Continuous Improvement

One competency most prized and valued in business today is that of ‘continuous improvement’… the relentless and never ending quest to raise the bar in any sphere in your life. Let us look at an athlete who, throughout his practice sessions, times himself and focuses on beating his own record each time. The key here is not to limit yourself to work place. On the contrary, start by using this principle in your personal life. In-fact the attitude that we adopt and practice in our personal life surely affects our professional life in a significant way. I am a firm believer that if one does not have the mind set of continuous improvement in one’s personal life one may find it very difficult to adopt the same in one’s professional life. In keeping with this belief think about any area of your personal life where you can say that you are focused on achieving continuous improvement? Is there some thing that you are trying to do better than yesterday or last month or last year?

The first golden rule is that ‘improvement comes from the processes’. Simply by setting new and higher goals you start thinking of how to get there. For example, if you’re trying to manage your time more efficiently, then just set a goal that this month you would reduce your late sittings to half & still manage to complete all the tasks for the day. You’re bound to fall flat on this goal if you just keep doing the same things the same way. Look closely, you would surely identify the ‘time waster’ and ‘fatiguing’ activities; eliminate these. This continuous learning, tweaking & changing is the foundation for achieving the desired milestones. We improve our situation only if we learn that the current situation is lesser than desirable or simply that there is still scope for improvement. We improve by making small changes in the way we do things.

The second golden rule to remember is that ‘God is in incremental growth’. Try losing 6kgs in two weeks… you might actually succeed, but within no time those kilos would be back. Or take a language crash course and learn a new language in just a month, you might be able to correct sentences in that language but you’ll see your limitation in using the language to express yourself. Very soon you’ll actually forget most of it. Any endeavor following the rule of spurts, is sure to fail. As commonly known, any incremental growth would have its peak and might not stay as motivating with time. Well at this juncture, change your goals! The constant dialogue has to be improvement and there are innumerable areas for ‘continuous improvement’. Success then is inevitable.

On the larger canvas, it is this relentless focus on continuous improvement that guides the success of most organizations. Ask any CEO about the mantra for growth, more often than not it is not the big bang; it is actually the small incremental and ongoing improvements at each step and in each process!


In one of my earlier assignments about ten years ago, the CEO had taken ‘Quality Drive’ for the whole organization. Struggling with ‘how to drive home quality’, he thought of not using work environment as the driver. The risk being that the real spirit of quality would get reduced to dead process documents. Continuously improving himself, he came up with an interesting initiative that made a humungous change in the organization’s culture and in the true sense, Quality got internalized. In each of my training programs he took the first slot of half an hour to address the participants. He asked every one to list about four or five areas of personal life where they would like to improve and track the frequency of default, using quality management tools and did the same himself. Simple things like polishing shoes everyday, grooming every week, reading two books every week etc. got shared in his session. Month after month, he shared and asked the participants to share their goals, successes & defaults. This practice germinated from the belief that unless people see continuous improvement in their personal life, they would not be able to focus on the same in their professional life. Wow, what a way to integrate continuous self improvement to continuous organizational improvement!

rajesh@peoplefactorindia.com
The writer is a management consultant and a leadership coach.