If they feel valued, part of the team AND have access to a communication system in which they have confidence, they will provide you with invaluable information on the overall business system that only YOU as the boss can change. Your frontline team members are your eyes and ears. By listening to Deming’s advice, acting on it and building relationships within the team, we delivered a massive turnaround within a year, creating profits way above industry standards and built on this in successive years. They were bleeding cash, and substantial losses had been recorded in the previous financial year. Trust in management had fallen through the floor and communication with it. In the early 2000s, I took over leading a manufacturing company that had been held to numerical measurements. To keep his job, anyone may present to his boss only good news”. He argued, “Any worker will fill a quota if they’re not responsible for the losses” and “Bearers of bad news fare badly. Deming famously campaigned against any form of numerical measurement of individual worker output. It is worth noting that the word ‘special’ in the above quote includes every exceptional cause of disruption to the system, not just human error. In other words, those who control the system are responsible for it functioning correctly, not those operating within the system. In the words of William Edwards Deming, “I should estimate that in my experience most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to the proportions something like this 94% belongs to the system (responsibility of management) 6% special”. ![]() Not so obvious, however, is the need for each and every employee to feel heard, valued and validated as an authority on their work this is the real value of a healthy internal communications system. ![]() Hence, the need to appropriately communicate policies and procedures is evident. Miscommunicated company policies and procedures cause disruption, damage and even injuries or worse. The prospective damage can be enormous from a business perspective, and the opportunity costs are even greater. It becomes an in-house version of the telephone game with slight variances added at every iteration. The grapevine only flourishes when authoritative sources of information are unavailable. Responsibility for both matters lie squarely on the CEO’s desk. ![]() Furthermore, we all need customers! But let’s be honest, staff can create many problems, especially if they are not adequately engaged with the business or are left trying to work out what is going on. Even if you could eradicate staff, you wouldn’t because they are the source of growth. I once had a boss who was particularly fond of muttering under his breath, “This job would be perfect if it weren’t for staff and customers!” Of course, this is ridiculous, even if the eradication of staff is a far more plausible idea in 2022 than when I first heard these utterances. This is when you need the X factor only a genuine human to human relationships will provide. If they feel listened to and valued, real communication is possible. You need your people to report ‘their truth’, subjective though it may be. ![]() Therein lies a cold hard reality – statistics can never tell the whole story. However, even if you can successfully capture the data from your business systems free of human influence, there remains the problem of communicating the interpretation of the statistics produced, which again falls to humans, and having it believed, let alone acted on. Edwards Deming, who I think would have believed, as I do, that the difference between Einstein’s laws of relativity and the laws of statistics is that Einstein’s laws are only relevant in this Universe! It’s fair to say that data collected from statistically stable systems is the gold standard in business information. When it comes to the truth of what’s happening in an organisation, I’m a big fan of the late W. If you lead or aspire to lead an organisation, it’s critical to know what’s really going on in the business.
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