KEY POINTS:
Kaizen is Japanese for "continuous improvement" and seeks to eliminate "activities that add cost but do not add value".
It's one of the principles Craig Lewis, author of Lead to Succeed, uses to coach business people and elite athletes.
Everyone needs Kaizen time, which Lewis describes as 20 to 30 minutes for you to determine what areas you need to improve and how you can improve them.
"Where do I need to improve? If by putting energy into a certain area, what's going to give me greatest value added?"
Lewis has been involved in elite sport for about 20 years. He played a critical role in the successful 2005 Tri-Nations Rugby League campaign for the Kiwis and the world championship winning New Zealand short-track speed skating team of 1993.
Performance management on the sporting field comes down to a "post match review form" which each player completes according to the following questions.
"I will achieve the following goals. What am I going to do? What am I going to improve? How am I going to improve it? Why is it important to improve it?"
The questions are designed to get players to delve deeply into the areas of their game that they need to work on and develop and ask the question, "Why?".
"The people who know why will always be the people who know how."
Lewis says the principles he uses were originally taken from business and applied to sport.
"The idea of the book is to reapply the principles back to business using the analogy of sport."
You might not think of elite athletes doing much paperwork. But Lewis goes as far as to have his players identify three daily achievements and write them down everyday.
"Confidence and belief comes from getting an understanding that you've got a thorough knowledge of the task and that you're mentally and physically well prepared and ready to perform."
In order for people to perform at that level, Lewis says he has worked hard to develop a positive culture where people are trusted and respected.
"There are opportunities for people to be feeling like they've got a sense of belonging and that they have a strong ownership to everything that we're trying to accomplish."
If an employee comes into an organisation that already has pre-defined values and those values are not re-enforced, people often become distanced from them.
Lewis says it's important for people to see success in terms of how well the values are fulfilled.
"We define our values and get them to the point where everybody really understands them. And then we constantly reinforce them.
"We constantly reflect on how well we're going in regards to those values."
Failure is painful whether it's on or off the field. But Lewis says coping with failure is easier if there are specific goals set out to achieve and there is proper feedback based on the goals.
"Once you can do that, in any environment, then people are going to be more readily able to deal with failure and setbacks because they can always see a recipe and a remedy to the failure and setbacks."
One of the biggest ingredients for success is believing in yourself, Lewis says.
"The only way you can believe in yourself is if you have some form of substantiation around that belief."
That means you've identified where you need to develop. You have a strategy to develop in that area and you have an action plan to see improvement in that area.
If improvement requires changing some behaviours, Lewis says the key is to be clear about the direction you want to take.
"If people have enough experiences around a certain direction that they're going in, then that becomes their behaviour. That's really what we're trying do in sport and that's what you need to be trying to do in business."
But the performance management needs to remain constant. Lewis says he constantly puts in front of his players the ideal model of where they need to be.
"When people get constant reinforcement around the values that have been set by the organisation, then their behaviour falls into line with those values."
But it's not all one way communication. Lewis says you've got to create an avenue for the workers or players to have a say as well.
"People need to feel like they've got voice within your organisation. Everybody wants to have voice."
Lewis says even a simple suggestion box will do the trick. But for workers to be the most productive they can be requires a bit more.
"Having people happy and fulfilled in their situation and believing that there's care within the organisation culminates in productivity without you necessarily having to specifically target it as an ideal that you want to achieve."
