For most of my career I taught one lesson above all others.
Do not chase symptoms. Find the root cause.
I said it in every problem-solving workshop I ever ran. I said it to teams at General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Saturn, GE Medical, and Colgate-Palmolive. I built training programs around it. I was a designated Subject Matter Expert in Statistical Process Control, Design of Experiments, and root cause analysis, and the single most important thing I communicated in every session was this: most improvement efforts fail because they address what is visible rather than what is actually driving the problem.
Then I retired from my last executive role and started giving speeches about employee engagement and workplace culture.
And I broke my own rule for three years without realizing it.
I was describing symptoms. Over forty documented symptoms of employee disengagement, and I was recommending interventions aimed at every single one of them. I was doing exactly what I had spent decades telling other people not to do. The workshops felt productive. People seemed to find value. I kept getting invited back.
But at the end of every event, I went home feeling hollow.
It took me longer than it should have to admit why. When I finally did, I went back to the tools I trusted.
Toyota’s Five Whys. Ishikawa diagrams. The same root cause analysis methodology I had applied to manufacturing problems for fifty years. I applied them to employee disengagement instead.
What I found surprised me.
Underneath the symptoms: the turnover spikes, the engagement scores, the exit interview data that never quite explained anything; there was a specific operational condition driving almost everything I was observing. I came to call it standards erosion. The gap between the standard an organization believes is being applied and the standard actually applied in practice, particularly when the operation is under pressure.
End of month. Short-staffed. Behind schedule. That is when the standard posted on the wall and the standard actually enforced on the floor quietly diverge. And when they diverge, the workforce notices. The stories they tell about what they observed become the operating reality of the organization. And people start making quiet calculations about whether their effort will be treated fairly here.
The financial consequence of that divergence has never appeared as a line item in standard financial reporting. It accumulates invisibly in voluntary turnover, productivity drag, and the performance gap between a departure and a replacement reaching full capability.
Until someone adds it up.
That realization became the CLEAR Process, a five-step methodology that calculates the hidden cost of standards erosion from four operational inputs, locates its root causes, and builds the internal capability to eliminate it permanently.
The number it produces is always larger than leadership expects.
I should have known. Root cause analysis always produces surprises. That is the point.
If you have ever wondered whether the turnover in your operation has a root cause that your financial reporting has never shown you, the conversation starts with four data points and takes about five minutes.
Reach out directly at 740-552-9079 or through the contact page. I will come to you.