What We Learned by Watching

I lived a version of what Cindy described while rolling out a 5S initiative with two assembly line teams. They worked side by side, building nearly identical products. One line lead embraced the process; the other pushed back at every step.

In the short term, there was little difference in output between the two lines. Over time, though, a gap surfaced, and the explanations came fast: one crew had better uptime, the other got tougher orders. Nobody ever traced it back to what those two leads did or didn’t do. When leadership is considered intangible, the gap always gets blamed on something else.

Since finding Buchanan’s article in early 2023, I’ve shared her statistic with thousands of leaders across the United States, and it’s worth repeating here, word for word: “Increased commitment can lead to a 57% improvement in discretionary effort... That greater effort produces, on average, a 20% individual performance improvement.” And every single time, that’s been received by wrinkled foreheads and scowls. Until I asked the same question Cindy just challenged you with, “Think of the best and the worst leader you have worked with.” In many cases, I actually saw the lightbulb appear above a supervisor or manager’s head as they made the connection.

From there, it was never difficult for them to picture how they gave the additional discretionary effort or how the performance improvement showed up in their own work; I know I can point to specifics from my personal experience. That tied right in with how we’ve closed every lesson we’ve shared with groups since starting our business in 2015: identify one specific thing you can apply right away and detail the result you want to achieve, then share that with whoever you report to so you can collaborate on it moving forward.

We’ve seen leaders write down action steps that would make an immediate impact on their organization’s culture and profitability. As simple as that sounds, several problems kept showing up. Follow-through and sustainability are incredibly hard. That’s where ongoing coaching earns its keep, but that’s a separate conversation. Moving an idea from paper to practice is nearly as difficult without a clear picture of what that action actually looks like. And underneath both of those, in nearly every organization we worked with, there was no baseline to start from.

For years, Cindy and I worked those behaviors with organizations across nearly every industry, and we watched them work. Then we’d hit the same wall, every single time. There was no way to tell a leader where they stood before they started, no way to show them it had moved, and no common language between two organizations doing the same work. Good behavior with no baseline is a hope, not a plan. The behaviors were never the problem; not being able to see where you started was. Even the best action steps are tough to sustain when the stuff hits the fan if you can’t measure them against a starting point. So think of the last leadership training your organization paid for. Can you say what changed? If not, was the training the problem, or was it never knowing where you stood before it started? And without knowing where you started, there’s a bigger risk most of us never see coming: you can’t be sure you’re even working on the right problem. Cindy’s going to show you what that looks like.