Continuous Improvement

How do you approach improvement at the top?

How do you go about improving the importance of the executive team? The board? Your own performance as a CEO? If you have a planned approach, give yourself a gold star. Most of us assume that we will learn as we go. We’re confident that we can manage most of what’s thrown at us and if we can’t, we’ll figure something out. If that sounds familiar, you’re missing a big opportunity to get better across the board and to be more prepared if a crisis does hit.

We know from research that performance is more likely to improve if we set clear goals, make them public, and find a way to measure ourselves against them. Simple stuff but actually quite profound. The opposite is drifting along, never discussing what we hope will get better, and not stopping to check if we are making progress. We assume things are improving without taking the test.

What’s more, if we aren’t challenging ourselves to learn and improve, we’re missing one of the best parts of the job. Learning makes our work more interesting and trying to put that learning to use can feel like a new sport we are trying to master. Let’s look at how this might play out.

For the executive team, start by brainstorming a list of the things that, if done better, could really help the organization. It won’t take long to fill several pages with ideas. Examples include improving how work on the strategy is conducted, the level of cooperation between units, the creativity of decision making, the speed with which we respond to customer concerns, our understanding of new markets or new technologies, the way in which we integrate acquisitions, how we develop our people, what we can do to enhance our culture, and much more.

Next, either prioritize the list or simply pick something to work on. Since improvement should be an evergreen process, having a large backlog of improvement targets is not a bad thing. Once you have decided where to begin, discuss various ways in which you could get better at that one thing. Again, a long list of ways to improve that one thing is not a bad since the first experiment may not pan out. Choose a place to begin from the alternatives you have generated and plan a small, bounded experiment to see if you are headed in the right direction before committing a great deal of time and effort to it. Examples of experiments could be to try out a new process for doing something, having an expert come to educate the executive team about something they want to understand, benchmarking how others approach the challenge, or setting up a committee or task force to figure out next steps to be taken. Learning what kinds of experiments to try is part of the learning process. Over time, the team will get better at understanding the conditions under which learning occurs for them. Finally, once the team has designed the experiment and knows how they will carry it out, they should come up with ways to measure the outcomes to discern whether or not the experiment worked. Carry out the experiment, learn from it, and then move on to another experiment on that one thing or a new topic for learning.

In the ideal, work on improving the executive team’s performance should be ongoing, and included on every regular meeting agenda. Since the opportunity to learn is engaging, don’t be surprised if it becomes the part of the agenda that people look forward to the most.

For boards, the process is similar but the targets for improvement are different. Boards have opportunities to improve their performance just as senior teams do. Knowing more about topics that are important to the success of the board or organization and applying that knowledge more effectively through processes in and between board meetings can help the board contribute more. While board agendas are usually crowded and the routine work of the board must be completed before anything else, there is usually time during or before meetings to introduce one or two new topics for the board’s consideration. If the board then takes the additional step of discussing how they would put the information to use to improve how the board operates or could help the organization, real progress can be made. The annual self-assessment of the board’s effectiveness could include how many experiments the board carried out and how much difference those experiments made. As with the executive team, the board may come to look forward to the parts of board meetings that involve learning and figure out how to make time to do more of the same.

For CEOs, there is always more to learn but never sufficient time to do so. Good CEOs welcome opportunities to learn but may find it difficult to fit into their schedule. An annual trip to Davos is a wonderful thing but even better if afterward, the CEO has time to follow up on the ideas and connections the meeting produced. The idea of learning continuously rather than episodically may strike some as unrealistic. Ipso facto, learning opportunities that are avoided produce no improvement.

So, what’s a busy CEO to do? I would suggest micro-experimentation, coupled with a few big-bang improvement objectives. Becoming a more effective CEO isn’t just about the big-bang strategic decisions, transformation programs, investments in AI or the game-changing acquisition. These are all important and represent opportunities for the CEO to improve their leadership, provided once again that the goals, processes and measures of improvement are clear. If any of these big-bang events are on the horizon, put in a little extra work to maximize the learning and feedback that is available in these naturally occurring experiments. But beyond that, spend a little time over the weekend or holidays thinking about the little things that you would like to improve upon every day. There are lots of micro-things that could make you better; learning more from your people about what they do, spending time visiting key customers to better understand their needs, having dinner with a board member to tap their wisdom, or meeting with a peer group of fellow CEOs to talk about challenges you have in common. Some of the things you will think about may take only minutes a day or a few hours a week. Yes, learning still requires a bit of time and may mean pushing something else off your calendar but getting better at something important may make doing so worth the cost.

Here’s the really big thing to remember. The capabilities of the executive team, board and CEO have an outsized effect on the performance of literally everyone else in the organization. Even a little improvement at the top can make a big difference.

P.S. Sad note: Patrick James of First Brands resigned and will be replaced by one of the company’s restructuring advisors according to today’s WSJ. Doug Lebda, CEO and founder of Lending Tree, died in an all-terrain vehicle accident near his home. These unexpected departures are a reminder that boards need to insist on up-to-date succession plans, even when they can’t imagine the unimaginable.