Building Six Sigma Leadership
By Sujit Mundul
Peter S. Pande has made some simple suggestions, some easy and some requiring careful planning and effort. Since our own path to Six Sigma Leadership will require time – and one will really never “be there” - one should have patience and persistence in building these approaches.
Organisation Action One: Explain What One Is Doing
As one examines opportunities to apply smart leadership (for example, to clarify impact on the customer, review and tighten priorities, check assumptions, etc.) it’s wise to share the rationale for your actions. Over time, as you get more comfortable with these better habits, you will probably want to be more thorough in your explanation, even going so far as to establish new practices in your organisation (see below).
Also you need to be careful of inflating others’ expectations. Replacing old habits with new ones usually involves some setbacks.
Organisation Action Two: Present/Encourage a System View
Providing people with a “big picture” understanding of your organisation, and their place in it, is fundamental to your success in building smarter behaviours. Seeing beyond their immediate environment can keep people better connected with customers, enable them to work more collaboratively, and promote more effective decisions. It also provides the context for better understanding the impacts and risks, and for developing more effective measures.
Organisation Action Three: Establish a Leadership/Management Vision
A vision for your organisation is essential to define and prioritise initiatives for change and growth. Here, however, talking about a vision for the leadership and management “best practices” are critical. Interestingly, we have not run across this type of “leadership vision” definition that can be recalled, however, it’s really different from company values, ethics, policies or management competencies, which are fairly common. Instead, this would describe accepted approaches and characteristics of your desired “leadership culture”.
Organisation Action Four: Upgrade Performance Management Systems
This is the action to consider when you’re ready to get serious. Raising the standard of leadership across the organisation can happen through advocacy and your good example, but current habits are deeply ingrained. To make smarter leadership a consistent advantage for your business, it should be part of how you assess people.
If people are rewarded for heroism instead of preventing problems, or if they never see the consequences of their bad habits, you won’t be able to sustain Six Sigma Leadership.
Organisation Action Five: Link leadership Improvement to Business Results
There are many personal traits and abilities – charisma, effective speaking skills, passion, and courage – that can contribute to the effectiveness of a leader. But those are very challenging to quantify, difficult to develop, and especially hard to tie to meaningful business benefits. Six Sigma Leadership, on the other hand, is observable, learnable, and relatively easy to link to the achievement of critical results. Working on the right things, asking the right questions, gaining insights to customers – all these are practices you can assess and connect to real organisational objectives. In doing so, one can avoid making “Leadership” and “business results” the two important but disconnected variables in your success equation.
Peter S. Pande has suggested that this action may be tied to Action Four, i.e. performance management criteria. However, it can also be incorporated into routine, informal “coaching” efforts. Sample questions/comments to use with your team include:
• When you investigate this opportunity, be sure to assess how it will impact our customers.
• We don’t want to bite off more than we can chew. Get with your team and review your priorities before determining how best to meet our goal.
• There need to be some clear, measurable benefits to tie to this initiative. Define some metrics and financial impact before going too far.
• This looks like a big issue that we can turn to our advantage. But fist we need to challenge and validate our assumptions.
• We can’t solve this on our own. Contact Sully and see about getting an interdepartmental team together.
(Mundul is the CEO of Standard Chartered Bank Nepal)
Lesson on Strategic Planning for Aspiring Organizational Leaders
By Manohar Man Shrestha
Most of us came to know about ‘vision’ and ‘strategy’ during our college days. We still hear them at work place. But we hardly try to get to the bottom of them.
Simply speaking, ‘vision’ means the future destination of any organization that we have envisaged. Strategy is a special kind of plan to materialize the vision. Whereas a plan is simply a step towards the vision, a strategy is developed considering all the opportunities and threats posed by the external environment as well as the strengths and weaknesses inherent in the organization.
These two tools are also highly effective in managing our personal life, our career and relationships.
Illustration 1
Recently, I got an opportunity to work with a big multi-national company. It took months to negotiate for the assignment. When everything was settled down and it was time to sign on the dotted lines, I suddenly realized that I would be making a strategic mistake if I signed the deal. So I quit the table.
Had I signed the deal, the following things would have happened:
1. My personal vision about my career and family would have been jeopardized.
2. My strength and creativity would have been suppressed and my weakness would have been exposed.
3. The business model of that MNC was incongruent and unrealistic for Nepal at least for the coming 10 years, although the same model has worked well in other countries.
