Podcast: Does Size Hurt or Help Meaningful Change? Part 2
Size matters when it comes to implementing culture change in an organization, be it team-based continuous improvement or other transformational effort. And by size, we are speaking of an organization’s size.
In this episode of Behind the Curtain: Adventures in Continuous Improvement, hosts John Dyer and Dr. Mohamed Saleh continue their discussion about important factors to be mindful of when embarking on an organizational change journey, based on the size of the organization.
In the previous episode, the hosts addressed three ways in which organizational size shapes transformational change. This episode addresses three more aspects: access to resources, cultural agility and leadership bandwidth.
Among the hosts’ observations:
Access to resources: Large organizations have flexibility that is absent from small manufacturing companies. Want to hold a kaizen event? Big organizations can pull multiple people off the line and keep production moving. Small organizations “have to get very creative,” notes Dyer. That creativity may mean building ahead of schedule to accommodate a training event, bringing the workforce in on a Saturday and paying overtime, or forgoing a traditional 40-hour kaizen event in one week and instead extending it to three or four weeks, but reducing the hours per day.
Cultural agility. Saleh notes that small organizations may have freedom to experiment or pivot that is absent in the bureaucracy of a larger manufacturer. Of course, that holds true in a smaller organization only as long as leadership is committed to change.
Leadership bandwidth: The podcast hosts discuss the potential for micro-managing or the opposite—too much delegation—in a large organization, while quicker collaboration is typical within a smaller organization.
And, to sum up, Saleh says, “People need to be a little bit more mindful of [size] when they're going into an organization or into an organization that's changing, to understand the context” of what’s happening.