This video is an excerpt from a live Q&A session with Chrissy Scivicque, Career Coach & Corporate Trainer. The full video is available in the Career Success Library.

The article below summarizes the video content.

My colleague has an uncanny ability to come up with process improvements for, it seems, just about anything. I know that having that ability helps make you valuable and seen as an employee. What can I do to become better skilled at this? I just feel like my brain doesn’t work in that same way. Is there a trick to it, or is it just ingrained in some people?

This is a great question! And it’s wonderful that this person identified, “Oh, I have a colleague who is making improvements to processes, and that seems like a really valuable skill I would like to hone myself.”

I think you’re right that it can be very natural for some people, less natural for others, but it’s very learnable.

The first thing I will say, just so that we’re all on the same page, a process is just an established way of doing something. We have processes across the board throughout our work. You have a process for how you manage meetings. You have a process for how you run certain types of reports, a process for how you create presentations, a process for how you handle certain requests.

So processes exist all over.

How we improve processes is through, first and foremost, awareness. Because a process is an established way of doing something, it turns into routine, and routines inspire autopilot. Autopilot means you stop paying attention. You’re just doing things the way you’ve always done them because that’s the way you’ve always done them.

And in order to start seeing opportunities for improvement, you need to get off autopilot and really reconnect. Be aware of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it that way.

So a way to do that is to document processes. Through the documentation of a process, you become hyperaware of it. You really think through every single step of it.

And a lot of times then the the places where the process doesn’t make as much sense as it should pops out. It becomes very, very evident because you’re really hyper focusing on all the different details of the process.

So that’s a a great kind of first step is pick a process, document it, and see just what comes naturally from the documentation. I will say the documentation of a process is in and of itself an improvement in the process Because any process that is undocumented lives in someone’s mind, and that is an organizational risk.

So documenting it is a good first step for a number of different reasons.

The other thing that you’re really kind of training your brain to do is to identify friction. Friction is when a process slows down, when it gets harder, things get confusing, errors start happening. A lot of processes have friction in them, and we get so used to it that we develop workarounds or we just say, “Ugh. It’s just the way it is.”

The goal that you’re trying to achieve here is to identify friction because that’s the thing you’re trying to fix with improvement.

Improvement doesn’t have to mean that you throw it all out and start from scratch. Instead, it’s really asking, “Where can you make some small tweaks that will help reduce or maybe even eliminate friction in the different steps of the process?”

I like the terminology that doctors use where they talk about the lowest effective dose. The they’ll talk about with the medication, what’s the lowest effective dose? The dose that’s gonna have an impact, but it’s the lowest amount.

That’s kind of what you want with the process improvement: the smallest thing that’s going to have the biggest impact on the process. That’s what we’re looking for.

You’re not trying to make these huge changes all at once.

And just ask yourself, “What can I do to reduce friction?”

You could print that out, put it up on your your cubicle wall or your office wall, and just have that be a mantra that you’re repeating to yourself, looking for friction and finding ways to reduce it.

That’s the goal of process improvement.

Kristen says, “Gosh. It sounds a lot better to say I’m good at process improvement, and the truth is I’m lazy and looking to make this task as easy as possible.”

But isn’t that the truth? That is what process improvement is.

You’re looking to streamline it. Let’s make it easy. Let’s take the pain out.

We all want that.