Actions are the source of improvement, not people.

I remember a director in charge of the automotive engineers at a contract R&D firm. He complained out loud and often about his staff. He had come from a big car manufacturer where apparently they could measure load curves for engines in a quarter of the time it took his current team to get them. Somehow this poor man had now ended up with a bunch of nitwits who could not do it right. In time, I learned he was right, partially.

He looked at measurable results – that was the good part.  Comparing the time it takes to get load curves told him that his current team needed to improve, and by how much.

The part he got wrong was that he only kept looking at the people, judging them. But he never focused on what they actually did. To his mind there was little else to fix but his staff. And the results never improved.

People are not the source of improvement, their actions are.

A trivial distinction? Not when it impacts how managers relate to their team. If we believe people are the source of improvement, we can easily assume that there is something wrong with them when improvement fails to materialize. That R&D director told me his staff lacked motivation and/or pride in their work. You name it, they lacked it.

But if we believe that actions are the source of improvement, we do not look for “people flaws” as the cause of failures. Instead we analyze how the work is performed. We objectively see what’s missing. Then we address it.

Taking “people” out of the improvement equation offers a different perspective. Webster’s defines improvement as “a change for the better”. What exactly becomes better? And what changes?

“Better” implies a comparison with what was before. This can only be about results, since only they can be measured. But results cannot be changed directly. It is our actions that produce results. Hence my definition:

Improvement: Changing how we act to produce better results.

Here is an interesting corollary I never truly realized until I understood the source of improvement:

We get the results that our actions create, nothing more and nothing less.
If we want different results, our actions must change.

Look to the collective actions of the team as the source of improvement:

• What actions must change?
• What are we not doing that we should be doing?
• What are we doing that we should stop doing?

The source of improvement is working differently. Thankfully, figuring out what actions are needed to reach new goals is becoming simpler in this information age. Best practices, empirical research, training seminars, continuous improvement point the way.

How we’ll make everybody work the new way – That’s the real challenge.