Process Improvement Tip #10: Appeal to the competitiveness of your business executives

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In the lead up to PEX Masters next month, we’re running a series of process improvement tips to help you jump start your initiatives for 2013. This is the tenth of twelve.

Having strong executive sponsorship is one of the keys to successful process improvement. If the guys and gals in the top layers of your company aren’t convinced that what you’re doing is worthwhile, you’re going to have a harder task convincing everyone else in the organization that it is.

Indeed, lack of executive buy-in to process improvement is often cited as one of the key reasons that process improvement initiatives fail to achieve their goals. Executives were too busy, focused on other things, or not convinced about the value of all this process stuff with its strange language, weird flowcharts, and habit of documenting everything that moves.

On your marks. Get set. GOOOO!


If that’s the situation you find yourself in there, here’s something you can do to address it: appeal to the sense of competition between executives. Find the most "process-friendly" executive out there, deliver the process improvement of highest value to the business within their business unit, and make sure it reflects positively on the executive.

If you help your executives to look good among their peers, there’s a good chance that the other executives will take note. Afterall, they want to make sure that they’re not missing out on an opportunity to improve their own numbers. And if that’s the case, it won’t be long before the rest start to knock down your door asking for the secret recipe to process improvement.

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