Why do some leaders choose change?
What causes a leadership team to decide to embrace change and begin adopting quality as a strategy? Many leaders and organizations do not proactively change. They are satisfied with good people who desire to do good work, put forth their best efforts, and react to changes in their marketplace. The status quo is to work harder, message better, inform, educate, maybe change some policies, and in the end, experience similar results. It is a rare case for an organization to decide to be different, change its leadership methods, sharpen its focus, put its head down, and generate impactful and quantifiable performance improvement.
Ask leaders why they shifted from their previous leadership approach to pursuing quality as their strategy, and they may struggle to put their figure on the specific moment or event. But listen to their story, and some themes emerge.
- Catastrophic event: An employee is severely injured, a patient dies unnecessarily, or property is lost due to damage or a fire. An adverse event happens in a high-profile way that reveals flaws in the system or causes public pressure for change.
- Inadequate methods: Leaders continuously work hard to improve the organization’s results and make little or no progress. Results remain the same. Problems reoccur. The current leadership approach is not getting improved results.
- Unexpected change: Many organizations are plugging away as they always have only to discover their products and services are no longer the best match to their customers’ requirements; their expectations have shifted.
- Best practice outside of accepted benchmarks: Many leaders benchmark performance with peer organizations. Suppose that results are equal to or better than competitors. In that case, we might be complacent. But what happens if we think we could be better, or there are examples of organizations performing outside what is currently believed possible?
- New idea: Sometimes, we don’t even know that we are looking, yet we discover new ideas that shift our thinking. Maybe it is a presentation at a conference, a story in the media from another industry, or a book like this one. A leader discovers a new way of thinking that changes how they think about your approach and offers a new way to improve.
- Early success in applying improvement theory: An organization applies improvement theory to projects and realizes success. Leaders want to expand the potential of methods that achieve results by including more people and addressing more significant organizational issues.
- Other organizations are doing it: Leaders learn that competitors or other organizations in the industry are applying improvement theory in their organizations.
There are many appropriate reasons to change and adopt quality as their strategy. Whether we see it or not, every organization has pressures from key stakeholders, competition, technology changes, and a need to continue improving value.