DailyKaizen

There is a noticeable shift taking place in the organization that I think is very positive.  Over the last year the leadership culture of the organization has made some small but very important transitions that I believe will continue.  One of the most noticeable of these changes relates to the transparency of leadership.  Leaders are becoming far more upfront and honest about where the problems are and why the exist.  Additionally, leaders are far more transparent about what they don’t know and what they are struggling to learn.  The conversations are far more real and substancial.  A couple of months ago James Womack visited our organization and made a comment that stuck with me.  He said the first step toward creating a system of accountability is transparency.  As problems become visible and acceptable people can get busy solving them as opposed to trying to find the person to blame or just ignoring that they are there in the first place.  We are heading in this direction. 

I remember the first time I attend a leadership conference at the organization about three years ago.  I walked away from the event really frustrated with leadership because the messages they shared seemed so disconnected from the reality of the work I was doing each day.  You know the type of event, leaders standing up confidently in front of their peers throwing around buzz words and all the “right answers.”  What Pascal Dennis refers to as “the happy talk.”  Basically, we got told what we wanted to hear as opposed to what we really needed to hear.  Its a lot harder to talk about problems and deliver disturbing news then to talk about everything that is going great. 

Now contrast that with a similar event that I attended this Friday.  Individuals and teams spent time in front of their peers showing their “dirty laundry” and discussing some of the bigger problems that we still don’t know how to solve.  Leaders were no longer pretending to have all the answers and often talked about the PDCA process and learning as we move forward.  There was a tension I could feel in the room that I think was healthy.  A tension created from a culture that is in transition and opposing mental models at play.  The transparency can be quite unsettling to all of us.  Especially when we are used to our leaders telling us that everything is going great and getting better.  Something in the past that we often heard, knew was untrue, but were thankful that we were able to dodge confronting some of the harder issues.  It clear that it will not be easy moving forward and there is a lot of hard work to do.  But, in reality it has never been easy, the work has always been hard and the issues have always been there.  The difference is if we can be real and transparent about these issue we might actually be able to do something about them.  Like I said in the beginning small, but important.