Culture is not a top-down mandate but the sum of employee actions. These actions are driven by individual beliefs, which are directly shaped by past workplace experiences. To change culture, leaders must create new, positive experiences that shift those underlying beliefs.
Traditional business culture rewards immediate action. For continuous improvement to succeed, you must instead reward the counterintuitive behavior of slowing down to thoroughly define a problem first. This prevents teams from wasting time solving the wrong issues.
Many companies view morale as a byproduct of success. Instead, it should be treated as the foundational element. High morale and engagement are prerequisites for achieving improvements in safety, quality, and delivery, which ultimately lead to cost savings.
Teams often adopt continuous improvement tools without understanding the underlying principles they serve. This leads to "ticking a box" without real impact. Start by teaching principles like 'flow' or 'standard work,' then introduce tools as a means to apply those principles effectively.
A highly effective sequence for process improvement is to first use Lean principles to remove systemic waste and complexity ("cleaning out the noise"). Only after the process is streamlined should you apply Six Sigma to analyze and squeeze down the remaining, true process variation.
Implementing standard work is often aimed at improving productivity, but its biggest impact can be on quality. By reducing process variability between operators for hand-sewing heart valves, a team not only achieved a 30% productivity boost but also an unexpected yield improvement from 91% to 95%.
Engineers often focus on technical skills or salary. A more foundational step is to define what personal success looks like, acknowledging that it changes over time (e.g., from financial survival to work-life balance). This personal "north star" helps in making critical career decisions and finding the right company culture.