How Leadership Behavior Impacts Execution

A lot of people think you can only do continuous improvement in operations.

So sometimes I get questions, what do you do in innovation? And then like the question you asked, Shane, what's commercial? well the commercial is often often a shortcut for sales marketing service folks um so people who are selling who are dealing with the customer directly and of course from a continuous improvement point of view they have problems as well target actual gap and you can ask the same questions when why do we have a gap what are we doing about the gap so that's what what uh um continuous improvement looks like in commercial and then innovation will be product management engineering or rd um talking about new products how do you get new products to market how do you sell new products in the market so that's what i'm dealing with every week olav

Yeah, I have to imagine that there are people listening right now who are like, wait a minute, you know, I'm in sales.

Don't bring that CI stuff my way or don't, you know, I don't, I work in product development.

Why are we talking about lean or continuous improvement? So I really want to I want to park on this just for a minute because I think it's super important as you know, obviously, it's really easy for organizations to adopt lean initiatives in their manufacturing operations and manufacturing industry.

It's very easy if you're.

especially if you're building multiple widgets an hour and you're passing them through multiple processes before they get shipped out the door.

Very easy to understand how lean can apply, especially with all of the research and tools and information that's out there.

But when it comes to the commercial side of things, when it comes to sales, even transactional and the office finance, things like that, it can be a little bit more difficult to understand realize the benefits i guess or to implement uh continuous improvement and develop you know that culture uh inside more of an administrative process or you know outside of manufacturing what does that look like for you like what's been your experience has it been difficult to get people to adopt lean into you know operations or sorry the transactional side of things

Yeah, thanks, Patrick.

It's a very good question because if you apply lean by the book, right, the sort of, in German, we have this saying, some people are more Catholic than the Pope, right? If you apply lean that way, then it might be difficult.

But if you apply the principles of lean, if If you take any transactional process, there's probably a quality element, there's probably a delivery element, there's probably an inventory waiting element, and there's probably a cost element, right? So very similar.

You have things which repeat, you have your metrics, you can do visual management.

So that's for transactional.

For commercials or sales, for example, or innovation, what we often do is we look at growth.

We look at revenue or orders.

And I always joke with my sales colleagues, as long as you make your numbers, we'll stay away.

The problem starts, the literal problem, when there's gaps.

When there's gaps in an organization not growing as fast as they aspire to.

And that typically is either on the sales side, say existing equipment, or existing service, existing software, or new stuff, innovation.

And that's where most of my work is in looking at how much are we growing, how much are we growing versus target, and then identify those areas where we're at, where the actual is less than the target.

And then again, the same questions like the ones you would ask for any problem, right? What's the gap between the target and the actual? When, why do you have a gap? What are we doing against it? And when will we get green again? So the moment you have your maybe different metrics or different ways of getting the metrics straight, you can do problem solving 101 again, at least from my point of view.

Yeah.

And that's that's a that's a great, great point.

I love love that because and I like that you started out by explaining the kind of the definition of a problem, you know, where we want to be and where we are today and the gap between the two.