service – SOLUM SERVICES

Change is Never Straight

Controlled chaos is a normative term in the management of change. Change is never straight. Change defies a linear constraint. Change is messy and change is curved. Leaders must be curved people.

Mentoring a growth team, we reviewed normal impact of change on the growth leader. In this model vision leads to planning and implementation leads to problems and pressures leads to perseverance leads to accomplishment and success leads to celebration and rejoicing leads to increased vision. Or you can choose crisis instead of perseverance which leads to exhaustion and withdrawal can lead to restoration can lead to increased vision. Or crisis can abort the progress. There are hundreds of divergent paths that may happen. Change is messy and curves a lot.

Change is not for straight line people. They are good at regular performance and processes. Change bothers them. A leader must learn to be a curved person. Change is inevitable and needed. Leaders lead through the curves.

There is one major curve in change you should explore and master. It is the curve between your starting level of productivity and your landing level of productivity. In that curve lies all the potential for disaster and triumph. In that curve many leaders lose sight of vision. In that curve success is assured and failure is certain. Master the curve and master change.

Starting Level: Preceding productivity curve is your present level of productivity and accomplishment. How successful are you? What are your measurements? Know them and get them recorded.

Plan: Now, plan the change that you intend to take your business or other endeavor into the next level of productivity. Go from 100 widgets a day to 200 widgets a day. Add a new product line while keeping current production levels on others. Penetrate a new market. Implement improvement in service. Change for growth.

Launch: Launch the change. Communicate, take action, and plunge into the change. Paralysis by analysis is deadly. There is a moment and point of demarcation. Take it. Fall off the mountain. That’s right fall off the mountain of your current productivity level.

Freefall: Change causes freefall. Problems come from change. Teams get confused. Productivity decreases while people absorb new information. The right screw becomes the wrong screw. Questions abound. Production plummets. This was in your plan, right? You made allowance for this, correct? No? Whoops. Fingers get pointed. Doubt crawls up the ladder to challenge the change rationale.

Adjust: Light shines. People push through learning curves. The services straighten out on the planned track. There is smiling in the camp instead of groaning. You knew you would get here, you just wished it had happened on schedule and without the problems. The changes begin to push productivity above your starting level.

Landing Level: Why endure the pain of change? Reach new levels. Plan diligently. Execute well. Adapt strong. Obtain outcomes. Receive reward. Of course, it does not always look so pretty. You might drag onto the landing level scarred and scattered.

Summary: This conversation is one I’ve had with hundreds of learning leaders. Every new leader expects smooth change, gets into the curve, panics, and needs some encouragement. Have your eyes open when you enter the change curve. You still might get blindsided, but you will be ready. Adapt with good and frequent communication and intentional feedback points. Go ahead and fall off the mountain. The landing spot is higher than where you stand.

Excellence Starts Here! Three Tips For Top Performance. Engaging Ingenuity.

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These two gentlemen represent a great event in a production shop. What really is the beginning of such powerful events? Oh, the event? The team had kept key equipment up and running and productive for 30 days with no vendor calls. Amazing. Especially considering the fact that prior to this the equipment required calls every 2-3 days for many years. They are holding an award for the historic event. Now, back to the question. What really is the beginning of such powerful events?

Think about why you need these events? A friend used to call them “Big Days”. Big Days build strength in an organization, overcome defiant obstacles, and release energy of the team in a positive manner that is brooding in a negative manner. For those reasons alone, you need to engage the next three points.

One: Get dissatisfied. Yes, that is the beginning of all great change. If you are comfortable and content, change is a threat. You must engage vision for the future with passion and be dissatisfied with the status quo.

Two: Spread your dissatisfaction. Now, you don’t need to get people upset over nothing. But if the people you are serving can’t get their jobs done or their product delivered or their services received on time, you need to get some partners in your dissatisfaction. Other managers, co-workers, staff, key customers, executives and others probably are already dissatisfied. Let them know you understand and listen to their view points.

Three: This is where real change starts. Pick a key point over which everyone is dissatisfied and attack it with passion and purpose. Dig for a root cause that will help everyone in the process. The theory of constraints explains that when you dig out a major point of constraint, you loosen up other constraints to become visible so they can be resolved. In other words, break the dam!

You will be amazed. This team went into overdrive for customer satisfaction when they found this one barrier to productivity resolved. They annihilated this bothersome downtime issue on key machines, developed new procedures for maintaining the equipment, gained independence from the vendor, improved production turnaround times, and improved the entire shop morale.

Just a thought today for those looking to do something good for themselves and those they serve.

