Harnessing Internal Competition
Challenge: A business unit of a large government agency realized it was not going to meet the deadline for implementing “Six-Sigma” goals for the second year in a row. The technical program managers in their mid-year progress report to the agency leadership team stated that their primary difficulty was lack of support from other units of the agency. They complained of spending too much time dealing with the politics of upper level managers “protecting their own turf” than on meeting “Six-Sigma” process goals.
Solution: During the Aligning Culture with Business Session, the agency leadership team decided that their three year effort to build a “Culture of Performance” into their agency as part of their “Six-Sigma” efforts needed to be fine-tuned. The agency’s traditional operational culture had always rewarded self-starters, but they came to realize that the new and unrelenting focus on measuring and rewarding results had pushed upper level managers to a heightened level of individualism. They were too strongly focused on achieving their own personal and unit goals to the detriment of meeting the overall mission of the agency.
To counteract the growing practices of internal competition, the agency leadership team immediately convened a working session with all “Six-Sigma” champions and their business unit upper level managers. During the session, “Six-Sigma” goals that crossed between units were outlined, and incorporated into the personal goals of the appropriate managers. In addition, as part of their overall role to manage the organizational culture of the agency, the leadership team started a communication campaign around “Our Common Mission and Goals” that reinforced how achieving individual results must support the agency in meeting its overall mission.
Results: The “Six-Sigma” goals were reached on-time, but over-budget. Defining cross-unit collaborations were incorporated into the following year’s planning process and individual managers were held accountable by making the required collaborations part of their performance goals. To further reinforce the required culture, two upper level managers were moved to positions of lesser responsibility, due to their inability to moderate “protecting their own turf” behaviors.