How managers can derail continuous improvement

When a continuous improvement program is introduced into any organisation, it is introduced into a particular historically determined set of circumstances, the existing status quo. Even where current managers are trained in continuous improvement, they are likely to view it through the lens of their pre-existing biases and a day or so of training is unlikely to change this.

Problems with managers

Where a manager has managed the same organisational unit a number of years it is almost certain that:

• they have exhausted any ideas for continuous improvement that they may have been prepared to implement
• they are now acting as a barrier to further improvement because they have fixed ideas about how things should be done (as well as blindspots and pet ideas) and are not open to any CI ideas that are inconsistent with their fixed ideas
• they are blocking those ideas and as a result staff are discouraged from making further suggestions
• they have a vested interest in the status quo as representing any improvements they may have made in the past, even if those improvements are now outdated or dysfunctional.
• they have entrenched non-valuing adding activities that they may be unwilling to even discuss giving up.

Bureaucratizing the process

One threat that continuous improvement represents is loss of control.

If improvements are driven by grassroots recognition of problems by workers on the ground, the risk for some managers is that they will lose control of the process. So there may be a temptation to impose a whole set of rules which slow the process, a structure that subjects it to excessive approvals and controls so that it becomes bogged down. And in the process, the workers on whom the success of the process depends become disenchanted with trying to do anything.

Some managers may look on continuous improvement as a way to build their own profile by putting it into plans and trying to act as a clearinghouse for any ideas of the staff reporting to them and in the process act as a bottleneck (as well as bringing in the problems discussed above). I think most of us have known a manager who always manages to complicate things as soon as they get involved.

So what do you do?

The solution (which may not be possible for all organisations) is simple and brutal: replace or rotate managers, particularly ones who have been entrenched in the same workunit for an extended period of time.

By doing this, each workunit would gain a fresh perspective to look at their processes, plus they would be able to benefit from any improvement ideas that the new manager might have implemented in their previous unit, so that there is transfer of organisational learning.

The new manager would have no particular attachment to or investment in the status quo and would be more willing to consider ideas that the previous manager might have dismissed out of hand. Working in an unfamiliar area, they would have no choice but to become familiar with the existing processes and in doing so start to question things that don't make sense, but which have been taken for granted by the existing staff of the unit or which under the previous manager they had given up trying to change.

For continuous improvement there needs to be an openness to new ideas and new managers would lead to such an openness as well as a fresh rather than a stale eye being cast over any improvement ideas suggested by staff.

It may seem radical but sometimes a management reshuffle is the only way Continuous Improvement will work. Otherwise, you end up with the same old tired and ineffective ideas for improvement and a few months down the track it is looked back on as just another 'flavor of the month'.