Ingenuity: Your Company Inside THE Company

INGENUITY: THREE ESSENTIAL ADAPTATIONS

Ingenuity Takes Adaptation

Over decades of assisting companies in healthcare, insurance, non-profit and retail, there are three essential adaptations that always play. For improvement to stick, you need the right stickem. Stickem? Remember the old glue sticks as a kid? We called any type of glue out of a pot or a stick, stickem when I was a kid.

Adapt Staff:

That’s right. Start by adapting staff.

Raise Up Others. It is so easy to let folks down. Find a way to raise them up. You will grow when others grow around you. You stand on their shoulders.

Replace Yourself. It is essential that find others to replace your skills and expertise. Probably one of the most frightening activities of your career will be replacing yourself. What if “they” don’t need you anymore after you replace yourself? There is always someone looking for a new leg up, a new improvement, a new approach. There is a promotion waiting for the right person who is free because of great management development of others.

Visiting with one shop ten years after working with them was enlightening. One of my early hires during reengineering had risen to become the shop manager. We were visiting at a national conference over a cup of coffee. He looked me in the eye and said, “We still use the PAL method.” Puzzled, I asked him what he meant by the “PAL” method. He explained that I had initialed every new memo and organizational tip and note with “PAL”. Those are my initials. He and others had learned concepts of operations and improvement through those notes and continued using them ten years later. They did not need me, they had learned me.

Reinforce Service. Get that team to engage a full service mentality. In Plants and In House operations have bad reputations for service. Do whatever you can to find a new service mentality. Never rest on service. Years of acculturation can kill service. You find yourself not hearing what you really need to hear.

Adapt Products

The same old tired product line is unexciting to your organizational customers. They want pizzazz and look and feel and different sizes and approaches. Sure, there is a penchant to live within the norm at every organization. Trust me, the norm is boring. You need some spice in your product line.

A recent in-plant manager talked to me about finding right support product for banner stands. A year ago, there was no capability to do banners. Now, the largest customer was demanding access to the new product line and they wanted it in volume repetitively. Foresight to acquire equipment and train staff had turned into a “have to” product line.

Find collateral services that accent what you already do so well. Can you add multi-channel support of email and landing pages to your direct mail? Can you add direct mail with variable impact to your brochure printing? Can you add online ordering and fulfillment on-demand to static box shipments of marketing collateral? What can you add that makes sense?

Customization is a must. Everything you do needs variable integration and segmentation design and capability.

Challengers in other departments, companies, other thought leaders, the market, all these need to be attended and addressed. Expect them and respond with wisdom and research and cooperation. Some of your biggest supporters will get mad when you launch a new product that helps another supporter. People just like to be in control and keep it all compartmentalized. That is, until they need something new that you don’t supply. You have to lead and laugh and remember they will come demanding more after getting upset that you grew.

Adapt Marketing Speak

Adapt your language and approach to each different audience. It is amazing how many sets of ears exist in our limited universe. Each has words they love to hear and ways they love to see information. Become an expert at telling the same story in multiple ways.

C Suite listens to different actions and words than your staff. These are results oriented, cost reducing, compliance happy, and culture protecting individuals. Speak the language. Make the emotional and logical connections with them. Help them see. They have seconds to assess new information, not hours. Be brief and positive.

When working with a client to add a product line, we had a C suite luncheon. Using new techniques of landing page survey, we acquired food and drink preferences. At the luncheon all the food and drink was ready and organized by name. C’s came into the room expecting a normal corporate cattle line. They received custom service. As the client presented the new information ears and eyes were open and ready for new input. The client took orders for that product line continually over the next year out of that one low cost personalization that touched the C suite ego. One top executive mentioned that luncheon a year later. To him, it was the most professional he had been treated in 30 years of leading his corporation.

Your customers don’t care what you do for others. They just want to know what you do for them personally. Find that one product line or service that is most meaningful to them and make notes. Find a way to make it appear easier at the right time on the right day. Find ways to customize and improve it.

Working with one client, we modified a “book of forms”. They were shipping these to each new customer. Through some simple cooperation with the IT web folks, we created a custom variable post card mailer using mainframe data feed. Everyone struggled with the concept. The forms went to online download. The cost went down over $120,000 a year. We kept the customer for the client. Other business that came into the shop from that customer more than made up for the $60,000 a year in print that went away.

Influencers are looking for ways to grow their contribution. Show them how you can help them do that. Help them move up in the eyes of their clients and customers. Find out the influencers in your organization and find ways to advance their cause. It is amazing how you can help someone in administration by simplifying business card ordering processes.

Whew! There you are. Here are three essential areas to adapt. Staff, Marketing, and Product all need adapting to move forward. Of course, there are more areas. But without these, the others are meaningless. Love your customers enough to talk to them in their language. Love your products enough to do them with excellence and continuing improvement. Love your staff enough to build them into a better body of service.

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