 A key component of running a successful business is being able to coach and provide feedback for employees. As a leader or manager, providing proper guidance for employees ensures they can succeed in the workplace and continue to improve. In this article, we will provide you with three tips for coaching and providing feedback for your team.
Avoid Using Accusatory Language Words such as always, should, never, and you or your are all quick to put an employee on the defensive when providing feedback. It’s important to choose words carefully, because more than just providing feedback or worse, venting frustrations with their performance, we want our employees to be open to evaluating themselves openly and improving. Ask Open-Ended Questions Asking guiding questions tends to lead to more thoughtful and detailed answers. Asking guiding questions allows employees to discover the answers themselves and help them learn and grow the most. The open-ended approach to questioning also encourages more productive coaching conversations to occur in future. Develop Strong Relationships with Employees When providing coaching or feedback, your relationship with your employees is incredibly important. If employees don’t understand you and where you’re coming from, they may be unresponsive to your guidance and even be upset by it. It also provides managers with an understanding of employees, their attitude toward work, and their capacity to improve and perform. Committing to Continuous Improvement While providing feedback and coaching is essential for helping employees strive for improvement, it is also important as a leader to try to continuously improve as well. Here at Adonis we can help managers, leaders, and employees at all levels through Six Sigma training and coaching get better results by utilizing the Lean & Six Sigma toolkit.  Organizational politics involves performing influence tactics for the sake of organizational or personal interests. Organizational politics can impact all levels of a company, which is why it is important to learn how to navigate political situations and create positive outcomes instead. In this article, we want to provide you with some tips for navigating organizational politics in the workplace.
Build Strong Relationship Often the most natural development of political influence occurs through informal networks and personal influence. By maintaining your personal integrity and developing strong relationships, navigating situations such as gaining support for a new initiative or asking for someone to cover a shift for you becomes much easier. Address Disagreements It can be tempting to go down the path of least resistance and ignore issues, but being vocal about disagreements can actually help bring new solutions to the table. Creating effective conflict management to deal with internal politics is critical to employee happiness and obtaining better outcomes from workers. Utilize Your Authority Whether you are the CEO of a company, an expert in the tech field, or have access to NASA telescopes for research purposes, all of these are formal qualities which place you in a greater position of power. Positions of power can help companies navigate times of crisis and be a stable foundation for an organization to build upon. Maintaining Positive Political Influence While many of the tips we offered on navigating organizational political situations are meant to promote positive change, there are many ways that internal politics can hinder the growth of a business. Here at Adonis we can help you ensure that your business maintains continuous improvement and is better equipped to deal with challenges through our organizational development programs.  Control charts were originally used in the deployment of Statistical Process Control (SPC) and later on adopted into the Six Sigma framework. Also known as Shewhart charts (after Walter A. Shewhart), these charts look into the process behavior as well as its natural (common) or special (assignable) causes of variation. Control charts set statistical control limits (upper and lower) where most of the process data are expected to fall within. By using control charts, one can identify areas of poor performance or excellence and adapt accordingly. In this article, we will go over the basics of creating a control chart, the four process states within a control chart, and the different ways that these charts can be used.
How to Create a Control Chart The most common way to create a control chart is by entering data points into Excel and using formulas to create a chart. There are seven different types of control charts you can create depending on the amount and type of available data. More robust tools like SigmaXL or R can also be used to create control charts for both continuous and attribute data. Identifying the Four Process States in a Control Chart There should be four process states within a control chart: the ideal state, threshold state, brink of chaos state, and the out of control state. Each of the four process states reveals the stability and predictability of the process and helps identify, through data, whether the process is under control or is becoming increasingly prone to error. Specific rules can be applied to trends, shifts, and out of control process behavior. Different Uses for Control Charts Control charts are primarily used as a tool to control, monitor, and improve processes by identifying patterns that develop over time and finding areas that need improvement. Control charts have uses in a variety of contexts such as response time, budgeting, quality control, and beyond, making them a useful tool to learn regardless of the work setting. How Adonis Can Help Control charts are a key tool in striving for continuous improvement. Here at Adonis, we provide training in the Lean Six Sigma toolkit that will help you master utilizing control charts and other continuous improvement strategies.  Value stream mapping is a lean tool developed by Toyota to eliminate waste, thereby increasing value for the customer. Value stream mapping typically involves using flowchart documents with various symbols to analyze and design the various workflows in the end to end process. In this article, we want to give you an overview of the steps to utilize value stream mapping in your company.
