Written by Stephanie M. Naidoo, MBB

CEO Blue Crane Consulting Group & Adjunct Faculty at UNSW Executive Education, building operational excellence and capability programs.

I started my career at GE Plastics, back when General Electric was the standard every other Six Sigma program was quietly measured against. Rigour wasn’t a value statement there. It was the operating system. So I’ve spent almost three decades since with a fairly unforgiving eye for the difference between a program that changes how an organisation actually runs and a training calendar wearing a program’s clothes.

Most fail the same way, and it isn’t the curriculum.

Capability without capacity is a certificate nobody can use. You can train someone brilliantly and still fail completely if you never give them the hours to apply it. I’ve watched this pattern repeat across a decade of programs since, my own and other people’s, closely enough now that I can usually tell which kind I’m looking at within the first ten minutes of a briefing.

The clearest counterexample I’ve worked inside was the Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s Productivity program, the bank’s enterprise-wide operational excellence effort. I was accountable for weaving together each Business Unit’s objectives and strategic plans into the Group’s strategy, culture and community, supporting development of the KPIs each business unit was held to, the town halls, and the Expo that brought the different improvement disciplines together. Running that scope at that scale taught me things about capability programs that no curriculum ever did, because a curriculum doesn’t have to survive contact with fifty-two thousand people and a CEO’s attention span.

The program worked on two levels at once, deliberately, and the gap between those levels is the whole argument.

Level one: everyone. Tens of thousands of people trained in one shared set of operational habits. Not a certification, not a belt, just a common way of noticing and naming a problem that anyone in the building could use in a five-minute conversation. This is the layer almost every program skips, because it’s unglamorous and doesn’t photograph well for the annual report. It’s also the layer that makes level two possible. Without shared habits already in place, a specialist walks into a room where nobody shares their vocabulary and has to teach the language before they can even start the work.

Level two: several hundred certified specialists. Green Belts, Black Belts, Master Black Belts, embedded across the business rather than sitting in a central “improvement team” waiting for referrals. This is the expensive, deep layer, and it only earns its cost because level one already exists underneath it.

Build one layer without the other, and you get one of two familiar failures.

Culture without specialists means everyone nodding along and nobody who can actually run a rigorous improvement project.

Specialists without culture means brilliant Black Belts nobody on the floor understands or trusts enough to call.

I’ve seen both fail at organisations that had every resource except the discipline to build both layers on purpose.

The other thing GE taught me, and CBA confirmed at scale: capability is a leadership behaviour before it’s a training outcome. Getting the CEO’s attention in the town halls I ran wasn’t ceremony. Ian Narev, CBA CEO, talked about Productivity in results calls too, in front of the market, as core to how the bank was run. “Our emphasis on productivity has ensured that expense growth is fit for the times,” as he put it in one set of results (Commonwealth Bank of Australia, 2017). When the person at the top treats capability as how the business operates rather than a side initiative, the two layers underneath stop being optional and start being load-bearing.

None of it ran on faith, either. Behaviours-based surveys and independent culture assessments ran constantly, the unglamorous discipline of checking whether the habits had actually landed and the specialists were actually being used, rather than assuming the training stuck because the training happened.

So the checklist I now apply to every program I look at, including the ones I’ve built myself since:

— Is there a shared layer everyone can use, not just the few selected for it

— Do the specialists have time, not just a certificate?

— Does the CEO talk about this like it is inherent to business strategy, or like it’s another initiative that someone is running?

— And how will anyone actually know if it worked?

Skip any one of those, and you don’t have a program. You have a very expensive training calendar, and after thirty years, I can usually spot one from the doorway.

None of this is a reason to give up on capability programs. It’s a reason to build them properly. Every organisation I’ve named here, including my own, learned this by getting parts of it wrong first. The two-layer structure works. Leadership sponsorship works. Active evaluation works. None of it is complicated. It just has to be done on purpose, not assumed.

If you’re building one of these right now and want to compare notes, find me at bluecrane.com.au, on LinkedIn, or at s.naidoo@bluecrane.com.au.

References

Commonwealth Bank of Australia. (2017, February 15). CBA 1H17 results: Media release. https://secure.commbank.com.au/content/dam/commbank/about-us/shareholders/pdfs/results/1h17/cba-2017-half-year-results-media-release.pdf

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