How many of you have been through a lean Six Sigma (LSS) project or business transformation and there was no internal conflict between employees or among managers? My guess is very few. In any LSS project, company transformation, or change initiative there are going to be instances of love and war.
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Although many C-level executives aren’t likely to cite these instances as top challenges of transformation agendas, they realize that people both create and endure friction within their organizations, and projects can sometimes fail.
So what can a C-level executive do to ensure that the people charged with implementing a LSS project or business transformation are working together to achieve the defined objectives?
Trust your instinct
I’ve worked with C-level executives from various industry sectors and spent time working with all levels of management beneath them. I’ve observed firsthand the information that C-level executives receive and don’t receive. Many managers feel it is their responsibility to shield top management from what’s often referred to as “noise” and to provide their bosses with only a limited overview of the risk within a project. This “noise” regarding internal conflict can be detrimental to a project, and oftentimes only a C-level executive can bring about an effective solution, especially if the conflict is occurring within his management team.
As a C-level executive, if you sense internal conflict within your project, there’s probably more happening beneath the surface. For this reason it’s critical that you consider the following.
Identify and accept that a problem exists. Identifying the problem won’t be easy and may require approaching the situation from different points of view. For example, you may have to be more observant of your managers’ body language during meetings, and look for triggers that cause people to withdraw from the conversation or stop engaging. Try being more conscious of the types of disagreements between your management team members. Notice whether people are disagreeing about data and information or disagreeing about principles and beliefs. Does the disagreement suggest that another person’s opinion and expertise aren’t important? These types of disagreements tend to me more personal and must to be addressed.
Encourage dialogue between team members about their differences. Allow your team members to disagree but also encourage them to explain what their differences mean to them. Doing so will give all members insight into a solution of compromise.
Motivate your management team to resolve the conflict in a productive manner. Once your management team members understand each others’ point of view, enable them to work out a solution that both sides can accept.
Encourage excellence in communications
It’s always wise to have effective communication processes within a project, but asking employees to hold a higher standard of everyday communications can pay the largest dividends for you and your organization.
As a C-level executive, you probably observe poor communication habits every day. I’m not talking about the bad habit of not listening. I’m talking about communication habits that lead to internal conflict, diminished productivity, and poor performance.
It’s possible the employee who communicates in ways that disrespect the person with whom he is communicating may not be aware his communication style is destructive. For this reason, it’s important that the C-level executive
• Identify what is an acceptable communication style and what is not.
• Communicate to all employees what makes for an effective communicator and what does not.
• Explain how bad communication affects not only the organization but also each employee.
• Provide resources for employees to become more effective communicators.
• Work diligently at being a model of communication excellence.
Align compensation with shared objectives
One of the greatest strengths of any leader is her ability to motivate and mobilize people throughout an organization and also during large-scale change projects. Unfortunately, these leadership skills may not be sufficient to ensure a harmonious and productive relationship between management and project team members. C-level executives must implement other strategies to encourage this.
One such strategy is to align employee compensation with contributions toward organizational and project targets. Creating this alignment is quite easy. The difficult part is developing a compensation structure that motivates people to work well together. For example, a compensation structure based on a 5-percent reduction in operating costs may leave an area depleted of much-needed resources while creating an overstaffed department elsewhere. This is hardly an ideal scenario. On the other hand, a compensation structure that reduces operating costs by 5 percent by eliminating duplicate work across functions and processes could result in employees working together to ensure that individual processes and handoffs between processes are efficient and effective.
Whatever the targets linked to compensation, it is critical to ensure that they result in increased cooperation across your projects and the organization.
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