Strategy: Overcome Inertia
Benchmark your team’s performance against other teams in¬side your company or other organizations. Toyota executives recog¬nized that to make the transition to luxury cars, they had to first show their employees the more demanding customer requirements of the luxury car market. To drive home this point, they transported busloads of employees to the Nagota golf course and encouraged them to examine closely the Mercedes, Porsches, Jaguars, and BMWs in the parking lot.
By encouraging the examination of everything from paint finishes to metal frames, Toyota made a very eloquent statement about the performance jump that was needed to produce a car of comparable quality.
Remove yourself as a buffer. If a team doesn’t seem committed to change, it may be because members have been insulated from exposure to performance problems. If you find that you are being overly protec¬tive of your team, try the following tactics:
- Let your team hear directly from your customers about the need for performance improvement. This may require meetings with your customers, visits to customer sites to see firsthand the difficulties customers are having with your products or services.
- Show your team the result of performance problems. The production manager of a manufacturing company accomplished this by taking engineering and production people through his shop’s quarantine area (the area reserved for defective products) and then explaining the amount of money that was being lost through these defects.