This was how I avoided making a strategic mistake. There were several opportunities like higher income, international travel and chances to learn more from other icons of my industry, yet, I did not favour the deal. As a popular saying goes — one can’t have everything —I did willingly reject the offers.
If a student makes a mistake in an exam, he gets lower marks. If a teller makes a mistake, his cash will be ‘short’. If a doctor makes a mistake, the patient may die. If an engineer makes a mistake, bridges may fall. We are all aware of the possible consequences of mistakes. We always try to avoid such mistakes by acquiring the relevant knowledge and skills at the ‘operational level’.
Illustration 2
A teller in a bank, upon closing the books for the day, found out that he was short of Rs. 50,000. He looked in every transaction, went through the CCTV records and asked the colleagues. Still he was clueless. He had made a mistake, but he did not know how that happened. He was sad because he had to pay from his pocket. He thought about all the things he was going to sacrifice in order to make up the money.
As he was about to leave, a customer came in running. He scolded the teller, “Why did you give me so much extra money?”
The happy ending to the story was because of a strategy that the teller had adopted in dealing with the customers and that strategy was based on the teller’s vision. His vision was that of going back home everyday evening without having any ‘short’. He knew that the biggest threat to his vision was the customers who do not return any excess cash he would give out. Knowing that chances of error are always there, this teller made a strategy to be very polite and smile at all the customers. He also planned not to miss eye contact before and after each transaction. His understanding of human nature was, “It is harder to cheat someone you know than someone you don’t.” He also developed a framework to analyze customers and adapt his behaviour accordingly. His bosses were impressed by his approach in dealing with the bank customers. Sure, it slowed him down a bit but it was good for business. The customers’ action of returning the excess cash was the inevitable consequence of the teller’s strategic planning.
Illustration 3
A student has a vision to score high marks in the exams. To fulfil this vision he needs serious study. However, his scores in a mock test are lower than his expectation. If he is an average student, he will study harder. If he is a future strategist, he will take the mock exam as a feedback and he will thoroughly analyze his mistakes. He will also look at answer sheets of his colleagues who got high scores and thus identify what is lacking in his answers. In this way he can identify his strengths and weaknesses. He then will investigate the methods to improve his weaknesses.
The battle of visions
Even if you have the best strategy it will not work if your vision is not clear and unique. I struggled to find my vision in the prime of my young life. Society and the academic systems put ready-made dreams for the future in my mind, but I outright rejected them.
Before the Maoists launched their armed revolt, the majority of the Nepalis living in the rural areas had a vision of a life of contentment even amidst scarcity and they had no strategy to fight for eliminating the scarcity. Now their visions has transformed to a life of abundance. The vision of “Servitude to Zamindars for prosperity” has lost its relevance.
In fact, politics is less about ideology or dirty games and more about instilling your vision in the minds of the masses. This is true even if you are running a nation, a company, a family or simply your life.
Once a client asked me, “I want this colleague of mine to laugh and joke. I have made many others jovial. But this nut is hard to crack. Can you give me some tips?” Upon asking her how long she was with the group, her reply was: “Only a few months”.
There are two ways to look at this question from a coach’s point of view. I could have treated it as a problem and given a solution. Either she had to find a way to change her behaviour or she had to stop expecting such a change from the colleague. But I took it as a case of leadership. The vision this client had for her group was that of every body working happily, teasing one another, giving support at work and at the emotional level too. She agreed that it was actually so. Then I told her, “Your leadership challenge is to instil your vision in your colleagues. That will require you to earn their respect and then they will give you the right to inspire them with your vision. Earning respect can take a lot of time as it requires such incidents in which you can exceed anybody’s expectation. So you should be patient and not miss any opportunity to prove yourself a leading figure in the group. That should be your strategy to materialize your vision.”
Checklist for implementing visions
A CEO’s job is less about management and the least about operation. It is more about making strategic choices and the most about weaving dreams for the future in the minds and hearts of the subordinates, clients and other stakeholders. That is tough because knowingly or unknowingly, they already have a vision, which may be incompatible with that of the organization. Or they may not have any vision at all. Both situations are not good for our CEO.
