We at Kroger are considering creating a "contract" of sorts with our champions. This is not a legally binding contract, but one based on good faith. We are going to be asking champions and the greenbelt candidates they send to training to sign a document that outlines the expectations of certification, and the time committment needed to become certified. By signing, each person is declaring that they understand the expectations and agree to complete the requirements and drive change in the organization.
Does anyone else have anything like that in place? How is it working? Looking for advice on this one. I'm a bit conflicted.
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For me such a contract is a mixed blessing.
On one hand, you have a written commitment, but on the other hand you don't have any consequences if the contract is not been fulfilled.
I assume there will be the same excuses about why the project is delayed, not done, etc. as usual but with additional effort to set up these, as I understood, mostly individual contracts.
We are thinking about adding an respective commitment note to the yearly individual employee performance review. If the timeline has not been met without any comprehensible reason or the overall performance of the Belt is unacceptable, he will be taken out of the program with the personal consequence of losing opportunities for promotion.
What is missed here are consequences for the Champion for his performance in supporting and triggering the Belt being bad.
As mentioned, we haven't implemented it yet.
We don't have any contracts, but our organization fails in holding champions and green belts accountable. I agree with Carsten on the negatives and I think I read some hesitation in your post, but I'm not sure what better alternative there is. I like Carsten's idea of the bad performance review, but having a carrot out there would help too. Do any of you have positive motivators for Green Belts? How are they working?
Ok, I missed to mention the positiv side of being a Belt.
We're communicating strongly, that being a Belt helps definitely to be promoted. For some positions, being a certified GB or BB is actually required. This is why we have a huge amount of inquiries from employees regarding GB/BB training.
But as usual, after the training the first excitement decreases and they realize that getting certified requires some work to be done.
For the Champions, we don't have any carrot except the fact that the projects should help them to solve their respective problems.
Unfortunately we obviously didn't find a way to communicate this well...
Thanks guys. You're absolutley correct about the lack of "pain" that will be felt if the champions and GB's don't live up to the commitment, but we don't currently have a culture where certification is valued (nor understood). In many cases the best fire fighters have been rewarded with promotion. I guess we (like many others) have a lot of work to do in this area. My fear is that having an incongruency between the perceived pain associated with this contract and the reality of our culture will create a no win situation for our early participants. Said differently, if someone wants to participate and learn a new skill, the risk assessment would see pain for failure and little gain for success. I don't want to create that environment.
We did have champion contracting during my BB stint at Ford Motor and it helps a bit.
we dont have contact in AMI now but instead we include number of projects to be closed by a GB/BB in their yearly individual goal setting. We also reward GB's/BB's and their teams for each project closed equivalent to 2% of their hard savings which is done every quarter. This helps them work on their project much faster.
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