Most seasoned consultants look for warning signs when they try to help a company that is early on its continuous improvement journey. Creating a continuous improvement culture is extremely challenging. In its infancy, it is hard to build momentum, and easy to get derailed.

Some of the ‘tells’ of a company that is not likely to be successful at continuous improvement include the following:

Senior leaders are not engaged

If the top brass continually misses steering committee meetings, doesn’t show up to report outs for kaizen events, and doesn’t participate in improvement projects, your efforts are all but doomed.

Projects are frequently rescheduled

The most important things to an organization get done. If projects slip and slide down the pecking order, it is telling.

No money is budgeted for continuous improvement

Department budgets need to contain money to make improvements. This includes enough staffing to have people on project teams. Typically, 10% of a person’s time should be devoted to CI. That means that on a team of 10 people, one of them should always be working on projects. It really doesn’t work out like that. You might have two people miss a whole week to work on a kaizen event, and then have a week with little activity, but it should balance out.

That means that if you have 10 people’s worth of work, and only 10 people, there’s no time for CI (not to mention vacations, sick days, etc.). It takes money to make money.

This gets easier once you make improvements and start to free up people. Move them to a continuous improvement resource team to make managing CI efforts easier.

This excessive frugality is also apparent if there is limited time devoted to training and if there is no willingness to hire expertise internally or bring in consultants and trainers.

Pulling people from projects

I get it. There are emergencies that sometimes require a special response. But people tend to be far to free putting normal operations above improvement activity. When you have a project going on and pull people from it, you are often disrupting the whole team.

I generally use the test of whether you’d call the person on vacation for the issue. If not, the person should politely decline.

Measurements are considered taboo

Most companies measure output. Some even measure processes. But the warning sign is how prominently they display the measurements. Continuous improvement makes metrics a part of daily life. If there is a lot of resistance to posting results for all to see, the company is in for a rough go of it. You’ve got to make problems jump out if you want to fix them.

Focusing on tools

When companies focus on leadership and problem solving and culture and policy deployment, they tend to be more successful than when they focus on specific Lean tools. The tools need a framework within which to operate.

Focusing on the frontline

When senior leaders are fixated on how frontline employees need to change, but make no change in their own management processes, there is going to be trouble. You can’t change a culture bottom-up.

Not reviewing progress

Companies that are focused on continuous improvement need to have the senior leaders meet monthly to track their improvement progress. They need to have action plans for each miss, and misses need to be treated as a big deal. In CI, each team relies on the other teams to do what they commit to, or their own projects will fail as well.

These monthly meetings are generally called PD Reviews (for policy deployment review) at the corporate level, and OPs Reviews (Operations Reviews) at lower levels. You would generally see these down to the lowest leadership level (i.e. supervisors would attend their manager’s OPs Review.)

Silence

When people are checked out, they don’t speak. If teams get into heated discussions about changes, it isn’t great, but at least it means that there is passion about making change, and people are still checked in. When leaders act as the good idea fairy, and there is the sound of crickets chirping in response, you’ve got problems.

Sarcasm

Joking about change is natural. Grumbling and griping is also to be expected at times and is fine as long as it is not pervasive.

Sarcasm, though, has a lot of anger behind it. It is the most biting kind of humor. If there is a lot of sarcasm from people when they are badmouthing CI efforts, there is a serious cultural problem.

Entrenched dissenters

Some companies have long-time employees who have a lot of clout and are not afraid to voice their dissent. These people can derail efforts because others are afraid to cross them. If supporters visibly buy in to the changes that are coming, they get onto the bad side of the ruling party.

This is the rotten apple principle. Entrenched dissenters will spoil improvement efforts.

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Strong leaders and experienced consultants can address these issues if they know what to look for. Some solutions are painful. Some take a lot of work. But some are not terribly hard to address.

But you do have to address these issues or you’ll be fighting an uphill battle to make progress.