Company culture is what makes one organization different from the next. The team's shared values, goals, and expectations contribute to a thriving organizational culture. Leaders who are dedicated to continuous improvement make it the cornerstone of their organization's culture.

Most leaders will agree that a culture of accountability and ownership is essential if the goal is to achieve operational excellence. Unfortunately, many organizations don’t take the steps necessary to build accountability into the day-to-day practices of individuals at every level. Like everything else that has to do with organizational culture, accountability will not happen by accident. The good news is that leaders can take some simple yet powerful steps to bake in a sense of responsibility and positive engagement. 

Standard work is the documented and current best way to do a particular task, procedure, or process. Workers develop the standard and follow it until an improvement process results in a new standard. Standard work ensures that results are consistent and forms the foundation upon which improvements are made. Leader standard work applies this same concept to the task of driving Lean thinking and behavior throughout the organization.

The internet is full of blog posts with productivity tips and advice about how to work smarter, not harder. There’s a lot of useful information about the best way to work, but we think it is important to keep in mind that the foundation for all of it is something called standard work. 

We've written about standard work in the past, but it is a subject that is often overlooked or misunderstood in the continuous improvement efforts of many organizations, so it's definitely worth spending some time on. If you’re in the process of implementing Lean, Kaizen, Six Sigma, or just trying to become more efficient at work, we strongly recommend making standard work a part of your process.

The continuous improvement methodology of Kaizen was once closely associated with industrial and automotive manufacturing. That’s because the Kaizen philosophy originated in the Japanese auto industry and was then later adopted by technology manufacturers like GE and Motorola.

But if you’ve been hearing about Kaizen project management in other sectors over the last few years, you are not alone.

The principles of Kaizen can lead to continuous improvement in almost every industry. The approach is now widespread in healthcare, construction, software development, education, logistics, and everything in between.

You won’t learn everything about Kaizen in any one blog post, but we can lay out the fundamentals of Kaizen project management.

One thing we hear from leaders who are looking to implement a structured approach to business process improvement is that it is difficult to explain to employees how to spot an opportunity for improvement. There are usually a few straightforward ideas that people point to right away, but once they are taken care of, it can be challenging to spot problems in processes, especially those you engage with every day.

An effective way to overcome this problem is to give employees categories of improvement opportunities to consider. Priming the pump with some examples and providing some questions to ask is an excellent way to get people thinking creatively. Of course, every business is different, and all of these examples might not apply to you, but here are 30 ideas that might spark a few of your own.

Empathy is the ability to understand someone else’s feelings. It is a prerequisite for compassion. In 2021, compassion is in more demand than ever.

While empathy might not come up very often in business discussions, the importance of empathy in the workplace is backed up by data. The Businessolver State of Empathy in the Workplace study found:

• 82% of employees would consider leaving their job for a more empathetic employer.
• 78% of employees would work longer hours for an empathetic employer.

The year 2020 will no doubt claim a chapter in the history books of the future. While it was a very challenging year in many ways, we did find a bright spot in the literature surrounding leadership and management. With some extra time on our hands, we uncovered some excellent resources. In the spirit of Valentine's day, we'd like to spread a little love. We hope you enjoy these new additions to our list of favorite inspirational reads.

In some organizations, the leaders who are good at putting out fires are considered the best managers. But what if, instead of putting out fires, leaders had the luxury to spend time on fire prevention? What if, when the rare flame was spotted, every leader was skilled in identifying and correcting the root cause? These conditions are possible with an approach called Leader Standard Work.

If you think trying to predict anything that will happen in 2021 is insane after what’s happened this year, you have a point. But by applying the lessons learned from 2020 and some strong trends that make sense in this new normal, we think we have a reasonably good idea about what to expect concerning continuous improvement next year.

Here are our predictions. We’ll check back in a year to see how close we came.