insist on working on the right kind of work, not busy work. Second, insist on defining and quantifying the goal of the project as best you can.  Third, insist on identifying the customer and quantifying their needs and then measuring how your process does at meeting those needs, both before and after your improvements.  But be flexible on most everything else as appropriate.

One of your process improvement anthems should be the legendary Tina Turner’s classic track from the classic 1985 film “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.”  <PAUSE> 

I’m pausing so you can get that ear worm lodged properly for effect.  Unfamiliar?  “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” a classic track and a classic music video from back when music videos were a big, big deal.  What’s fun is seeing fashion that is supposed to be futuristic but in reality it’s quite contemporary.  You’ll see big hair and even bigger shoulder pads, all in costume, and a saxophone solo to boot.  I’ll provide the link in the show notes. https://youtu.be/HLBXAs2LO8k?si=zx0oGeI42EHU1kDb  Anyway, so please, we don’t need any more heroes!  What kind of heroes am I talking about?  Heroes emerge when we don’t have process!  In the course of process improvement work, you need to put heroes out of business, which is a good thing!  Heroes step up and are needed when things go badly, and we don’t ever want things to go badly.  No need for people to be working 12 hours a day on the regular.  And you will find some employees want to remain heroes, perhaps due to the satisfaction of being so highly valued and important to the team.  Heroes at work may also think their job is safe, but heroes also can’t take vacation.  Heroes can’t get promoted either.  

In your work, you are eliminating the need for heroes, and you certainly are not creating the need for more heroics.   And this also applies to you and your engagement in this work.  Remember that the process owner is lucky to have you involved in this process and you are likely a free and over-trained and over-qualified resource, which means you can’t stay.  So if you find yourself stepping into actually executing the process, you are not helping for the long-term.  With your skills and abilities, you are better utilized to lead the change versus getting sucked into trying to fix things by doing the work.  Don’t do that either.

Another derailing behavior - I’m not sure if it’s derailing, or maybe it’s just a core principle that you must, must have - is that everyone has a customer and that customer is more likely than not an internal customer.  Every process provides something to a customer.  If you operate a stamping machine on a production line, your customer is the owner of the next step in that process, so your immediate customer is Marv at the welding station or Mary in final assembly, because she depends on your inputs to produce her outputs.  Your customer – internal or external - depends on your work being done to a given specification.  The end consumer of course depends on your work but they may not even be aware the part you’re fabricating even exists in their product, but certainly the person who depends on your output as an input into their process cares deeply!  Everyone has a customer, and that may be a mind shift for a lot of people, probably much more so in transactional environments versus manufacturing where I suspect it’s more obvious that someone is doing a lousy job.  Another example: a data analyst is working on an AI project by collecting and preparing data records to be used to train the AI tool.  The Analyst is dependent on customer notes entered into a record for a customer’s call 5 years ago.  The linkage between customer and the person delivering to the customer is far more obfuscated by time and awareness.  But the relationship is there.  Part of what we do to improve quality is to shed light on these relationships that aren’t obvious.  Only by doing this can we improve quality as measured by who?  The customer!

A related derailer to not thinking in terms of internal as well as external customers is siloed thinking.  If you’ve been exposed to an organization where support partners are engaged at a low level, and/or are fully integrated into processes, you may not even be aware of this kind of thinking.

Silos are created by organizing the enterprise by function versus by product or service.  Silos also can exist with supporting organizations.  For example, finance partners may roll up to the CFO, or safety professionals may roll up to the head of safety, or the Customer Service division has a separate organization that provides support to your product line.  In these cases, however, the organization uses a matrix of dotted line and solid line accountability between the support partner and the function they support.  A plant manager, for example, will have a dedicated finance professional and safety professional that may not directly report to them, but do provide direct support.  

