There are hidden saboteurs in almost every organization that are inhibiting innovation, creating inefficiency, and ultimately reducing profits. These deadly saboteurs are in plain sight, but are not seen. What are they?
Beliefs about what can't be done, what must be done, and what each employee believes he/she should be doing.
In an earlier post I explained how you can help employees eliminate the most common limiting belief in organizations, "We can't..." In this post I will describe two actual case histories that will make perfectly clear how other types of beliefs in an organization are the biggest single roadblock to success... and why eliminating them can be the single most important thing you can do to insure your company's success.
The Lands' End Story
For years the people at Lands' End had tried and failed to reduce the time it took to move new products from conception to catalog. Before I began working with them it had taken 14 months. The Gap and Limited at that time were going from idea to store in six months. The people at Lands' End were vastly inefficient by comparison and they knew it.
The executives and the managers in each department tried to make the departments more efficient -- they tried to speed up design, purchasing, inventory, quality control and catalog. But nothing they did resulted in any significant improvement in the time it took to bring a new product idea to market. They needed some sort of real breakthrough.
As a result of the work I did with them over 700 people began to examine their operating beliefs, including beliefs about their jobs, what they had to do and what they could not do. They discovered that everyone in the company had the common belief: "We have to have different departments, each of which is responsible for a different function."
But it is true!
When this belief was first identified most people's reaction was, "But this is true. How can you operate without different departments? Every company is organized into different departments for different functions."
Despite the fact that the need for different functional departments seemed obvious, most employees were aware that many different problems resulted from the existence of different functional departments. For example, the bonus awarded to employees was based largely on the results of their department. But sometimes focusing on having one's own department be as successful as possible was detrimental to other departments.
Here's an example. The inventory department's effectiveness was measured, in part, by its ability to reduce inventory costs. So it tended to keep the minimum amount of product on hand. Customer service, on the other hand, was measured by surveys that measured the level of customer satisfaction. So this department wanted plenty of inventory of each item, each color, each size, etc., so that customers would always be able to get what they wanted.
Many other conflicts existed between other departments. I'm sure you can name a number of similar conflicts in your own organization.
Once this belief was identified and eliminated (in other words, when they realized it wasn't necessarily the truth), we put together a team of management and non-management employees to come up with an innovative structure that didn't require functional departments, something that would have been impossible as long as the belief existed.
This team suggested that Lands' End get rid of the functional departments and replace them with "product teams" that had representatives from the old functional departments (such as design, purchasing, catalog, inventory, customer service, and design.
Another possibility
Management loved the idea and decided to put it into action. Each team -- such as the men's accessory team, the luggage team, and the bathing suit team -- was responsible for coming up with ideas for new products, contracting with vendors, being responsible for inventory and quality control, etc. No time was wasted in interactions between departments because they no longer existed. People were no longer trying to get a bonus by reaching their department's targets, because there were no departments.
As a result of this change -- which resulted from eliminating a fundamental belief about the way the company had to operate -- the new time from conception of a new product to having it on hand, ready to sell, and presented in a catalog was reduced from 14 months to 6 months.
Mike Smith, a former CEO of Lands' End, said:
The Lefkoe Institute broadened our thinking by getting us to question some of our long-held beliefs. That enabled us to develop new solutions we couldn't have even imagined before. LI's techniques peel away old ways of thinking and open the mind to realizing that almost anything is possible.
The point isn't that I did it. The point is that Lands' End was open to identifying limiting beliefs it did not know it had, to eliminating them, and then to creating innovative ways of operating that would have been impossible with the old beliefs.
Kondex reduces "Cycle Time" from 33 days to 24 hours
Here's another case history you should be able to identify with.
Kondex, a small manufacturing firm in Wisconsin, had been trying for many years to reduce "cycle time," the number of days it took to run an order through the shop. At one point it took 33 days.
The managers worked hard to solve the problem but after several years of trying they were only able to reduce cycle time by 58 percent, to 19 days.
When they hired us I discovered that managers rarely asked employees for ideas or solutions and when employees did offer solutions they were often ignored. I knew this had to change if Kondex wanted to dramatically reduce the time it took to fulfill an order. I also knew that just explaining why managers should listen to employees wouldn't work nor would training them how to listen better.
Kondex's destructive belief
So we helped managers uncover an unstated belief that ran through the entire company: "It's management's job to make all improvements, not the worker's."
This belief kept management from requesting ideas from workers and from using the ideas workers volunteered. This belief was also held by most of the workers and it kept most of them from making suggestions.
After this belief was eliminated, both managers and workers eliminate this belief managers started listening to workers and workers started to volunteer lots of ideas.
That year Kondex reduced cycle time by another 50 percent to 9 days. And almost every idea came from non-management employees.
During the next two years cycle time was reduced to less than two days. And when customers submitted orders through Kondex's computer system it took less than 24 hours.
Jim Wessing, the president of Kondex at the time, told us:
People have changed how they look at the world, both here at Kondex and at home. Changing people's beliefs has led to people seeing a lot more possibilities. We no longer measure how many reported changes and improvements associates make, but they occur daily here at Kondex. As you know we measured innovations at one time and achieved one hundred in a couple of weeks from less than 100 employees. Now they happen so fast that many of them are shared at our weekly meetings, and many are just implemented without anyone even thinking about them.
Find the destructive beliefs in your organization
What unexamined beliefs are preventing your organization from achieving breakthrough results? Finding them and getting rid of them is the single most important thing you can do to dramatically improve your organization's bottom line.
For more information about Morty Lefkoe and how his method for eliminating beliefs can improve business success, please go to http://lefkoe.com.
Copyright © 2011 Morty Lefkoe