"What happened? Why are you so nervous?", I asked one of my singer friends during our monthly
singing meeting. "We have a lovely theme of singing 'monsoon songs' with a lively setting of heavy rains in the background!"
My friend is usually well-prepared for our singing meet up every third Sunday. We all professionals from various fields with a common interest enjoy theme-based singing.
"Are you not prepared today?", I continued.
"That's not the case", he murmured. "I am worried about my business dear. It has become a noise while I am on a song".
He owned a mid-sized business. In spite of reasonable compensation he had a problem of attrition affecting business performance year-on-year. It was their innovative product that had been somehow helping them sail through. In fact, their 'somehow'-management techniques consisted of 'pushing' people (including a major chunk of attrition-substitute freshers) for production, 'shouting' at them for mistakes, etc. This had been resulting in a 'snow-ball effect' of managing rejections, delayed deliveries, and so on.
In effect, sagging morale of people had been posing a perpetual challenge of keeping both the old brigade as also the new breed engaged homogeneously. Anxiety of future, that was evident on his face, seemed to take toll on him. Actually he had been voicing this concern at regular intervals in past.
What was the solution to engage people?
There was no point in him worrying about attrition in particular. Even big and successful companies could't prevent that. Finding ways and means to get both the old and new engaged speedily and sustainably was the only answer. More the engagement, lower the performance issues, easier and faster the familiarization to processes, higher the affinity to workplace, lower the possibility of attrition.
Getting that done was a challenge particularly on a fear-struck workplace that on the other hand was full of challenges on quality, cost and delivery front.
In a fear-struck workplace if leader himself behaves like a maniac, it adds fuel to the fire. "What if I change the process" kind of 'What-if' questions haunt people under-fear especially if they are freshers.
Fear of unknown haunts just as a child gets scared of entering a dark room.
What will boss say if I make mistakes?
Will I be able to do this neatly or adequately?
Will I be able to complete it (Compliance)?
Will I fail?
Will I be able to communicate my stand?
Will my colleagues ridicule me?
Will they criticize me?
Such aesthetic fears promote staying put in status-quo.
While on one hand people under the grip of fear wish that everything should go right, on the other hand they imagine everything undesired happening. They begin worrying and get excessively anxious. This results into several mental, emotional and physical symptoms including demotivation, loss of self-esteem and self-confidence, etc. In other words generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) takes their charge resulting into negative 'snow-ball effect' around.
Apart from demotivating work-environment, causes of such worrisome behavior could be a mix of biological, psychological, social and cultural ones that may include: lack of preparedness for the occasion, personality inhibitions, shyness or learned behaviour of habitually worrying or anxiety (as a trait) inherited from their family environment, etc.
In personal setting the affected people may get conventional advice that of resorting to self-help strategies such as to "have self-confidence even if others don't have it in you" or to "look at your own self positively and get set & act" or to "relax, deep-breathe and meditate" while in mess, and "to "approach solving a problem one-step at a time", etc.
Yes, it's always good to make your own-self robust than trying to change outside world to accommodate your weaknesses. But only one's own family members with their captive homogeneity and serious interest may afford to spend that kind of time and efforts on helping one individually.
But in a typical dead-line based corporate setting that employs 100s and 1000s of people with multiple diversities at personal and professional level, spending that kind of time and efforts on helping everyone individually may become prohibitively expensive and difficult in spite of employing a fleet HRD managers and their initiatives.
So what is the alternative solution for businesses such as that of my friend?
How to instill self-confidence in each and every member of the corporate family? How to align them with speed matching that required to perform and deliver time-bound goals of the organisation?
One pioneered by Toyota among various methods was about creating various listening platforms in order to preserve "respect for people" and to preserve their "individuality" in terms of individual creativity as well as speed of participation without affecting speedy demands on the organisation.
Toyota did this by providing
1/ empowered environment to make changes in work under an individual's direct control,
2/ structured
platforms to declare and get recognised for the efforts put in suffering or making those changes with rules that would pre-empt all the fears including that of failed changes, if any.
This is where structured problem solving methods such as
Gemba-Kaizen, One-step instant
Kaizens, Seven-step Kaizens, Quality-Circles, Kaizen-Teian, etc. were born that helped them mint millions and billions of improvements. Most important common thread among them all was listening to the changes made by people with employee empowerment rules such as following as the essence among other support structures for creating Kaizen-culture as they say in one-word at Toyota.
1/ The Kaizenee (an employee willing to make an improvement) is the boss to decide, make and declare small-changes within a pre-decided area with pre-decided conditions viz. 'go-zone' that won't disturb safety standards and customers. He is given full help by a Kaizen Engineering Team (KET) to experiment changes. (P. S. There are methods elsewhere in my blogs that help 'pull' all employees into willingness to do Kaizens).
2/ Mistakes and failures, if any, are pardoned. However they should be recorded as opportunities for improvement.
3/ There is no question of quantum of adequacy and compliance and that of size of savings as long as the deviations are recorded so that they don't go unnoticed and undergo next improvement
(PDCA) cycle followed by standardization
(SDCA) cycle.
4/ The Kaizenee's style and method of communication is considered least important as long as efforts in making changes are demonstrated personally or evidenced with before-after pictures. Anyone found ridiculing or criticizing a Kaizenee or her style and her sincere efforts is dealt with strictly.
5/ Moment an abnormality is noticed, anyone can stop the entire running line at a touch of a switch of an Andon that blinks or hoots placed at strategic locations.
6/ All help and attention is provided to a Kaizenee by a designated team if s/he brings forward any abnormalities in compliance to above rules.
With such empowering rules, where is the question of fear now. Isn't this kind of empowerment enough to 'manufacture' self-esteem, confidence, teamwork in order to make the workplace self-managed.
It was difficult for my friend to believe this kind of maverick approach. In fact, his reaction was "with such rules 'they' will force 'us' to close down the shutters". Short of efforts to act he was stuck in his own set of paradigms.
He may finally end up believing the maverick Kaizen-way on visiting some case-studies though. But I have serious doubts whether he will create one of his own because it's about 'believing-by-doing' which is very difficult for people who believe in 'talking-than-doing'.
Also read a few relevant blogposts hereunder:
