Category: COE Forums

As a manager or practitioner, you’ve developed solid problem-solving skills. Yet organizationally, problem solving tends to be isolated to certain people, roles, departments, or events. You still don’t have an “everybody, everywhere, everyday” improvement culture. To build an improvement culture, you have to move from doing problem solving to coaching problem solving. The thing is, these are two distinctly different skills.

I recently led a webinar for Fisher’s Center for Operational Excellence on the topic of “The Curious Leader,” which members can view in COE's Members Only Digital Content Archive (February 2020). We had a great discussion about how curiosity can help leaders build better relationships, grow their expertise, and become more innovative.

This is our first year hosting our annual Leading Through Excellence summit virtually, but we've spent years perfecting the multi-day learning session that happens every April. We'll miss the lunches, VIP reception, and in-person networking -- but we're excited to offer the myriad of benefits that come along with hosting a virtual event.

What do great organizations look like today? Do they have the best strategy? Are they the most efficient? Whilst both of these factors are essential, strategy (what we do) has become almost irrelevant and operational excellence (how we do things) is not easy to achieve.

Throughout the year, COE blends its line-up of big events with other sessions designed to get member companies connected on a smaller scale. The beginning of the summer has a few notable opportunities like this. June 5: Lean Leader Benchmarking