How to Make Executives Follow through on Their Lean Six Sigma Commitment

What happens when somebody doesn’t follow through on their agreement? It’s a good one and on a little sideline here is one of the things that worked wonderfully for us at Motorola is we used to sign contracts with one another all the time. And what we’d do is if we sat in a meeting room and we made an agreement before we walk out again in very simple terms, Gary is going to do this and Mike is going to do this. George is going to do this and it always had to have a specific action by when, right? And the expectation was either you went off and did what you were expected to or you got to hold of all the people you made the agreement with and let them know what the problem is. And if you can instill that type of behavior with these written documents then the signature means a lot. And a lot of companies, it doesn’t mean anything to make an agreement in a conference room, and walk out and then basically trash what you just agreed to do. You know, it depends on the culture of the company. I know you grew up at, no, I don’t know about growing up, but you worked a long time in GE and that kind of behavior wouldn’t have been tolerated. You made an agreement, you were expected to keep it, right? Right. And you were expected to rally the people around you if you couldn’t keep it.. And so it’s got to be a part of the deal but you know having people sign off on things and then having them behave that way is a difficult thing. It’s where again a person like, and again you know the people who I hang out with. That a person like Mike Carnell or Rich Schroeder are invaluable because we need somebody that’s brave enough to go take a risk Of we’re basically, “This is what we agreed to and this is what’s happening. What we are going to do about it because if we allow this to keep going this way were going to disengage.” And you got to be willing to do that kind of thing because you know at least for us, we do this as a passion. We make money at it, by the way. We are not going to do something that we aren’t proud of and so you’ve got to have people who are brave enough to go in a skillful way and again, I will tell you there all three of people that I mentioned including myself that learned to do that in a more skillful way over time but you got to have people willing to engage and call the people’s hands where they don’t keep their agreements. Yeah. It’s a difficulty. You know, you don’t have any actual leverage in the organization. You are a consultant and you can be let go right now, right? Right. So, it’s a fine line. You can’t just not let something happen but you also can’t just get kicked out because you let them go. And so it is walking a fine line but again it’s what in my mind make the best consultants. You’ve got to be willing to challenge, you’ve got to be willing to not just go in and trash the person and walk away. You’ve got to go in there and tell them what’s wrong with their behavior and talk through with them and sometimes it’s not the easiest thing in the world. Especially, if you’ve got somebody you’re passionate about. We get a lot of bright people, the best part of the job for me is all the bright people we get introduced to and we can change the way they think about business for the rest of their lives. And we got a lot passionate people there that are basically getting stymied by people not keeping their agreements and so it’s hard not to go in there and be overly passionate about your support of these people. You’ve got to walk the line but you got to do it. You’ve got to be willing to challenge, you’ve got to be willing to walk away, you’ve got to be willing to… I don’t care if your title is executive, the VP. I don’t care if your title is CEO. If they aren’t meeting their agreements just sit down and talk to them and explain what you are seeing and what can we do about it. It’s got to happen.