Overview

With Max Isaac ^[1]

The soft stuff is the hard stuff.

Chris Cool, Vice President Quality and Lean, Northrop Grumman

DMAIC is the heart of Six Sigma, leadership effectiveness is the soul.

Nori Morimoto, ITT Champion

Talk to people who have been there, who have successfully implemented Lean Six Sigma or one its predecessors, and they ll all tell you the same thing: having the best data, tools, and improvement methods in the world won t help you much if you don t have black belts who are effective team leaders. Lean Six Sigma is about leveraging the knowledge, energy, and passion of the whole team: the green belts, process owners, and other team members. Time and again, at company after company, experience shows that being able to deal effectively with the human element of improvement is a more critical determinant of team success than the rational, analytical processes and tools.

Steve Hochhauser, currently a senior vice president at Johns Manville, learned this lesson when he worked on one of the earliest implementations of Six Sigma. AlliedSignal has become one of the premier examples of effective Six Sigma implementation in the world, says Hochhauser. We started seeing much faster, better results once we had black belts who had been through leadership training. The skills and tools they learned helped them make the transition from having a narrower engineering perspective to having a true business perspective across the organization. They really blossomed and were able to lead their teams to...