Continuous Self Improvement And Lean Six Sigma: What You Need To Know

The way to be successful is through constant improvement and continuous learning. Hence, focusing on continuous self-improvement and learning to apply Lean Six Sigma is key.

The key to continuous self-improvement is to get used to thinking like an entrepreneur and to always be willing to make adjustments. This mindset allows you to adapt to any changing circumstances, quickly identify weaknesses, and eliminate problems before they become serious enough to affect your overall well-being. It also requires that you constantly be open to learning from others’ mistakes, experiences, and advice.

In order to achieve this, you must be comfortable with failure. When you are faced with an obstacle, trying to find a solution may not always work. It’s okay to fail once in a while. As long as you’re still trying to figure things out, you’re still learning.

But if you’re not willing to take risks and experiment, you’ll never learn anything. Lean Six Sigma is a powerful tool to help you develop an entrepreneurial mindset and increase your ability to deal with uncertainty.

This post shares the importance of continuous self-improvement and Lean Six Sigma, which is one of the tools you can use to stay focused on your self improvement and your business and to continually improve its operations.

What Does Continuous Self Improvement Mean?

For Yourself

Continuously improving oneself, as in continuous self-improvement, means becoming better at something every day. But it also means striving to be better, and not just better than your peers, but better than yourself. We live in a society where people strive to achieve excellence in all aspects of life. In business, we call this continual improvement a competitive advantage. In marketing, we call it differentiation.

Most people want to improve themselves. We all want to be better versions of ourselves. So how do you make that happen? Well, it’s a little bit different than most people would think. It’s not simply about being better than you are right now. It’s about improving every day, even if you feel like you’re doing just fine. If you’re constantly improving, you’re building the skills you need to be better than you are right now.

For Your Career

Self-improvement is essential for career advancement. You should always strive to improve yourself through learning new skills, developing your leadership abilities, expanding your knowledge base and networking. Most importantly, you should learn from your mistakes and develop a better attitude in your life. In addition, you must strive to do all of this in an ethical manner, so as to ensure you don’t harm yourself or others.

Continuous self-improvement is defined as the ongoing process of improvement and growth in your business, career or life. There are many reasons to improve yourself continuously. It can help you achieve personal goals and increase productivity. And it can even improve your overall happiness and quality of life.

For Your Business

If you’re going to continuously improve your business, you have to figure out what it means to you. To your employees. To your customers. To your vendors. To yourself.

It means doing everything you can to continually improve the quality and performance of your business. The process of continuous improvement begins with the mindset you have about your business and how you approach it. To become better, your company must change — from top to bottom. But the change doesn’t stop there. Your employees need to change too. They have to adapt their methods of operation and work ethic to meet the new needs of your company.

A company that constantly improves its services and products has a competitive advantage over those that don’t.

The Continuous Improvement Process Model

One of the most widely used tools for the continuous improvement model for businesses is a four-step quality assurance method—the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle:

Plan: Identify an opportunity and plan for change.
Do: Implement the change on a small scale.
Check: Use data to analyze the results of the change and determine whether it made a difference.
Act: If the change was successful, implement it on a wider scale and continuously assess your results. If the change did not work, begin the cycle again.

Other extensively used methods of continuous improvement, such as: Lean, Six Sigma, and Total Quality Management, highlight employee involvement and teamwork, work to measure and systematize processes, and reduce variation, defects, and cycle times.

What Is Lean Six Sigma?

Lean Six Sigma is a fact-based, data-driven philosophy of improvement that values prevention over detection of defects. It drives customer satisfaction and bottom-line results by reducing variation, waste, and cycle time, while promoting the use of work standardization and flow, thereby creating a competitive advantage. It applies anywhere variation and waste exist, and every employee should be involved.

Both Lean and Six Sigma provide customers with the best possible quality, cost, delivery, and a newer attribute, nimbleness. A great deal of overlap between the two disciplines exists; however, both approach their common purpose from slightly different angles:

Lean focuses on reduction of wastes, whereas Six Sigma emphasizes reduction of variation.
Lean achieves its goals by using less technical tools such as Kaizen, workplace organization, and visual controls, whereas Six Sigma tends to use statistical data analysis, design of experiments, and hypothesis testing.

Often than not, successful implementations begin with the Lean approach, making the workplace as efficient and effective as possible, reducing waste, and using value stream maps to improve understanding and throughput. If process problems persist, more technical Six Sigma statistical tools may then be applied.

What Is Lean?

Lean or Lean production is a system of techniques and activities for running a manufacturing or service operation. These techniques and activities differ according to the application at hand but they have the same underlying principle: the elimination of all non-value-adding activities and waste from the business process.

Lean manufacturing is related to the operational model implemented in the post-war 1950s and 1960s by the Japanese automobile company Toyota, called “The Toyota Way” or the Toyota Production System (TPS).

The Lean Tools

Lean provides some powerful principles and tools for process improvement, inlcuding:

Just In Time Concepts
Value Stream Map
Quick Changeover
Mistake-Proofing
Visual Workplace
5S
Total Productive Maintenance
Kaizen

What Is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma focuses on reducing process variation and enhancing process control, whereas Lean drives out waste (non-value added processes and procedures) and promotes work standardization and flow. The distinction between Six Sigma and Lean has blurred, with the term “Lean Six Sigma” being used more and more often because process improvement requires aspects of both approaches to attain positive results.

The Six Sigma Tools

Six Sigma is a system that provides organizations with process improvement methodologies to advance the capability of their business, including:

Statistical Process Control (SPC)
Control Charts
Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)
Process Mapping

Continuous Self Improvement And Lean Six Sigma

In a company, continuous self-improvement is the process of continually improving products, processes, and systems. Lean Six Sigma is a management method that cuts waste and increases customer satisfaction. Both continuous improvement and Lean Six Sigma involve eliminating non-value adding activities and reallocating resources.

Lean Six Sigma is an improvement methodology that involves the continuous improvement of business processes. This means that if you want to become a stronger marketer or a better entrepreneur, you have to keep learning, studying, and practicing.

You’ve got to be willing to take on new challenges. The good news is that there’s no shortage of challenges out there, especially if you want to get certified with Lean Six Sigma Belts, i.e.. Yellow Belt, Green Belt, Black Belt, and Master Black Belt. This means that you’ll need to be willing to step outside of your comfort zone and do something new.

Are you ready to take your career to the next level and become a leader in process improvement? Then take the first step and enroll in a Lean Six Sigma course today! From Yellow Belt to Master Black Belt, learn the tools and techniques to eliminate waste, increase efficiency, and improve customer satisfaction.

Don’t wait any longer, take the challenge and invest in your professional development by signing up for a Lean Six Sigma course now!

Check out vriuniversity.com for a wide range of Lean Six Sigma courses that can help you achieve your goals.

Table Of Contents[ Hide ]

What Does Continuous Self Improvement Mean?
What Is Lean Six Sigma?
Continuous Self Improvement And Lean Six Sigma

Maria Milo is a Continuous Improvement Teacher and Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt.She is on a mission to teach people how to apply continuous improvement tools, methods and the thought process in important aspects of life; business, career, and self. Maria has 25+ years of career experience and is President of Variance Reduction International, Inc (VRI). Her experience has taught her that when people are able to continuously improve themselves and their environment, they can achieve great things and lead happier lives.

Maria Milo

Author