Key Points

• Hoshin Kanri promotes open feedback, allowing departments to collaborate easily when working toward set goals.
• This approach isn’t just about setting strategic vision in the long term, but also about empowering employees and letting them share ownership of goals.
• The X-Matrix is a vital tool for promoting transparency, fostering communication, and ultimately allowing for effective cross-functional collaboration to take place.

Making use of Hoshin Kanri is one way that businesses can fully align their workflows with long-term strategic goals.

This is vital for any organization, as having targets to reach is always going to benefit any company.

That said, little gets said when it comes down to how Hoshin Kanri can benefit cross-functional collaboration.

Cross-functional teams are one of the most effective ways of unifying a workforce and eliminating silos entirely.

Taking a structured, systematic approach to how you make use of Hoshin Kanri can help your teams reach new heights and achieve breakthroughs that wouldn’t have been possible previously.

So, with that in mind, let’s look at how Hoshin Kanri strengthens cross-functional teams.

Catchball

Catchball is one of the most important elements of Hoshin Kanri, and is one that you’ll come to rely on with cross-functional collaboration. In a nutshell, catchball opens up a two-way street for communication. This allows managers to state their intended goals, and empowers employees as they are part of the shared ownership of said goals. Catchball thrives on an exchange of ideas between organizational levels.

Vision and Action

At the start of implementing any sort of Hoshin Kanri-based objectives, you can view it as such: senior leadership, or owners even, throwing three-to-five-year breakthrough goals to middle managers. Ordinarily, at least with some methodologies, you wouldn’t expect such direct communication through the different strata that make up a company’s leadership.

As previously mentioned, by getting the upper echelon of leadership on the ground floor, you’re enabling everyone involved to get a sense of ownership over the goals.

Feedback

Going back to our middle managers, they’ll be the ones catching these goals. It is up to them to analyze and determine feasibility and translate that into tasks and projects for their teams. This opens the floor to communication and feedback from the front-line employees. Discussions centered around concepts like potential challenges, resource needs, and dependencies are going to be instrumental in planning and achieving these goals.

Typically, middle managers are going to be looking at these projects as something done yearly, with the higher-level goal assigned from top leadership being the final objective. After feedback is gathered, items of concern, resource needs, and so forth are presented to higher leadership for review and approval.

Breaking Down Silos

It might not seem like it, but this constant back and forth isn’t just happening in a single location in your organization. Instead, it is taking part across the whole company, and likely involves multiple departments talking to one another. Cross-functional collaboration is a core component of Hoshin Kanri, and it becomes readily evident when planning to achieve the aims of any set goals.

Everyone in the company is aware of said goals and has a hand in shaping how the organization achieves them. This forces different functions as well, with departments like IT, marketing, manufacturing, and others to communicate to more effectively coordinate, align efforts, and clear up any potential resource conflicts that might arise down the line.

X-Matrix

At the heart of any successful use of Hoshin Kanri is the X-Matrix. As a visual tool, it promotes clarity, connecting long-term vision, annual objectives, and key metrics on a single page. Successful use of this document is going to promote transparency and get everyone from senior leadership to low-level workers on the same page.

Holistic Views

One of the core functions of the X-Matrix is connecting long-term vision, objectives, priorities, and key metrics in an easy-to-use document. The X at the center of the document shows interdependencies, which only serve to aid any sort of cross-functional collaboration. It might seem like a gimmick if you’re new to the approach, but it is one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal.

Identifying Dependencies

The X-Matrix’s power in terms of cross-functional collaborations is how it maps projects and responsibilities. You aren’t just viewing the annual objectives, but also improvement projects, and which teams are responsible for a given task. This amount of transparency immediately highlights where cross-functional collaboration isn’t just beneficial, but a must. A company endeavoring to launch a new product in the coming year will likely want to link projects with engineering, research and development, marketing, and sales, making just how closely tied they are to one another evident from the start.

Shared Accountability

With transparency comes a higher degree of accountability. The X-Matrix isn’t just linking teams, but individuals to specific projects and metrics. Ideally, this allows everyone to understand their role in accomplishing what needs to be done to achieve the bigger picture. Further, any team is going to understand that they play a vital role in contributing to the overall success of these long-term goals.

As such, it isn’t just about promoting transparency, but continuing to give purpose and empowering your employees. It isn’t a matter of a task being out of a department’s wheelhouse, but rather about fostering a collaborative mindset built on a foundation of communication for overall success.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Ready to start the work week right? You might want to take a closer look at how Lean Six Sigma is innovating patient care in the medical profession. This hybrid methodology might be well-suited for the likes of manufacturing, but many organizations are finding it to be an effective means of addressing resource optimization, defect reduction, and increasing overall customer satisfaction.

Additionally, you might want to learn about how business process reengineering can radically change your organization overnight. This isn’t an approach for the faint of heart by any means, but it might be just what the doctor ordered when it comes to legacy processes that are falling short of expectations. By taking a clean-slate approach, BPR helps organizations reinvent themselves and stay competitive in the wider market.

Conclusion

Hoshin Kanri isn’t just about setting goals for your organization, but rather making your company a cohesive whole. It can be easy to forget that companies are all working towards shared goals, but making use of Hoshin Kanri can invite far more robust cross-functional collaboration and eliminate silos in the process.