Knowledge Base · Leadership
How do I get leadership buy-in for continuous improvement?
Buy in is not a signature on a budget. In Chapter 7 the first barrier is leaders treating improvement as a side project run by a CI team, disconnected from strategy. Real buy in means senior leaders own the vision, state it relentlessly, and connect every improvement to the mission, answering the why again and again.
Chapter 7 names lack of leadership buy-in as the first of its ten barriers, and defines the failure precisely. Leaders, in that failure, keep improvement apart from the strategy, as a side project owned by one department, instead of weaving it into how the company runs. The work is then seen as external, optional and a distraction from the real work, and teams end up busy with improvement activity that has no shared purpose behind it.
The author learned this from his own deployments in 2014 and again in 2018. They were technically sound, with the right templates, workshops and training, but buy in at the very top was never deep or real. Senior leaders supported the idea of improvement, but had not woven it into their strategic narrative. The result felt like pushing a boulder uphill: progress was possible, but the moment the pushing stopped, the boulder rolled back down. His conclusion: the effort cannot be sustained when it is pushed only from below or from the side. Vision, and the voice carrying it, have to start at the top.
So buy in, in the book's terms, is a leadership behaviour, not an approval. A leader's job is not just to sign the cheque for the initiative. It is to own the vision, articulate it relentlessly, and tie each improvement effort back to the mission it serves. Chapter 6 adds the other half: leaders champion the work, set the tone, and model the behaviours, because culture flows downhill from them.
Related questions
- What is the leader's role in continuous improvement?
- What are the most common reasons continuous improvement fails?
- Why does continuous improvement fail when it's run as a program instead of a philosophy?
Source: Continuous Improvement in the Workplace, Ch. 6 (Cultivating Leadership for CI) and Ch. 7 (Pitfalls to Avoid in CI Initiatives).