Sometimes the obstacles to improvement in companies

Google Images: tommydoll.com

are firmly ingrained in the culture.  People have developed habits of thought that have to be redeveloped if the company's initiative to reduce defects and waste, increase speed and efficiency, etc. is to succeed.  Yes, even without doing so the business might be able to experience some uptick in performance, but without addressing employees' and leadership's conditioned attitudes and behaviors the improvements won't last.

Culture is not the only obstacle in this venture.  Continuous improvement requires the alignment of the company's structure, processes, rewards and people with the strategy. It's likely that a business committed to continuous improvement will make changes in many if not all of these factors.  But of these resources, alignment of the people resource requires the most attention.  Conditioned behavior often eludes one's notice, especially one's own behavior. You engage in it without thinking, sometimes doing the same things repeatedly even if they don't work.

Here are some of the obstacles you can often count on ad

dressing - the scary six cultural mindsets that can dilute or even destroy your efforts toward developing a quality-focused business:

1. Management knows best - Although your quality culture needs to be management directed, the activities within it require the involvement of employees at every level. Managers often have the most extensive formal education,but they're not the ones actually doing the work, so they are not aware of the day-to-day details that impact quality output.
2. Not invented here - This can be a management issue, or a cross-functional one. It's easy to think that your own ideas are the best, but the people that can see beyond an idea's origin to its value and its application will win the day.
3. It's the people, stupid, or rather the stupid people - In some organizations it's habitual to attribute poor quality to employee failings like poor motivation, inattention to detail, lassitude, etc. J. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement, tells us the contrary - that 85% of poor quality is caused by bad processes. In service businesses the process impact is 95%.  Bad processes will beat good people every time.
4. Fear motivates - Perhaps in the very short term fear can "motivate" people to do what their managers want. But if the culture routinely assassinates people for making mistakes it's unlikely that employees are going to stick their necks out to try new ideas. What will be the consequences to them if their ideas don't work? This doesn't mean that it's OK for individuals or teams to make the same mistakes over and over. The company needs to acquire a "test and measure" attitude to incorporate new ideas while managing the risk.
5. Stick to your own knitting - Functional silos often have their own communication processes and their own cultures. The customers, however, have to interact with multiple departments. Who is managing the "white space" between them? And often the best targets for process redesign are so because they cross functional lines and are likely to have failures or delays in the hand-offs.
6. "We're pretty good" - Jim Collins wrote that "good is the enemy of great." In addition, subjective evaluation is the enemy of good quality. Measurement is quality's friend. You need to know how much you're producing, how much it costs, how long it takes, etc. in numbers and dollars that can tell you whether you're improving or not.