The culture required for sustainable improvements

Creating a new culture or changing an existing culture is also the most difficult aspect to master if any improvement initiative if it is to have any chance of succeeding. We once did a productivity improvement initiative in SAA. We had great success. We handed out certificates to the delegates to celebrate their success. We were allocated a basement in the parking lot to hand out certificates. Delegates had to bring their own refreshments.

The leadership was conspicuous by their absence. The importance to the leadership of what had been achieved was clearly evident. The improvements achieved immediately fell flat and take a look at where SAA is today.

So what culture are we looking for? A culture of continuous improvement is an ethos of the ongoing effort of incremental changes. Why? Because every organisation is different, every organisation has its own unique culture, and every organisation will respond differently to change. Any of us who have taken part in any personal improvements’ activity such as weight loss or fitness will understand the challenges of continuous improvement. There is never a quick fix, it takes small daily incremental changes, to see our bodies change, and our fitness improves.

We are trapped in the industrial age where people are seen as things or at best assets. To create a unique culture of continuous improvement we need to unleash the creativity of our people and the only way we can do that is by engaging the whole person, the mind, body, heart, and spirit. Covey, a foundational authority on leadership, writes extensively on this. In construction, we are mostly engineers or accountants.

Everything is empirical, everything has a formula, everything has a standard, and everything has a rule. I was saddened to see the Lean Construction Institute stop operating in South Africa. The principles of Lean had great tools to improve productivity, but these tools are useless if we as leaders believe in the traditional way of doing things and cannot unleash the creativity of our people by engaging the whole person. So rather than focusing directly on the operations we want to improve, we need to focus on the people who are going to improve these operations.

The road that runs through my farm is being upgraded from gravel to a bituminous surface. The contract was awarded to the contractor some fourteen months ago. No sooner had construction started than it was suspended because the environmental approval had expired.

The contract remains suspended more than a year later. Authorisations have been sought sequentially rather than in parallel. Reports have been lost in the post. Who uses post anymore?

Requests for approvals have been lying on bureaucrats’ desks for months. Approvals have not been sought from all relevant stakeholders.

The contractor continues to get paid, the supervising consultant continues to get paid, the cost of this road escalates, the client’s budget dwindles, and the government departments are blamed for their inefficiency. If any one of the Client, the Contractor, or the Engineer used some innovation and injected a sense of urgency into the process instead of blaming others this problem could have been sorted out in one month, not fourteen months and counting.

What is being created is a blame culture, a culture that accepts poor performance, a lethargic culture, a defeatist culture, and it is being created in all the organisations involved, including the Contractor and the Engineer. We are creating a culture of continuous deterioration.

What should be happening? The people of all the stakeholders should be tasked with and allowed to work together, referred to as the “fluffy stuff”. Leaders need to drop the traditional heartless autocratic approach that has served “boomers” so well. An example of the fluffy stuff that is essential in leadership is mindfulness.

Mindfulness refers to practice of being present and fully engaged in the current moment while leading others. Developing the skill of mindfulness helps leaders to be more present, focused, and aware of their own thoughts, emotions, and behaviours.

Mindfulness allows leaders to be more attuned to the needs of their team, to make better decisions, and to communicate more effectively. Being mindful will help leaders understand beliefs or mindsets that influence their team’s behaviours and can help leaders to develop empathy and compassion for their team, which can lead to unlocking their potential, innovatively with a common purpose being to urgently resolve the issue to complete the project. To work together the people need to trust each other, a trait traditionally missing in a contractor-engineer relationship. Just look at what the apparent corruption in the government departments does to trust.

Back to engaging the whole person, the mind, body, heart, and spirit. To create a culture of continuous improvement one needs to prioritise these essential skills sometimes ignorantly stronger relationships and better outcomes for the organization as a whole.

It’s not all altruism, by cultivating a practice of mindfulness, leaders can reduce their own stress, increase resilience, and improve their own health & personal relationships.

Rather than give you dry American examples of how working with the whole person can lead to success, I’ve dug up some very relevant & personal examples. I have been actively involved and led many successful initiatives where paying attention to the people, rather than simply the operations, unlocked the potential of the teams, harnessing their creativity and maximising their abilities while creating an environment of trust around a common purpose with aligned systems:

Placing gas pipelines into the sea, through the shore zone, when modern technology at the time was unavailable because of sanctions and apartheid.

Increasing the installation frequency of pipe culverts from 2 a week using heavy equipment to 2 a day utilising no heavy equipment. Part of fixing an 18-month, 70km, road project, in rural Africa emerging from an armed conflict, that was 6 months behind programme and showing an 18% loss and finishing it on time and showing a break even. All performance related. I had to pull together people from all three sides of the armed conflict and get them working together. Talk about being mindful of differing mindsets.

The turnaround of a road project being constructed above the snow line in temperatures that reached -28o Celsius was showing a 22% loss and was way behind programme to bring it in ahead of time with greater than tendered profits. There were at least 8 different nationalities involved in this project. Being mindful of the varied culture and mindsets shaped the needed understanding and compromise.

Turning around a business unit that had been showing losses for 10 years and was technically insolvent to a first-year profit of R40 million, a second-year profit of R103 million, and a third-year profit of R164 million, with a compound growth of 350%, and an average ROIC of 57% for the three years.

Were there other success-yes? Did I experience failures-Its part of turnarounds?

What I know is that It is time that improving the efficiency of operations receives the strategic focus it deserves. Working on the whole person is just one tool of many that serious leaders can develop. Leaders, whether formal or informal, have to step up, do the work, learn the skills, and create small fires of excellence that can burn through the blame, poor performance, lethargy, defeatism, and continuous deterioration so that we can get this economy moving.

“As a direct result of our partnerships, we have produced well over 20 000 units in the affordable housing space. All of this while creating thousands of employment opportunities. If all of this cannot yield any socioeconomic impact, we might as well close shop. So, we really exist to be a catalyst for growth, job creation, and enterprise development.”