Leaders ask me all the time how to get genuine buy-in from their teams instead of grudging compliance. My answer always starts with involvement. People are far less likely to argue with conclusions they reached themselves, and involvement breeds commitment.
Start With a Common Mission
Before any process work begins, I bring the team together around a shared mission that everyone can state the same way. I can’t overstate how much this matters. Misaligned teams burn through energy the way misaligned tires burn through tread, and the people end up exhausted long before the work is done.
Align at Every Step of DMAIC
The method I use, DMAIC, has a built-in checkpoint at every stage, and I treat each one as a chance to get the team on the same page before we move forward.
- At Define, we confirm we’re clear on the mission, the customer, the voice of the customer, the timeline, the scope and the expectations.
- At Measure, we go after indisputable facts and data, and opinions don’t count. When everyone can look at the numbers and agree the baby isn’t pretty, you’ve got alignment.
- At Analyze, we use a proven set of tools to get to the root cause and agree on the high-impact points, the places where solving one problem clears up ten symptoms.
- At Improve/Innovate, we brainstorm together and land on a list of changes we can make right away with everyone on board.
- At Control, we agree on how we’ll hold the gain so it doesn’t fall apart six months later.
Working through those checkpoints as a group pulls people together and speeds up the whole process, because nobody’s wasting time debating trivial things.
The Skeptic in Toronto
One of my favorite examples comes from a large project for a very big company running many sites. One of those sites was in Toronto, and its director was, to put it kindly, resistant. He had data showing his site was the most efficient in the entire company, and he wasn’t shy about it. Our consulting team each took a site, and I volunteered for his.
On day one he sat with the senior leadership team, arms folded and scowling. I started with a hands-on simulation that mirrors real work, and it cracked him open just a little. When we got into value streams and measurement, he got curious. He’s an extremely intelligent man, and once he saw the data for himself, he was all in.
What he discovered was that his site really was efficient task by task, but the value stream as a whole was full of gaps, delays and disconnects. Picture one task that takes an hour and another that takes an hour, with ten hours of waiting in between. That’s a 12-hour process for two hours of work, and it repeats all the way down the line. Work that could be done in two weeks or a month was taking three months.
The improvements at that site were worth millions of dollars, and customer satisfaction climbed right along with them. He and I became good friends. The results also caught the attention of the senior VP of transformation at another very large company, who flew up to Toronto to see what was going on. He walked into our war room, where we work standing up at a wall covered in value stream maps, charts and sticky notes, took one look and said to me, “We want you.” His team had been buried in PowerPoints and consultants stuck in analysis paralysis, and he could see real work getting done in real time.
The Takeaway for Leaders
That director committed because he saw the facts, reached the conclusion himself and helped build the solution. If you want commitment, give your people the same chance.
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