How can you make positive changes in your organization?

Are you missing schedules? Do your engineers behave badly? Do you have poor quality in your products? Are you experiencing a lot of attrition? Are you having a hard time hiring? Do you want more innovation in your team?

It does not matter what kind of problems you are facing or changes you want to make, you can employ some of the same techniques to effect change. Here are some of the basics:

• Make sure both you and your employees understand why you want to make a change.
• Create a plan and declare your intentions.
• Allocate time each day or week to focus on the change including status, techniques, issues and successes.
• Figure out how to measure improvement and then measure it.
• Recognize success.

If your team understands the rationale for change, it will be easier for your team to adopt change. They do not have to agree with the rationale but they have to understand it. Make sure how this benefits the company and ultimately how it benefits them. Do not minimize this step. Take the time to have a discussion, acknowledge their viewpoints. This is where you build teamwork. This is where you get to say "we are all in this together". There is where motivation begins.

Make your intentions very clear. Do not be ambiguous. Solicit your team's help in creating a plan. Do not make it a choice thing. When you have a plan say "we are going to do x and and y and z ...". Make it a priority. Legitimize the time and don't assume your team can take on an important initiative without some tradeoffs.

The way you get something done is to spend some of your team's collective focus on it. Allocate time at each staff meeting to talk about the change or if it is a critical issue, meet each day. The act of taking time, speaking about it aloud has an effect.


If you do not measure something, you cannot improve it. Or at the every least, you cannot tell. There are lots of tools available to measure things that you might not think to be measurable. Industry tools like Six Sigma (TM) concentrate on techniques to measure things. It is easy to stop measuring along the way so pay attention and keep at it.

Finally, it is important to recognize success. Positive reinforcement. Rewards through remuneration or praise are important and will incent your employees to work on the next change you want to make.

So, go out and break some glass!

More later ...