The Strength of Ownership

My focus in continuous improvement has always been to help teams solve problems in a sustainable way. Early on in my career, I learned many facilitation techniques through trial and error, mostly error. One of the biggest errors I ever made during a Kaizen event was to be too directive with a team. When one of the team members said, “Adam wants us to do this…,” I knew I was in trouble.

Another early mistake I made during Kaizen events was to take responsibility for writing team member ideas on a flipchart while they were shouting them out to me. While this seems like a natural thing to do, I was taking ownership for team member ideas by writing them. I also was hindering engagement during the event, as the only person that cared about what I was writing was the person speaking the idea and me, the person writing it. The rest of the team didn’t need to pay attention to what was going on. This approach also allowed for dominant team members to get more attention than less vocal team members.

Post-It™ Notes – The Great Equalizer

I knew I needed to change my approach to drive engagement and ownership to the team members. My first change was to use Post-It™ notes for gathering ideas from team members. Each team member would write their ideas, one per Post-It™, and then speak them, one at a time. In this way, everyone had an equal opportunity to voice their ideas, and they were written in a way that was meaningful to them.

I started to develop fun ways to share the ideas, with a focus on giving everyone equal opportunity to share their thoughts and minimizing the opportunity to dominate the conversation by stronger team members.  I also noticed that Post-It™ Notes were the great equalizer. It didn’t matter what level in the organization a team member was. Their Post-It™ Note looked just like anyone else’s.

Once we uncovered all team ideas, I had to develop ways to prioritize them. There are many ways to do this, but the approach I settled on was multi-voting. Each team member gets an equal number of votes and is asked to pick their favorite ideas and place their vote on the ideas. As an example, there might be 100 unique ideas written on Post-Its™ and 10 team members. Each team member is given a vote to place on their 5 favorite ideas to work on and implement during the Kaizen event. The ideas with the most votes are the ones the team will work on. This technique works fast, but there seemed to be something missing. People told me that it was chaotic and there was something didn’t feel right about how things were prioritized. I knew I had to improve multi-voting.

Adding Process to Chaos

One event, I added criteria to the process of multi-voting to see if it would focus the group and help them feel more comfortable with the approach. I added these criteria to use when voting for a favorite idea:

1.       It provides the biggest benefit to the customer and to us (related to the problem to be solved)

2.       I actually want to do this (personal interest in the work)

3.       We can accomplish and implement this during the Kaizen (fast implementation and low money spent)

Once I developed the criteria, the teams seemed more confident they were choosing the right ideas to work on. The criteria all but guaranteed people were interested in what they were doing, which would maximize the results, and the work would get completed quickly.

Pick Your Passion

Now that we knew the top priority work, we would assign team members to the work. I usually left this to the team leader. I noticed some team members didn’t like their assignments and I knew I had to come up with something better. That’s when inspiration hit me. What if I could help team members connect with the project they truly wanted to work on? One day, I decided to try something new. After prioritizing the top three projects to work on and writing them on a flip chart, I said, “First come, first served, put your name on the project you want to work on.” Immediately, two team members jumped out of their chairs in order to put their names on projects that were most meaningful to them. This was just the reaction I was hoping for. The connection between the team members and the work was strong. But, could I replicate this reaction?

It turns out, I have used the same approach throughout the world and it’s not unusual for some team members to jump out of their chairs to put their names on the projects that matter to them most.  Not everyone does that, and it allows us to balance the teams to the projects. I learned to set the safety expectations prior to making my “First come, first served” statement.

I have used these facilitation techniques and many others to strengthen the engagement, empowerment and commitment of teams. In the end, I want them to win. I will continue to refine my approach to help them do that.