News CBI Formula: 7. Increasingly competent people...
New Future Formula has been assisting organizations for 10 years. To celebrate this we are sharing tips and tricks with you over a period of 10 weeks. We wish to provide you with inspiration to continue your journey towards the top. We have mapped processes, identified potentials, reflected on opportunities, decided improvement projects and realized the improvements. In last week we looked at how to install an appropriate repetitive rhythm for your journey. The theme of this week is how to create a steady growth of human motivation and competence in every corner of the organization.
New Future Formula, 10 years
We have discovered the formula for continuously improving effectiveness
7. Increasingly competent people...
On 1 April 2017, New Future Formula set out on its journey. Much has happened since then. New Future Formula has been dedicating the past few years to fine-tuning the many approaches to making business enterprises work in a better, faster and more intelligent manner. We call this “CBI – Continuous Business Improvement” because it embraces the entire organization and supports a variety of already on-going effectiveness-enhancing initiatives. CBI can therefore improve revitalization of on-going programmes, if this is required. Our CBI is also the ideal tool for companies looking for a simple yet powerful structure and sturdy tools for their future effectiveness-enhancing programme. We are celebrating our 10-year anniversary by serving you, the readers of New Future Formula's newsletter, 10 easily digestible titbits.
Using the CBI formula, organizations continuously achieve three things:
- Documented bottom-line revenue improvements to the tune of 4-16 %.
- Year by year, improvements that the customers can understand and which make sense for the staff.
- Year by year, people with enhanced skills and improved systems to see and to carry through improvements.
People are at the heart of all change, which is why the individuals and the teams of an organisation and their constant competence development is absolute crucial when it comes to the success of a CBI programme.
There are, at least, two approaches to be applied with it comes to supporting the constant competence development of the organisation within the context of CBI, 1) through a CBI training programme and 2) through active and structured development of the organisation.
The CBI training is to enable leaders and employees to run a CBI process. For this reason, the training must reflect the CBI pattern decided on for periods between four and six months. This pattern is known as a cycle and the next specific four to six months cycle is known as a master plan. The intention of the training is to enable the organisation to actively manage a cycle where they identify and release concrete potentials in own processes and products in own organisation by means of various tools. The training should be tailor-made to suit the organisation concerned. In our experience, between five and six days is enough. Tests can be made in the process. Successful CBI training concepts include participation by not only top management but also centralised functional leaders from the lean, QA, finance and HR departments. HR can make a tremendous difference by highlighting the human perspective which is so critical when it comes to ensuring that changes are indeed successful and which quite surprisingly is often neglected. This can be achieved by integrating team building, stakeholder analysis and other HR approaches as natural ingredients. Training should be a recurrent theme, and after a few years, all centralised members of staff as well as leaders should have received training. The training might be organised and run by in-house resources backed up by experienced external support.
However, a formal CBI training concept is only one part of the constant development of employees and organisation. Another is to encourage and constantly develop what is known as a ‘learning organisation.’ At best a movement or perhaps even a ‘people's movement.’ Meaning an organisation that provides the environment, resources, freedom and goals for the individual, the team and the organisation to learn.
The possibilities of a people's movement are many and varied – and ideally something that might tamper with the usual views, light the flame of enthusiasm and push you towards change. These are a few examples:
- Allow young, dynamic talents the freedom and the resources to identify and implement their own improvements.
- Train everybody in providing feedback.
- Encourage project managers to visit each other half way through or at the end of a project to evaluate and grade their colleagues.
- Expect every single leader to operate one or more improvement projects.
- Engage in role play and case building in order to illustrate core issues for the organisation.
- Organise ‘award sessions’ where you award prizes to the best projects of a cycle.
- At the end of each cycle, reflect as a group with the purpose of setting up the next master plan and reassessing the cycle.
Leading industry groups work intensely with this field. As a former CEO of a leading industry group once told me, ‘Life has taught me that I do not design, manufacture and sell vehicles, instead I educate people who do it.’
Here are few bits of advice to leaders who strive to get ‘increasingly competent people’ involved in the CBI process:
- Management ought to stage a people’s movement. Make it live and prosper on its own by granting the power and the freedom to good people at all levels. It is not easy but fantastic when you manage to do it.
- Formal CBI training should support and enhance and not be ‘islanding.’
- In order to promote the improvement process within a framework, set up a CBI training programme coordinated by centralised staffs, including lean, QA, HR, finance and CBI.
- The CBI training process should be full of the company’s own relevant and up-to-date cases to be addressed in teams – and not otherwise well-intended best practice tools and examples from the automobile industry.
All managements ought to take a regular look to see whether they do in fact succeed in developing increasingly skilled people and an increasingly skilled organisation:
- Do we have a vivid and motivated CBI movement and a constantly learning CBI organisation?
- Do we have a formal and recurrent CBI training process of a high standard?
- Do the CBI training and the CBI movement support the organisation? Meaning, does it support the progress of daily operations, the overall purpose, objective and direction and final execution of CBI cycles?
You might want to address these questions at the next the meeting of your management group.
In order to perform, skilled people need good tools, structures and systems – in short a good infrastructure. And so, this will be the theme of next week's posting. See you!
New Future Formula is dedicated to working with CBI – Continuous Business Improvement.
Together with our client:
- We design, introduce and support new CBI programmes.
- We inspire, evaluate and improve existing CBI programmes.
The CBI formula is our framework. To begin with we look at purpose, objectives and direction. Through continuous process improvements, employee development and system optimization we create a steady flow of results. This allows us to spread out the continuous effectiveness efforts to all corners of the company and its life.
Since 2007, New Future Formula has completed more than 8,300 improvement projects for more than 80 organizations with a documented effect on the bottom line in excess of EUR 148.6 million. In the process, more than 500 people have received training.
