As a leader of people things will happen that shouldn’t happen. It’s natural since you are a leader of people. Maybe they are operating within a process and they generate errors or scrap within the process. How do you react? Do you attack the problem or the person? Using a Fishbone Diagram along with these other three tips will help you get to a root cause quickly.
Sometimes in an effort “to get to the bottom of it,” we assume that the person did something wrong instead of looking at the process. Here is a four-step framework I believe can help you.
1. Believe that the person is trying to do the right thing
It helps to have a belief that employees come to work every day to do their best work. Does that always happen? No. Automatically assuming that they have bad intentions will not provide you with the best mindset to begin the problem-solving process.
It’s easy to say in your mind that someone is a bad performer. Mentally, that gets you off the hook. Most times, that is not the reality. Deming said that a bad process will defeat a good person every time.
2. Go to where the work is being done and investigate for yourself
It’s easy to be an armchair quarterback. They should have done x,y or z. Go to the area or go to the process and observe what is happening.
Maybe you will observe a consistent pattern of errors. You might find out they were not properly trained by their mentor. You might learn there are no work instructions or that the work instructions are incorrect. There may be obvious reasons why there was an error. Go see for yourself.
3. Use a structured brainstorming tool to help you get to a root cause
If you haven’t seen a fishbone (Ishikawa) diagram before, here is one below. This is a shop floor or a transactional process-driven tool. When something happens, this tool helps you get to a root cause so you can mitigate that error from happening again.
The fishbone diagram uses 6 M’s to shorten and focus the team brainstorming effort. The intent is not to take this into the office and spend months coming up with a solution. The goal is to brainstorm quickly and put changes in place that your team believes will impact the root cause.
4. Develop solutions as a team
When you get others involved it does several things. It allows employees to become engaged and learn to use problem-solving tools. It allows the organization to get better as a group.
When employees can implement improvements to a process to support company goals it becomes personal to them. They will do everything that they can to ensure improvements get implemented and that the errors don’t happen again!
I hope that you keep these four ideas in mind the next time errors occur in your business. Try the fishbone brainstorming process and let me know how it goes. I look forward to hearing from you!
As always it is an honor to serve you and I hope that you and your company are getting better every day!
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