All this is to say that this is not an example of siloed thinking.  The silos form along the path of value delivery to the customer.  For example, I worked at a very, very large company that not only distributed products, but manufactured products.  As it turned out, the relationship between those two groups was so non-existent that they may as well have been separate companies!  One would expect that the product line of a given business would have the best relationship to the distribution line of the same business, but that was definitely not the case.  The data clearly showed that the product line of business was the poorest performing supplier to the distribution business!  When I suggested having the product business modify the packaging to reduce the work on the distribution side, I received laughter.  “Who would we even talk to?” was the response.  And I’m sure when this company purchased this product line (it wasn’t organically grown) I’m sure the CEO and CFO touted to the Wall Street analysts how bringing this in-house would lead to efficiencies.  In the operations arena, I didn’t see any, and in fact saw the opposite: poor internal customer experiences that no doubt translated to poor external customer experiences.

An example of ending siloed thinking is Sales, Inventory, and Operations Planning, or SIOP.  In short, this is an ongoing alignment across the value chain of sales, manufacturing, and distribution to ensure a firm is meeting customer obligations and needs.  Imagine a world where Sales makes promises that can’t be delivered.  Sound familiar?  SIOP aligns across all the links of the chain.  Seems obvious too!

For those familiar with Agile or Scrum software development, you also see how silos are broken down.  In the old days, Product people wrote requirements, threw them over the wall to developers, and then they threw back questions, etc.  In Agile, the product owner is locked in the room with the developers in what is called a Scrum so they are always on-hand to answer questions about the customer’s needs.  No more throwing requirements and questions over a wall, and waiting for a response.  No more uncomfortable moments when developers deliver something the product people were not expecting.  Product is sitting with developers as they deliver value to customers.

In short, corporate functions do not deliver for customers, integrated value chains do.  Manage your delivery as close as possible to these value chains.  Promote end to end thinking!

One more derailer, and maybe more of a principle, is that process improvement means someone is going to lose their job.  In my experience I simply haven’t seen anyone lose their jobs due to a process improvement initiative.  Is it possible, sure.  But it’s certainly not automatic.  Do not carry this attitude with you, and certainly be prepared always to dispel it.  When you show up to meet the team delivering a process you’re going to be working on, some may be apprehensive.  But more likely they know things aren’t working well, and they welcome help.  No one wakes up in the morning and looks forward to doing a bad job.  We all want to do meaningful things with our time, and doing stupid stuff is never meaningful.  Delivering better processes that produce less waste while delivering more quality and faster doesn’t mean cutting jobs.  What it does mean is that we are doing a better job, which makes us more competitive, which may mean more work coming to us.  With additional work means more challenge in our career, which prepares us for future challenges elsewhere.  It keeps things interesting and fun!  And if we are delivering more, that may mean a conversation about compensation - if you’re doing more you should be paid fairly for that work.  

Certainly, there are processes that have too many people.  Removing people simplifies the work.  So some roles may be eliminated.  Again, the organization is hopefully growing, which means more roles elsewhere open up.  Also, there is likely natural attrition already happening, which means instead of letting someone go, we may simply hire one less person in our ongoing hiring processes.  Ultimately, we are in a stronger place to keep our processes improving.

            Personally, I take a dim view of letting perfect get in the way of good enough.  I think we are all guilty of it – when a work product is inextricably tied to ourselves you don’t want to release something that isn’t perfect.  I face this in this moment as I record my spoken words and ideas for the Internet that will last forever digitally in some far-flung data center.  But at some point, we have to call the work Done and move on!  At some point, perfectionist behavior becomes selfish, because the work is no longer as important as the person doing the work and his needs.  

            How does this manifest?  If you are brought on to solve problems in an area where there hasn’t been enough focus, you may find tons of opportunities.  This has happened to me before.  It’s not that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit, it’s that you can’t walk without bumping into fruit all over the ground!  It becomes highly distracting, but we can’t solve it all right now, and frankly, many of those things will have to be solved by the organization itself.  This is also why building a Continuous Improvement culture is so important – teach the team how to empower itself to fix these problems on its own, instead of relying on external resources that will be inevitably re-deployed to put out fires elsewhere.

