Why is it so difficult for an organization to stay on course?

By Wayne Tindle

Why is it so difficult for an organization to stay on course to becoming a high performing organization?

After years working in manufacturing and with organizations in the public sector, healthcare and education, I have come to the conclusion that the answer to this question is the same for all. The reason for all of the roadblocks, delays and course changing is the result of human nature.

Let’s explore what I mean by human nature as it relates to high organizational performance. A high performing organization would be a Baldrige National Quality Award recipient that has sustained the use of the Baldrige business model for years, using annual assessments to focus on continuous improvement and using performance measures such as defect rate, cycle time, productivity, time to market, financials, customer satisfaction, product or service quality. This high performance company is run by fallible humans.

It is human nature for people to revert back to the old ways whenever difficult times occur. The old ways may be putting out fires instead of preventing fires from happening. Then, over time the unaddressed future problems become the present problems, causing organizations to always work on the “immediate or urgent” items. There just doesn’t seem to be time for long-term planning and improvement. The belief that long-term work cannot exist with short-term work creates lack of preparedness for what the future issues will be.
Lesson: Set short-term and long-term priorities and don’t lose the long-term focus.

It is human nature for people to think they can take a break from continuous improvement while addressing some “immediate” items. They don’t realize that once you stop, it can require twice the break time to return to where you were. What makes it worse is the longer your break, the more likely you will not return at all. An organization where I worked stopped the continuous improvement teams for six months because of a part shortage, and it required over a year to return to the original performance level.
Lesson: Don’t stop improving and don’t stop assessing how you are performing compared to other organizations.

It is normal for leaders of an organization not to understand the magnitude of their influence on the entire organization. Employees pick up on even the smallest hesitation to not putting high performance, customer-focus, planning, and continuous improvement into every communication and decision of their leaders. Absence or mixed messages indicate low priority, less importance, or moving in a different direction. For example, a common problem in manufacturing is monthly shipments. It contradicts the message to employees about how important quality is, when management ships product with lower quality to make billing at the end of the month.
Lesson: Be consistent between what is said and what is done.

It is normal to underestimate the importance of making a cultural change through training, coaching, and opportunities to work together as teams. What is culture change? In high performance organizations, some examples of culture change are:

In a company where I worked it required an intentional culture change to decide that the organization of teams, training, and alignment of work were as important as the training of an individual to operate a piece of equipment. The result was an empowered and motivated workforce that produced results such as reduction of defect rate from 2200ppm to 200ppm and cycle time from 30 days to 5 days.
Lesson: Culture change is crucial to the achievement of high performance and draws on the benefit of the organization’s workforce knowledge.

Finally, what is ironic is that organizations send people to conferences and workshops to hear “lessons learned” from high performing organizations, and then continue to cultivate the same issues because they consider themselves different and the lessons do not apply.

Wayne Tindle trains companies in the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence and coaches organizations using the North Carolina Awards for Excellence process.