Create goals
When you’re leading a change initiative,
you need to recognize that people will
start to lose their momentum, so you have
to keep them engaged in the process.
“When you’re trying to move people
from one state to another, you have to
create a sense of urgency,” Donges says.
“You’re trying to move the company to a
new place. Over time, people get
fatigued, and they lose that passion.”
You have to create methodologies to
keep the sense of urgency in place to
keep people moving forward.
“Create precise, short-term goals, so
that if they hit those goals, they see that
we’re moving to this new place.”
For instance, when Donges arrived at
Lane, the company had more than 100 accidents the first year he was there. He wanted to lower that number, so every board,
department head and location meeting
started by addressing safety.
“You have to get people’s attention,” he
says. “Every single orientation, that’s the
first thing that I talk about — safety.”
But establishing goals isn’t enough. You have to break that
goal down and understand the smaller components.
“You can sit down and say, ‘I’m supposed to be in construction; I’m supposed to hit the goals of quality and cost and time,’
so that on the surface is very simple to do,” Donges says. “How
you get the data and how accurate it is and how relevant it is
to those three goals is important.”
For example, if Donges says he wants to be the highest quality builder in the country, he has to look at how that’s measured. Is it by the number of client complaints? The number of
violations he receives from inspectors? Or his own quality-assurance process?
“It’s not easy to get there,” he says. “Sometimes, your initial
understanding of what those goals are like doesn’t translate
into an immediate data point. You have to understand what it
means, and sometimes, you have to try some, measure them
and see if they’re relevant.”
When testing your metrics, look for employee feedback.
“That comes out when you start having your meetings with
people and they say, ‘Why are we measuring how many nails
we used last week? It doesn’t make sense,’” Donges says.
After you get feedback, then you can better hone what you’re
measuring.
“You find yourself refining these to a place where you really
get it,” he says. “You get the metrics right over time because it
actually bares itself out because it shows that what you did is
relevant to that word — quality.”
By tracking the data and promoting safety, Donges was able
to reduce the number of annual accidents from around 100 to
30, and even the severity of the accidents has lowered.
Beyond numbers, now when he talks to employees, they’re
talking about safety, too, because they’ve seen how much he’s
reinforced it.
“You could see now that safety was now a state of mind,” he
says. “It wasn’t a rule or requirement. It was something they
believed in, and you can look at the data and see how the metrics are working out for you.”