I’ve also seen an occasion where seeking the perfect was a form of resistance.  The idea is that the process owners or participants, to prevent change, create an unachievable list of requirements that will prevent forward motion.  An example I found was, in the course of deploying a cloud software solution, the business wanted specific functions that didn’t exist.  That then drives a conversation about what it means to make a custom software solution versus utilizing something “out of the box.”  Did the business really need these functions?  No.  At best they were “nice to haves” dressed up as critical.  Having strong business sense and strong alignment to the project charter can help deflect these items.  By utilizing a project portfolio or enhancement list, you should memorialize these items so they’re not being ignored or dismissed.  What you don’t want to happen is to expend a lot of effort on these kinds of items, because they will slow you down.  And in this case, that’s the intent: jam up the change for as long as possible, in the hopes that the project goes away.  

Fortunately, we have a Project Charter that keeps us aligned to our objectives, and a Project Champion or Sponsor who can speak for the customer and say “You’re Done!” “Good Enough!” and “Mission Accomplished!”  Maintaining a strong portfolio of projects helps keep us focused on what’s next.  Endless tinkering with the work is diverting resources from more pressing opportunities.  Let the portfolio be your management focus.  If there’s work still left to do, then add it to the portfolio so it can be triaged and prioritized on a regular basis.

            One final derailer to share.  A lot of people seem to think that exerting a lot of effort means progress.  In Ross Perot’s autobiography “My Life and the Principles for Success” he encourages the reader not to reward people who are visibly working hard, because they very often are fixing some problem they created.  That always stuck with me!  Equally memorable was the line in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation where the daughter tells the grandpa, who is laughing at Clark Griswold’s extravagant light display “he worked really hard, grandma.”  To which the grandpa responds, “so do washing machines.”  Really hard work doesn’t mean success!  We should be careful to reward hard work.  We should recognize it, however.

            How does this derailer manifest?  Spending a lot of hours on things that aren’t moving us towards our goal.  Spending time on projects that have little “lift” in the primary metrics.  Doing continuous improvement tools that are fun and enjoyable and really cool but don’t get us closer to solving our problems.  Imagine a row boat, filled with people, each with oars.  Imagine every 3rd person rowing in the opposite direction, with all their might.  Like Olympian level effort.  Working very, very, hard directly against ourselves.  That’s the visual you need when leading change teams.  Make sure all the oars are going in the right direction.  That’s leader business – making sure everyone is pulling in the right direction, and if it means stopping everyone for a few minutes to get re-synched, then do it!  The temporary cost of forward momentum is worth it.

            Thanks for hanging in with me as we cover 9 derailing behaviors you need to avoid as a change professional.  We definitely want to avoid thinking “we’ve always done it this way.”  As a change agent, we don’t want to just show up and issue orders.  That short circuits building a change culture while shutting down great ideas from the team doing the work.  You must be flexible, because the path to success is often going to be different than expected.  We do not want to encourage hero behaviors – well-run operations ought not to depend on heroics day-in and day-out.  Do not think for a minute that there are only external customers – recognizing the needs of internal customers will be a key insight and source of success.  Do not encourage silos, but break them down, not just across support functions, but along the entire value chain.  Continuous Improvement initiatives are not about causing people to lose their job.  It is about improving the work to make the team more effective, and empowering the team to drive those changes.  Don’t let perfect get in the way of the good.  Measure the process, set an achievable goal, and keep taking ground until you achieve it.  And finally, don’t confuse hard work with progress.  Strive to make every hour count, and use your organization skills to ensure the team is working on the right things all the time.

            Thanks again for tuning in.  I welcome your feedback.  Message me via DutchCedar.com.  I welcome and am hoping to drive constructive conversations so we can all get better at this craft.  As always keep moving, onwards and upwards.