#33 People, process and performance from Shingo prize winner Gareth Brown.

Proudly brought to you in association with S A Partners, a world-leading business transformation consultancy.IntroductionWelcome to episode 33 of the Enterprise Excellence Podcast. I am so pleased to have Mr Gareth Brown with me here today. Gareth has a wide history in Enterprise Excellence, working for and leading organisation transformation journeys to award-winning results. Gareth is passionate about helping organisations establish continuous improvement and development in leadership, process and results.SummaryGareth won a Shingo prize at VistaPrint for this approach. It was a greenfield opportunity, as the factory was being built from the ground up. Gareth asked the staff, during construction, about how they wanted to work in this new facility. He used a future-state visualisation exercise. Imagine you are at a BBQ in two years, and you're telling your friends and family, "I work for (insert). It's incredible, it's achieving so much, and I love working there." Gareth then asked the team for their top five reasons for being able to state this. These set of values or behaviours were grouped and became the cultural framework for the team. When tricky conversations about the culture arose in the following six months, which they did, consulting the list of behaviours was often enough to diffuse any problems. The initial group of 30 staff was being scaled to 100 people. The expectation was that the new people would assimilate to the way things were being done (excellently!) from the start. Onboarding new staff in the right way, focussing on excellent culture and behaviours is an ideal situation.  Quotes4.18min if you don't know how you're actually performing, then it's very, very difficult to engage in the problem. Right? So you need to be able to put the problem or the opportunity up in lights. So that's the first thing.7:00min and even before we turned the first machine on at VistaPrint, we had discussions with the team about, "What does good look like? What kind of organisation do we want?"11:05min but it was certainly helpful to be able to visualise that long term equation and use that as a basis of, "Why are we doing these things?"13:20min every hour that we spent on building these foundations right at the start would save us nine or ten hours of grief later on.14:42min I think we underestimate the importance of really investing in that person as a leader at the start to make sure that they're part of the team and they understand where you want them to think differently as well as where you'd like them to subscribe to the existing paradigms. Key TakeawayThe key takeaway from this episode was Gareth's focus on people, process, and performance. Gareth outlined the importance of getting people on the journey and culturally engaged first. Without motivation to change and adopt new things, there is very little chance of team members engaging and supporting the journey. Emotion, either positive or negative, helps people embrace and lock away new learning and form new habits. When new people join a new organisation, they naturally have a high level of emotion and desire to fit in. This is a prime time to achieve cultural and systemic alignment with people.If you have a greenfield site opportunity, plan upfront and focus on the most important things, as Gareth and his team did. If you don't have that opportunity, review your new team member onboarding process. How can you improve this system to engage new employees early? Align them to the culture and system improvemenTo learn more about what we do, visit https://enterpriseexcellencegroup.com.au/Thanks for your time, and thanks for helping to create a better future.