FrenchDo you have the curiosity to improve?
- Posted on March 21, 2016
- By EMS Cognito
- in Change
- Comments: Comments Off on Do you have the curiosity to improve?
- Comments Off on Do you have the curiosity to improve?
Observing small children as they learn about the world and the environment around them you realise they constantly challenge what they think they know. As we progress through our working lives most of us become less curious, we accept what we are taught in most cases without challenge, this can mean we learn bad processes from our colleges and are not curious enough to make improvement.
As a manager do you spend your time solving your teams’ problems?? Hard work isn’t it, what if there was an easier way, that was faster and more robust, that dealt with all the natural variation in the process.
We can all engineer new processes when we think the original is broken but this does not help the team, it takes away ownership and the ability to learn. Instead the challenge of the manager is to create an environment in which your team can learn for themselves how to effect the process and that is the biggest challenge, ‘not guilty’ an environment where people learn needs to be blame free, whatever the mistake.
The next time someone discovers a problem say “thank you”, and ask them what counter measures can be taken. Even when the problem seems huge, no blame and say thank you.
But that is just the start you need to establish a robust problem solving technique that enables people to get past the first intuitive answer that enters their head.
As a leader you are responsible for setting the standard, so how do we achieve this? You need reliable processes, you need a common goal and you need a problem solving method that is simple, involves everyone and uses easy to understand tools. This is not an overnight success but a long term strategy for improvement. Improvement happens when people are curious and have the authority to make change happen.
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