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 numbers is not anywhere near what they can learn from interacting with the people who make the magic happen. Giving people credit for having a brain is one of the keys to unlocking their potential.
The other keys include a study of how your system is performing – are there any roadblocks to performance? Are there non-conformances that people are afraid to bring up? Improvement will only come from bringing issues to the light of day and fixing them. Non-conformances are truly nuggets of gold.
If the whole organization is focused on reducing the time it takes from ‘customer order’ to ‘money in the bank’ then the system will be improved in ways that actually matter. In order to find glitches, Management has to ‘see’ more, listen more and support improvement more. This builds powerful leaders.
Know Quality, Know Profits…No Quality, No Profits
If you’d like to see how we’ve enhanced the ability to ‘see’ with our cloud-based platform, schedule a demo and we’ll see if it can make your ‘ISO life’ simpler!