Creating and Leading a Continuous Improvement Culture

The primary goal is to deepen self-awareness and build new capabilities that can be immediately applied in leading the transition to organizations focused on problem solving, learning, and decision making for continuous improvement. Our approach builds new skills based on existing strengths.

Many companies and leaders realize that their businesses and organizations cannot thrive and possibly even survive in the current environment of rapid change and unpredictable economic and social shifts without engaging the minds of their employees in responding to the problems and challenges they face. Some see creating cultures of continuous improvement as a way to become more flexible and adaptive.

Traditional approaches to leadership do not, however, work well for creating this kind of environment in a company. In fact the behaviors of the top-down, command-and-control, budget-focused, results-driven manager are usually a barrier to engaging employees who are willing and able to step out and be self-initiating problem solvers.

In the recently published Great by Choice, Jim Collins and Morten Hansen contend that their “10Xer” companies which significantly outperformed their direct competitors during the period studied were not more ambitious, creative, visionary, bolder, or luckier. But they did have leaders who embraced “a paradox of control and non-control.” Basically that means they were focused, disciplined, systematic and deliberate about what they could control or influence and at the same time remained concerned, vigilant and experimental about what they could not. And they worked to develop organizations with the same priorities and capabilities.

Attendees will develop and learn new management practices and leadership capabilities to create and support cultures in which appropriate problem solving responsibility for continuous improvement occurs at each level in the organization.

Benefits

Participants will:

• Develop and be ready to apply gestalt-based leadership capabilities and new skills for continuous improvement of key business processes.
• Learn about and develop your own leadership style and capabilities for large-scale change programs that require understanding, buy-in, and support at all levels in the organization.
• Learn the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle for problem solving, continuous improvement, process management, and experimentation.
• Experience and learn new skills and insights for departmental, cross-functional, and project team effectiveness.
• Develop new ways to engage and align employees at all levels for improving value creating processes focused on delivery to customers.
• Learn how to understand actual conditions firsthand rather than relying on assumptions and how to resolve problems through rapid learning experiments rather than dictating solutions.
• Recognize multiple perspectives and improve skills to appreciate and manage resistance.
• Practice and increase capabilities for self-reflection, awareness, inquiry, dialogue, coaching, feedback, and presence.
  

Participants

This program is designed for directors, managers, program managers and project team members responsible for the design and delivery of business process continuous improvement initiatives. The fee for the program will be $2,750 for the first person attending from each organization. Subsequent people attending from the same organization will receive a 25% discount. This is to encourage multiple attendances from organizations so that colleagues deepen their mutual understanding and can work together on their own organization.

Dates and Fees:

“Every one of my 100 CEO clients wants to know how to do things better. GISC programs for lead-ers grow their power to answer these questions themselves and in a very deep and significant way – a way that will increase the bottom line of their business and their soul.”

Will Phillips
CEO
REX Roundtables for Executives

“The experience I had at GISC changed the way I interact with my work colleagues day-to-day. Understanding the importance of ‘scanning’ and the feedback people are giving - both deliberate and non-deliberate - is extremely valuable. This helps to be more strategic and deliberate in how you communicate with people. It allows you to separate what you observe from what you assume you are seeing.”