Performance Evaluation

Give Me What I Want!

In 1980, The American Council of Retailers did some research on why people stopped doing business with various organizations. Here’s what they found in 1980: 64% left because they felt ignored 12% left because they were treated badly (that’s our policy) 11% didn’t feel the organization was empathetic 9% found a lower price 3% moved […]

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What’s your ‘Purpose’?

John Seddon has been a Systems builder since the 80s. He bases his work on the genius of Taiichi Ohno – The Toyota Production System – Beyond Large-Scale Production. Seddon has been successful adapting Ohno’s TPS approach but using it in services. There’s always a temptation to set targets and try to convince people to

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Why Management Training Doesn’t Work…and what to do about it…

We all give training to new managers. It seems weak at best, and might even make things worse in some cases. Disengaged employees as a result of poor management may be costing your company as much as 34% of your wage costs in lost productivity. This figure comes from an article posted by Katy Tynan

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Why ‘Management by the Numbers’ Doesn’t Work…

Daniel Markovitz posted a blog called ‘The Folly of Stretch Goals’ in the Harvard Business Review. He outlined the dangers of using ‘stretch goals’ and gives some examples of unwanted behaviours that can result. He identifies three areas where ‘stretch goals’ can result in ‘off the rails’ behaviours. Stretch Goals Can be Demotivating When an

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Corrective Actions…WIIFM?

Not everyone LOVES doing corrective actions, and that’s an understatement! So why bother? Here are a few good reasons to carry out corrective actions: Corrective actions are one of the building blocks to system improvement. System improvement is required in 11 places in ISO 9001:2015 4.4.1 – Context, QMS requirements: continually improve a quality management

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Learn to ‘See’… Learn to ‘Lead’

John Seddon, Vanguard Consulting, published a book in 2005 called “Freedom from Command and Control”. Definitely worth reading if you’re interested in tapping the vast potential of any workforce. One of his interesting ideas is ‘Learn to see, learn to lead’ and it made complete sense to me. What a leaders learn from looking at

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You’ll be right 6% of the time…

…if you choose ‘Operator error’ as the cause of your latest non-conformance. When Ishikawa introduced the world to his ‘Fishbone’ for doing root cause analysis, his research showed that employees in organizations make errors, of course, but only about 6% of the time. The other 94% of the time, the error is caused by a

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