In a 2-part podcast next week, I have Bob Petruska, author of Gemba Walks for Service Excellence: The Step-by-Step Guide for Identifying Service Delighters and Mick Wilz, Director of Enterprise Excellence and Co-Owner of Sur-Seal Corporation.
Mick, co-owner of Sur-Seal Corporation, began his own journey to personal and business excellence about five years ago by actively seeking a variety of tools to meet his needs and the needs of the business. “My interest is to take tribal knowledge and make it visual and accessible to everyone,” he says. We talked about Mick’s journey in part one of the podcast (next week).
In part 2 of the podcast, I had Bob talk about as a consultant how he might apply what he has learned from Mick to other organizations. Bob is phenomenal at leading change and his take on Mick’s journey was remarkable.
You can find both these guys on the same day and at the same place at the upcoming ASQ Charlotte Conference on April 8th, 2014. It will be held at the Harris Conference Center. Not that I am biased but Bob and Mick’s track is called Keep Your Organization’s Chain Straight.
Podcast Excerpt
Joe: What is different about what Mick did that others don’t do?
Bob Petruska (Sustain Lean Consulting) :
What I see Mick doing is he’s engaging people on a visceral level. He’s engaging them in a way that allows them to become part of the construction of the future. We think of it as building a bridge. We’re building a bridge across a sea of uncertainty, and we’re walking on the bridge that we’re building on as we go because we don’t know what’s in the future. There are so many uncertainties out there.
I love that Mick has identified that people are really afraid of uncertainty. By recognizing this, he’s found a brilliant way, a solution to overcome people’s uncertainty in a couple different ways. Number one, he allows them to use their hands to be part of it, and adults learn by doing. They don’t learn by going to a course or a conference. You learn by applying yourself. He’s having people apply themselves immediately to the task at hand which is constructing together a better future. They get to work it out ahead of time – “Will this work? What will be the tradeoff of us moving this piece of equipment from here to there in that flow?” I think it’s brilliant.
The other thing is people want to be part of something. One of his quotes that I really love is, “You gotta have a seat on the bus for everyone”. What it means to me when he says that is that we all have something valuable to contribute. When you think about there’s differences in the way people think, there’s value in those differences. Servicing the intricacies of the different ways of thinking actually ends up with a better solution than if everyone just kind of nods their heads, “Oh yeah, yeah, go ahead and do that,” but then silently don’t really buy-in and then later come out and actually try to destroy and say, “You know I told them this wasn’t going to work.” Instead, he asks people, “Tell me what to do.” So he’s showing humility, and he’s showing respect for the people and he’s respecting the people who know the job best. That’s really for me it’s all about respect for people, and that builds a trusting environment where I think people can be fully utilized. He’s doing a lot of things that I really admire.
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