Building Accountability: Key to drive Kaizen

Building Accountability: Key to drive KAIZEN™

Every organization loves its employee demonstrate accountability; to take ownership of their work but developing accountability in the workplace has always been a challenge. The lack of ownership often has negative impacts on employee engagement and it leads to poor results.

A real or a productive organization requires every employee to be held accountable for his or her actions and this begins with the leaders. Similarly the success of any change initiatives lies in holding everyone accountable or engaging everyone (starting from doorman to chairman). Whether it’s a small project or a long journey of improvement, it is imperative to have a sound change management strategy which lasts for a long duration. Irrespective of the organization or industry or city, you will always find Early Adopters & Resisters who will be part of the change management initiatives. “Early adopters” (10% to 20%) are those who are always ready to support any change initiatives. They see change as an opportunity & they feel that change is an essential part of evolution and therefore they just need little support & motivation from the management to move forward. While the “resisters” are those who always sees change as a bad thing, irrespective of the benefit it could bring. They are habituated with the way things have been run in past and they see change as a threat. And there is a third category called as “neutral” and they are the one’s who don’t take any stand and are of “wait and watch” kind of attitude.

Early adopters are self motivated and accountability is generally not an issue for them but resisters pose the largest threat to the success of any change management initiatives.

Accountability may ultimately require discipline but hopefully this demonstrates that discipline is the last step. True accountability needs development of a good technical solution to a problem and using good change management skills to clearly set expectations, provide training, ensure demonstrated competency, determine the root cause for gaps and implement the right corrective actions to fix them. We are all accountable for our own actions, and in that sense it could be argued that accountability ultimately rests with the person responsible for following the process. However, please note that a portion of accountability also rests with the person who developed the technical solution in the first place. How? Almost any solution requires people to make it successful and therefore people must have the change management knowledge, skills, and competency to make sure that any organizational change is implemented and sustained in the right way and not just for the sake of doing it or getting rewards. And therefore it is very important for the management to let each & employee to know their role in the change management initiative, to acquire necessary skills to do it and last but not the least consider whether they have demonstrated such skills in past which makes them think that they can do it.

Without strategy CHANGE is merely substitution not evolution.

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