Lack of vision among the employees leads to the sinking of many sturdy ships like Sajha Yatayat. The vision of the organization—cheap and easy transport for all—was noble, sound, and realistic. But the employees didn’t digest this vision. Yes, the collapse has been attributed to political interference, rampant corruption and poor management (especially staffing and controlling), but as in the illustration (2) about the teller above, we have to look at the strategic level too.
What went wrong with Sajha Yatayat was the poor strategic planning on the part of the top management. They had the correct vision. But they failed to analyze the environment. Given the notorious habit of the government to mess around corporations (that is well documented) the management had to devise a plan to minimize the effect of such interferences.
An engineer while building a bridge has to consider all the environmental hazards and add safety measures during the construction time itself. In this analogy, the architect is the visionary, the engineer is the strategist, the contractors are managers and the workers are the employees. In Nepal the problem is that we think the engineer as an unproductive cost.
But not everyone has this limited conception. For example, a CEO hired by a management consulting service is there to spread his vision to every employee in all the corners of their organization and make that vision an integral part of their own personal aspirations and habits. It is ambitious but doable. Above all, it is well appreciated by the people.
While making a strategy one should not forget the people (or the employees). You cannot take them for granted. Employees are part of the organization and we have to consider their strengths and weaknesses. We have to see their behaviours and mentality as opportunities and threats. Unless you turn employees into followers, you cannot achieve the expected growth.
Framework for strategic planning
Strategists are known to be silent, spending most of their time thinking. With a stroke of genius they make decisions for their organizations, which look unbelievable. Strategists are usually voracious readers. But they don’t do it for pleasure. They read to find patterns in the external environments that they can either use as opportunities or avoid if they pose threats.
Strategists don’t use their bodily hair for warmth; instead they use the hair as antenna to scan the vibrations of the external environment.
Some of the decisions they make are related with such questions as::
1. Is it time to lay low or to rise like an unstoppable tide?
2. Is it time to buy or sell?
3. To compete or collaborate?
4. To burn bridges or not?
5. With whom to shake hands and with whom not?
6. To expand or not?
7. Which product to launch and which not?
8. Which sector to get into and which to get out from?
9. What type of followers to attract and how?
10. Which rules to follow and which to break?
In order to make these decisions, the strategist requires information. We all have access to information, yet we can’t be successful strategists unless we build a framework to organize, simplify and thus interpret all the data, information and knowledge we acquire through reading, observing, interacting or simply ESP (Extra Sensory Perception), also known as the sixth sense.
Every strategist has his/her own framework. I will tell you about mine. I categorize information into ‘relevant to my business’ or ‘irrelevant to my business’. Then I shuffle the relevant information into sectors (profit, non-profit, government) and sub sectors (e.g. trading, manufacturing, banking). I tag certain labels to each piece of info like new/old, propaganda/genuine, one-time/trend, related to any other information/one-off, feedback/feedforward, related to demand/supply, call for continuation/innovation, clever step/mistake committed by entity in the info and so on. Then I ask one of the above questions to my database and I get advices. Sometimes, when a pattern completes itself in the subconscious, it alerts me through various means like a thought that won’t go away.
Certified Leader?
Some time ago there was an article about company secretaries needing certification to practice, but only a few of this species exist in Nepal. It will take some time if ever there is a necessity to certify visionaries and strategists.
One thing that must be considered while taking a leader on-board is to see if he uses vision and strategy in every aspect of his life. These two tools are not something you just study about. You have to use them when you are a CEO. Here are some tips to master these two leadership skills:
• Practice using visioning and strategizing from the beginning of the day. As you wake up have a vision for how you want to feel that night and what you want to achieve by then. Consider your mood, your health, your preparation for strength and weakness. Mentally do surveillance on the ‘mindscape’ consisting all the people, activities and eventualities you will have to deal with that day judging which might stand as an opportunity and which as a threat. Based on this analysis, plan your day. All day long take this strategic plan as a map to your vision.
• Remember, this doesn’t mean to be a robot. The plan at a strategic level is not specific. It is not activities-based but results-based. Here the outcomes we seek are feelings and achievements.
• When you get an opportunity to work in a group or any project make a vision and a strategy and get on with your leadership mission.
In this way, you will become a corporate leader one day. I have a glorious vision for you, “You are the CEO of a large organization and I am your management coach.”
(Shrestha is Senior Trainer/Advisor of Standard Icon Pvt. Ltd. )
