How to Get Buy-in to Ensure Results

by Chris Anderson

Published on this site: July 15th, 2005 - See more articles from this month...

In order to achieve your objectives for real process improvement you will need to change the business rules, incentives, and measurements and empower employees to get involved in the process of improvement. We will need their buy-in to change the culture and change the results.

Business Measures as Culture

What you measure creates the culture of your organization. People are generally good and want to do the right thing. Even when employees are apparently making bad decisions they generally think they are making good decisions. People do things for a reason. If we measure the wrong things we most likely will get the wrong results and make bad decisions in the process. If you want to change the culture of your organization then you will need to change the measurements
that your organization uses.

Business Measures Affect Behavior

Measurement affects behavior in a profound way. Remember when we discussed business metrics we were trying to focus on the key metrics that could be used to drive the business results. Our example focused on inventory turns. In a manufacturing business inventory turns is one of, if not the most critical factors that drives performance. Yet when we go into a business what we typically find is that the plant manager is focused on asset utilization instead of inventory turns. What’s going on here?

There is a false belief that in order to generate the highest return on investment; you must keep all of these assets (investment in plant, machines, and labor) working at 100% capacity. Plant manager’s are frequently compensated on their ability to achieve the highest asset utilization possible, even if that means a large build up in inventory or keeping the line running while defects are occurring.

What’s really going on is that the plant manager is sub-optimizing by elevating one element in the business, manufacturing, above all other elements, like the cash cycle or quality. The plant manager’s behavior is driven by the metrics used to measure performance. We need to change how the plant manager measures results.

[Note: To increase your return on assets you only need to focus on those assets that are constraining your manufacturing cycle. Only your constraints need to be at 100% utilization, all others can be at something lower than 100%.]

People Don’t Create Defects, Systems Do

Systems are made of up of our objectives, metrics, policies and procedures. If we set the wrong objectives, use the wrong metrics and document the wrong things, then we will get the wrong results. Yet we have a tendency to blame the people. The great quality leader Deming said, “People don’t create defects, systems do”. The management procedures you use make up your management system.

“Public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.” - Abraham Lincoln, 16th US President (1861-1865)

Gaining Understanding, Commitment, and Action

Buy-in is the process of gaining people’s understanding, commitment, and action in support of your goals. Without buy-in you are almost certain to fail. You can’t just dictate results. People will resist and even try to stop your program. After all, without buy-in you have not really convinced anyone that it is in their interest to participate. How do we do this?

Strategic Stories of a Positive Future

Use stories. The best way to achieve buy-in is by using strategic stories of a positive future. In other words, strategically design, target and deliver a strategic story that projects a positive future. It is all about the listener. They need to know what’s in it for them. Address their agenda. Present your goals from their perspective and you are half-way to achieving your goals already.

For example: Let’s say our strategy is process improvement to build a competitive advantage. We know that if we improve process performance (i.e. increase inventory turns) we will increase capacity, which is good for the company. But, the employees may think that increased capacity will lead to layoffs and fewer jobs so they resist your efforts to improve processes. This is a classic buy-in problem that we see all the time.

The Solution: We need to present how we plan to use the increased capacity to sell more products not just cut expenses to realize the improvement. We need to create a strategic story about new products under development or opening new markets that will require increased capacity. Then paint a positive future that increasing sales and decreasing costs brings the company such as perhaps new job opportunities, higher pay scales, or continued employment in a competitive market.

Buy-in Ensures Results

In order to set objectives for real process improvement we need to change the business rules, incentives, and measurements used within the organization. And to ensure the changes are effective, we need everyone’s buy-in to the change program. Only if we empower employees to get involved in the process of improvement can we truly realize the goals and objectives we set.

Learn more about process design, implementation and continuous improvement with a How to Create Well-Defined Processes Class in St. Louis, MO.

Chris Anderson is founder and CEO of Bizmanualz, Inc. Since 1995, www.Bizmanualz.com <http://www.bizmanualz.com/> has specialized in empowering organizations to consistently produce results. Management Systems help is available via consulting, training and prewritten policies and procedures.