The R Company: Anchor lean culture in your DNA
Many organizations would love to build back more resiliently after the pandemic, but only a few know how to. We are going to look at why this is the case and on what these organizations need to focus on for a more resilient future.
The classic managerial toolkit is dominated by financial performance and growth management. Consequently, the fewest companies nowadays can sustain, measure, and manage resilience. However, now is the time to embrace the new world, and adapt our values and change our managerial mindset towards resilience.
Why is resilience so important?
Indeed, as a result of several forces like accelerated technological evolution, the interconnectedness of the global economy, rising inequality, the climate crisis and in addition now the COVID-19 pandemic, the business environment is continuously becoming more dynamic and unpredictable. Thus, the capacity of organizations to absorb stress, recover functionality and thrive in new circumstances is ultimately a method for survival. Our research has shown that companies employing principles of resilience have enormous advantages:
Graph: Martin Reeves, chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute in San Francisco and co-author at Harvard Business Review Press.
Resilient organizations are known to be change-ready. Always up for change, one could say. To understand how to successfully transform organizations and gain resilience, let’s take a closer look at the key principles of the R Company.
#1 Anchor lean culture in your DNA
The culture of a company is not only it’s personality, but much more like its DNA. In many organizations, we observe that management often thinks teams follow targets, procedures and guidelines, however it is a companies culture that defines how people interact and communicate with each other and even more: How work will get done. That is why a good culture can boost the performance of an organization, whereas a bad, or less developed one can in the long run even destroy the company.
If you want to envision a journey to lean operations thinking holistically is mandatory key. An integration of lean structures into the DNA of an enterprise provides the foundation of a culture leading, supporting and enabling the transformation to a resilient company.
Crises like the pandemic have proven: It’s about the people.
They are the key of a company’s culture. Indeed, one can even say the culture is shaped and made up by each life experience an employee brings into the organization. Leaders and executives need to understand their roles in decision-making to shape their team’s impact on the culture efficiently.
What are working principles of a lean culture?
If you are attempting to implement lean, it is important to keep in mind that “lean” is not only an overall system, which represents a holistic cultural change in an organization. In essence, a lean culture is also a learning culture, driven by extreme client focus and embedding continuous improvement.
At Avance Consulting we have gathered some guiding principles to make it work:
Be open-minded
Be proactive and agile
Be inspiring
Be bold
Be focused
Be human
Be a listener
Be yourself, only better
Consequently, a lean culture requires everyone to collaborate In fact, it is about people questioning the things they do and acting on facts, instead of opinions.
Lean and resilient
The impact of a lean culture for successful resilient organizations is undeniable. Small actions and a sharp awareness create sustained and striking results over time. However, no singular tool fosters progress alone and therefore, resilience and lean go hand in hand.
Organizations cannot set their hopes up for one quick solution that addresses all issues with little effort. Hence, deliberate and unrelenting effort is needed to sustain changes and preserve them.
In our blog post series on the R Company we will be unfolding the key principles for resilient organizations, in order to emphasize on the possibilities of change and share our expertise. Ready to move forward towards the R Company?