Open and Authentic

There are times in my life when I have felt hurt or betrayed. Those feelings can come from situations where I was not told the truth, and then blindsided by something for which I was not prepared.

As I spent some time reflecting this week, I realized another benefit for being open and authentic with others. You enable yourself to tell the truth and prevent those types of hurt feelings.

Leading an organization and being open can be difficult if you are dealing with confidential data. Here are a couple of practices that can help you be authentic in these situations.

When an organization makes personnel changes, rumors have a tendency to propagate  because of information leaks. The best policy is to announce changes immediately. Once the change is decided and approved, just make the announcement. It is the simplest way to minimize the time for rumors. It also reflects openness.

Secondly, if someone asks me about a rumor of an upcoming change, I would be honest and tell them I could not answer. But I would always be able to tell them that changes are being considered, and that as soon as they are approved, I would announce them. This too is being open.

For me, these two practices help create trust and authenticity with the organization. What has helped you be more open when faced with difficult questions?

The Process of Success and Failure

We tend to think of success and failure as events. They are not moments in time, but rather processes. Our successes and failures come from the actions we take leading up to that moment in time.

In 2013, I defined a goal for myself to write a book. My target date for completion was December 1, 2016. That day passed by without having a book written. I had failed. In fact when I reached my target date, I had not even started writing the book.

Many excuses played in my head. I was busy. I didn’t know where to start. It was too much work. I can’t write very well. But the truth is that I never had a process that would lead to success. By default, I had a process that would lead to failure.

Doesn’t that happen to us quite often. For me, I have a more ideas and plans than time. It requires sifting and selecting the ones that are more important. The probability of success is defined by the next step. We must take that idea and develop a process that will lead to success.

Defining the process is different than defining milestones or goals. Milestones check progress toward a goal. The process is actually doing the work.

If I had dedicated 15 minutes a day toward writing that book, I would have completed about half a page a day. In two years, I would have accomplished over 300 pages of material. Even if I allocate a year for editing a rewriting I would achieve the goal in three years. Instead I wasted five, by not having a process.

But if failure is not an event, we can recover. After realizing failure, I changed my process. Today, I am writing a book using only 15 minutes at a time at least five days a week. It is a process that will eventually lead to success.

When we recognize failure as a process, we can change our process. What process do you need to change to achieve your goals? What should you allocate 15 minutes of your time to every day?

Growing Your Integrity

Integrity is defined as the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles. Integrity is reflected in the alignment of actions, words, and thoughts. Everyone including those with strong integrity struggles with this alignment. If you decide to be a person of integrity, nothing changes unless you can live those ideals.

We encounter the conflict and challenges to our integrity throughout our life. Partly because life is full of decisions, and we do not know the outcome of making choices until they are made. And, of course, we all make mistakes.

We may consider George Washington, William Wilberforce  or Mother Teresa as people with integrity, but they still faced difficult decisions and failures as often as you or I. It is certain that viewed their own integrity differently than the rest of the world viewed it. We cannot know the depth of the internal struggles they faced.

It is exactly for this reason that regardless of how others perceive our integrity, we must always be working to improve it. We should always check our alignment between our thoughts, our words, and our actions. We should always be grounded in our values. It is not something you can do just five days a week, or only on the weekend. It is a full time commitment.

I find that as I have aged, living with integrity has become easier. No longer am I as easily swayed by the activities around me. I am much stronger in knowing my values, and I am not afraid to live them. I know I am strongest when I am who I am, no matter where I am, or who I am with.

We all must continuously guard and grow our integrity. If not, we risk losing it.

Observe and Discover

“You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.”, said Arthur Conan Doyle. There is a difference between seeing and observing. Observing with intent can lead to great discoveries.

I have led or participated in hundreds of kaizen workshops. The first step in almost all of them is to observe the work. We would go to the location the work was being done, and spend time observing. It was much more than just watching.

With practice and training you can learn how to observe work. To observe a manufacturing operation, I start with blank paper and write down all the motions the worker made. It would include each movement in the smallest detail, such as the estimated distances for each reach with their hand, or each step with their foot.

Depending on the cycle time of the process, observing and documenting the work could be done in minutes. If your observation was correct, then afterwards you could recreate the motions without equipment or material. You could demonstrate the work in a conference room.

This documented work became the baseline for improvement. Understanding the work unlocked the ability to discover improvements. It became possible to evaluate changes, evaluate combining and dividing the movements differently between different workers, and evaluate the elimination of wasted movements.

Observation is the key to discovery. We were trained to observe, and then we were trained to discover improvements. It sounds simple, but practice led to advanced skills.

What could you observe today that could potentially lead to a great discovery?