Create a Team To create a value stream map, you will need to gather representatives from various departments or processes in your company to enable information to pass between them smoothly and ensure important items aren’t left out. Including outside suppliers in the team can also help gain an outside perspective. Hold a Kaizen Event With a team assembled, the next step in creating a value stream map is to hold a Kaizen event. Over the course of the event it will be important to determine the process family, create a template with symbols to use to create the map, and draft a current and future state Value Stream Map. Draft a Plan After your team understands the current and future state of the company through mapping, and has identified areas where waste can be eliminated, it’s time to move on to drafting a plan. A good draft should include details about the logistics of the project, such as possible team members, a schedule for events and deliverables, cost estimates, and of course the goals and benefits of the project. Benefits of Value Stream Mapping Value Stream Mapping is a lean tool that can help identify inefficiencies in the line of production and even knowledge-based work. Through Adonis’ Continuous Improvement program, we offer Kaizen Event Facilitation and Lean/ Six Sigma Project Execution that will help guide your team through the process of creating value stream mapping, which will help improve your company’s overall bottom line.  Selecting a problem solving approach is one of the most important aspects to continuously improve and create sustainable processes. Having a standard process in place helps resolve problems at a faster pace and it enables your teams to overcome any roadblocks smoothly. In this article, we will go over a few of the common approaches that can help eliminate issues and keep your organization thriving.
Define the Problem It is essential to define a problem accurately before you enter into the problem-solving lifecycle. A problem well-defined is a problem half-solved. Your team needs to scope the problem and clearly identify the pain points as opposed to rushing to a solution. Do we have a bottleneck in our process? Is your business losing revenue due to competition in the market? Once you’ve defined the problem to be solved, ideally, you can gather some data then shift to solutioning. Collect Data Now that the problem has been defined, we must quickly gather data to provide additional context to our problem. That data can be retrieved from internal systems of record such as a human resource management system, financial tracking tool, or dashboards and other metric reporting, such as PowerBI or Tableau reports. Alternatively, you might need to conduct some time and motion studies in order to have a proper picture of the current state. Leverage Design Thinking Design Thinking helps you reframe the problem from the perspective of the people involved in the problem - and most importantly, using an empathetic point of view to put yourself in their shoes. It helps you challenge underlying assumptions and generate ideas with a fresh perspective. Advantages with the Design Thinking approach include creating a prototype of the solution and testing it quickly to prevent the risks involved in implementing a big change. Monitor for Success After you’ve defined your problem and have strong, data-driven solutions in place, make sure you are monitoring your results so you know whether you are achieving your goals. Use the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle in order to continuously improve by establishing periodic checkpoints to review your progress; this in turn avoids wastes of money and resources. Problem-solving is an ongoing process of improvement within organizations. It requires time and training, which cannot be provided by a simple overview of problem-solving techniques. Through Adonis’ Continuous Improvement program, we can help your organization tackle its most critical challenges by assisting you to establish such robust problem-solving frameworks.  To run a business to its fullest potential, it’s important to ensure that your employees are engaged with their work and see the linkage to your company’s vision. According to a study conducted by the Workplace Research Foundation, highly engaged employees are 40% more productive. Investing just 10% into employee engagement can potentially increase profits as well. In this article, we will cover a few different ways you can engage employees.
Listen to Employee Feedback A lot of times, employees have first-hand knowledge of the work being done and ideas on ways that work can be improved, yet their ideas about how to innovate are often left unheard. Listen to employee feedback by implementing a work-out session or Kaizen to generate new ideas and decide on solutions openly and decisively. In addition, don’t forget to close the feedback loop with employees to let them know how their input is being utilized. Recognize Hard Work While it’s always important to express appreciation to employees for doing their job, it’s just as important to acknowledge the work of employees who go above and beyond the call of duty. Recognizing the efforts of employees can take both big and small forms, whether it be words of encouragement, a monetary bonus awarded for stellar work, or a day dedicated to employee recognition. Ultimately, recognizing an employee’s extra efforts fosters positivity and increases engagement in the workplace. Provide Onboarding Experiences When embarking on a new position or joining a new company, employees will often feel unsure of their tasks and the tools they need to accomplish them - yet be hesitant to share their lack of confidence. By providing onboarding experiences for employees, you’ll give them the assurance needed to complete their jobs, a network of peers to call upon, and more than likely, minimize the productivity impact due to uncertainty about the work to be done. How We Can Help Employee engagement is critical to generating profit and increasing productivity in the workplace. At Adonis, we provide services, including Kaizen Event Facilitation in the Lean Six Sigma toolkit as well as team-building activities using DiSC assessments, that will help engage your employees and create a safe space to thrive and execute work in the aim of achieving your company’s vision. |
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Operational excellence and innovation leadership, leveraging Lean Six Sigma methodologies. Guided improvement from concept to deployment under the direction of expert consultants.
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Adonis Partners has a global reach with consultants located in the Americas, Europe and Asia.
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