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Bridging the Gap between People and Process

by: Jacob S. McAfee
Deputy Fire Chief
North Central Fire Protection District

Every organization wants to be successful, but what makes an organization successful? I think many people will agree that effective leadership in critical positions will help perpetuate success in most organizations. Specifically, Chief Officers are in a leadership position that directly affects the answer and outcome of that question when both people and process are deliberately addressed. Maxwell (2008) drives this point home when he wrote about the “Law of the Lid”. The law of the lid theory believes that success is dependent on a person’s leadership ability. The theory goes on to describe people and organizations that have had tremendously talented employees with off-the-chart IQs but have no leadership skills, struggle to achieve their goals. This is the law of the lid. These organizations put a lid on their success because of the lack of leadership. However, when organizations hire or develop leaders the lid to their organizational success rises.

Often times fire service organization are process driven and many times we deal with how people react to the process rather than working to get people to believe in the process. In this article I will theorize that developing a culture of Continuous improvement will increase the chances an organization will be successful by traditional standards. To help guide the development of culture and quality improvement we need to define what they represent. Culture is the embodiment of values, beliefs, and attitudes, the belief in the organizations mission and vision that collectively contributes to organization success. Continuous improvement is the desire for employees within the organization to continuously consider how processes and employees can be improved. Solidifying a mission driven Culture and a commitment to Continuous improvement (CI) will positively impact the success of any organization.

The fire service has established standards and best practices that help organizations move towards this culture of quality improvement such as ISO, department Accreditation (CFAI), professional Credentialing, Executive courses, partnerships within academia, and many others. Additionally, as a leader don’t be afraid to continually boundary span the theories, principles, and process in other professions as many private industry leaders have worked towards a culture of continuous improvement for years. Creating a culture driven by a strong mission, vision, and values on its own can be a formidable task. Similar to the Kotter change management process I have written about before, I will discuss six foundational elements to help leaders create a culture committed to CI that can professionalize your department and invigorate the trade. Each of these elements; leadership, empowerment, teamwork, customer focus, infrastructure, and a process for continuous improvement will present what can be done on the people side and the process side to build a bridge to CI in your organization. The Commission on Fire Accreditation International (CFAI) process includes an in-depth quality improvement structure. The CFAI uses performance indicators in various categories of a fire and emergency service agency. Each performance indicator is described and appraised while a plan in written to improve or sustain the current performance. It is this type of CI that is essential to a successful organization but must be paired with a strong CI culture to be successful.

Leadership must be transparent and intentional in the pursuit of organizational continuous improvement. Building a culture requires a collaborative passionate, and inspiring mission, vision, and values to build off of. As always, the success of any change or culture infusion is to relate the importance of quality improvement/continuous improvement to the members well-being. These organization changing bridges have to be about what people can connect with, relate it to their why if you want to create a lasting CI culture. Once you do that, it is critical that you communicate the “Why” behind culture and CI with the appropriate intensity and persistence. Work for shared buy in from senior and middle management. It will become even more important as failure tends to come from a lack of desire or understanding from middle management, not the top or bottom of the organization. Know your work force/Continually assess buy in and address misunderstanding immediately. Doing this requires establish communication methods or training opportunities to anchor the process, and can be extremely difficult in large organizations. Leaders should engage in data driven decision making and lead by example here while mentoring others through that mindset and delivery. Speaking from a process perspective ensure adequate resources are in place for culture building, adopt organization policies and plan to have measurements in place to support continuous quality improvement. This process should focus on empowering employees to achieve the desired results both in a small team setting and individually.

Empowering your employees can invigorate your initiatives and department if done correctly. Before you do this ensure the environment is right. Create a process where employees have the necessary autonomy or authority to make process improvement recommendations, where there is planned time or activities specifically for CI evaluation and development, and to establish trust, mistakes should be part of growth. Upfront ensure everyone understand why CI is critical for the safety of the public, members, and the organization and set clear expectations while consistently reinforcing work well done and provide constructive feedback when needed. If you can incentives and reward employees for CI projects and activities and have a formal process where employees can initiate or start new CI projects. From an employer perspective adjusting job descriptions to incorporate CI tasks make the expectations clear from the start, while including them in employee performance appraisals reinforces the importance and their role.

Be community focused, ensure your staff values the community and understands the importance of ensuring community satisfaction. Develop a process for assessing community needs and satisfaction. Collect and use community satisfaction data and used for process improvements, this will incorporate community needs into the in decision making process. No one is successful alone and the teamwork and collaboration needed to anchor a CI culture needs to be solid. Ensure employees are comfortable collaborating with teams/programs/divisions across the organization and that each individual team member voices are valued and respected. Good teams understand and utilize other team member perspectives and approaches and establish a mechanism to share their ideas and process. It is important to establish frequent times where employees convene for the purpose of problem solving, even going as far as creating a physical space conducive to collaboration where teams can establish and track goals while monitoring team performance.

All ideas are good in form but putting action to them required infrastructure to support those ideas. Get employees engaged in the development of a performance management system and have a process in place on how performance being measured, with what, and how often data is evaluated; more importantly what is done with the results. Communicate how employee work and performance measures link to the strategic plan and vision of the department. Organizational plans should be aligned across all divisions and a vetted planning process established that uses technology to streamline and benchmark performance. There are various software system in place to help with this but finding one or multiple that work for your organization will save you time and provided credible data to evaluate and improve. In regards to infrastructure I currently require all of my divisions; training, operations, the fire marshal’s office, and the apparatus and equipment maintenance division to report a host of performance measurements every month for discussion, evaluation, and planning for improvement.

These measurements were developed after key benchmarks were set as established standards in line local and national standards, CFAI categories and performance measurements and others to keep the continuous process improvement cycle going. In doing so continuously monitor current projects and track for sustainability, always allow member to have a voice in the CI nomination process, and ensure CI success recognized and celebrated. Establish a process in which CI projects are documented and continually questions how things can improve. Ultimately, as leaders we should be dedicated to continuous improvement and should always look towards developing or enhancing the CI culture; the community you serve deserves it.

References:

Burke, R. & Stashevsky, S. (2006). Leadership in organizations. International Journal of Manpower, 27(1), 5.

Northouse, P. (2013). Leadership: Theory and practice, (6 th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA:
SAGE Publications, Inc.