Continuous improvement is crucial for the ongoing success and growth of any business and organization. Your leadership style can either promote or hinder people practicing continuous improvement. I’ll talk about that in this video.

In a previous article and video, I talked about how to get employees to be more creative and drive continuous improvement. I spoke about three key components, which were the type of person, the level of self-esteem and self-confidence of people and thirdly, the culture of the company and the style of leadership.

The culture of an organization is driven by the values, beliefs and the style of leadership of top management. Thus, the leaders of organizations must evolve in their thinking and leadership style in order to drive continuous improvement from employees.

A participative leadership style is required to promote and support continuous improvement from employees. It necessitates taking a proactive approach to solving problems, rather than being reactive. This means practicing prevention rather than fighting fires.

It also means developing autonomous teams comprised of team members who are mature enough to facilitate problem-solving sessions in their respective teams or department. This requires training on team development, which includes interpersonal communication skills and problem-solving techniques. You cannot expect to just put a group of people together and presume they will work as a team. Just because people get along with each other does not mean that they are working as a team.

Teams need to grow from the stage of dependency to an interdependent state where they function more autonomously. Working this way they are able to step back from the day-to-day tasks and brainstorm to find ways to make improvements and then propose well thought out solutions to management.

A participative leadership style does not mean total democracy in decision-making. There are times when leaders need to take charge and be more autocratic in their style. But there needs to be a balance between controlling everything and having employees participate in decision-making and problem-solving.

Everyone has ideas and experience that they can contribute towards continuous improvement. Certain types of people embrace participating in these activities while others may shy away from it. The challenge is to get everyone to participate and this is why team development and problem-solving training is imperative.

Trust is another crucial element for employee involvement in continuous improvement. Trust needs to be established at all levels, between leaders and employees and also amongst employees and within teams.

Creating a mindset throughout an organization that promotes people practicing continuous improvement takes time and commitment on the part of leadership. Leaders need to assure adequate coaching and support to employees in order to go from simple task execution to continuously finding new and better ways to do things.

Any organization that clearly sees the benefits of performing continuous improvement and makes a commitment to the process can only reap great rewards.