Page 50 - The Power to Change Anything

Find Vital Behaviors 39

niques to invigorate a massive quality effort in a large manu-
facturing organization in the United States. A few hundred
employees had been through several weeks of Six Sigma train-
ing (a quality improvement program aimed at eliminating
defects as completely as possible), but the company was seeing
almost no benefit. For reasons that were hard to comprehend,
Six Sigma graduates didn’t appear to be applying any of the new
tools they had spent weeks learning. To learn what was going
on, two of the authors and a handful of managers went on a
search for positive deviance. We were looking for the answer
to two important questions: Had anyone in the company found
a way to put the tools to work? And if so, could other teams
apply the same techniques? It wasn’t long until we found four
teams that had enjoyed several Six Sigma successes despite the
fact that most other teams were cynical about the effort and had
given up on employing any of the new techniques.
What had the deviants done to avoid failure and the result-
ant cynicism? When the researchers interviewed unsuccessful
team members, they learned that their cynicism stemmed from
three experiences. First, when they offered innovative ideas,
their supervisor usually shot them down. Second, they had irre-
sponsible teammates no one ever dealt with, and therefore they
concluded that improvement ideas were a crock. And finally,
they felt powerless to question management policies or deci-
sions that appeared to obstruct their improvement efforts.
The successful teams were opposite in every respect. In
these three dicey situations, they behaved in ways that kept
them from becoming cynical. Their “recovery behaviors”
involved stepping up to conversations their peers avoided.
Team members vigorously but skillfully challenged their
supervisor. They were candid with peers who weren’t carrying
their weight. And finally, they were capable of talking to sen-
ior management—the same senior managers more cynical
peers avoided—about policies or practices that they believed
impeded improvements.