I once worked in quality improvement capacity as Director of TQM for a distribution company for whom the term supply management was a new concept. Purchasing in particular felt that it had no clout or influence over suppliers. The rest of the company saw purchasing as the price choppers and the whipping boy for stock outs. I was facilitating an improvement project with this group and we quickly ran up against resistance from other departments who thought that purchasing problems needed to be solved by purchasing alone and who weren’t interested in owning their contributions to problems. This was, of course, not entirely the case. In this company, Sales was the king to whom all others had to defer.  Not to minimize the importance of sales, since they were the revenue generators. But they often created unnecessary waste and cost (and fire drills for purchasing) due to their focus on making their numbers.  This resistance to working with purchasing rather than dictating to them turned out to be a bigger problem than recalcitrant suppliers. At one of our meetings, I jokingly described the way something was done as “Mickey Mouse”. One of the purchasing staffed replied that of course it was, as they were working for a Mickey Mouse company. After a few days, mouse ears and white gloves popped up all over purchasing on the tops of monitors and filing cabinets. I had struck a sensitive spot, and we had stumbled upon an inadvertent team-building tool.

However, continuous improvement meant working counter to a culture that had existed in this company since its inception and was very challenging. In this family-owned business, the staff was getting mixed messages. On the one hand, they were told that they were “empowered” to improve things. On the other hand, the empowerment went only so far before it could be squelched by the owner who, although he wanted his company to improve, felt that deep down, improvement was for everyone but him.

-Sherry R. Gordon

Thousands of people have gone through Six Sigma training and many call themselves Six Sigma Black Belts. While they may have gone through black belt training and possess the technical know-how, many may not adequately fulfill the role and create successful changes and improvements in an organization. They have the book learning but not the street smarts. Expertise in moving an organization on an improvement path is hard to do and especially difficult to teach in a course. It is a capability that is gained over time. And not everyone is able to make it happen.  

One questions how good a Six Sigma Black Belt is when they:

–Think and act tactically and not strategically.

–Fish  for their associates rather than teaching them how to fish or the opposite — won’t get their hands dirty.

–Can’t leave their egos behind and are self-agrandizing instead of inspirational.

–Are unable to motivate others.

–Focus on the Six Sigma tools but not on organizational and political barriers to success.

–Don’t know how to be agents for positive change and overcome resistance to change.

–Are ill at ease interacting with senior management

–Are statisticians who are not effective communicators at all levels of the organization.

–Have Six Sigma book learning but little real application of the tools.

–Claim to be a Black Belt and “name drop” about it, but don’t actually demonstrate their expertise, just brag about.

—Have difficulty being a team player

–Focus internally without truly considering the customer

As in any continuous improvement methodology, practitioners must be more than tool heads. They must possess essential leadership and communications skills and the guts combined with tact to be a positive change agent.  Six Sigma must add up to more than the sum of disparate cost savings in different areas of the company, or it will  not succeed or be sustainable.

-Sherry R. Gordon