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Most CI practitioners can name an organization where the program was thriving and then quietly disappeared. The pattern is consistent. One executive served as the program's champion. They left the company. The program declined. Eventually it folded.
That story is the opening Stephanie Hill returns to throughout this session, and it's the framing for everything that follows. CI programs anchored in a single executive sponsor are fragile. CI programs anchored across the senior leadership team are durable. The work of building that broader engagement is what most CI practitioners skip — partly because it's harder than running events, partly because most practitioners assume executives are outside their sphere of influence.
Stephanie has worked all three sides of this problem. She spent years as a CI practitioner reporting to a CFO, learning what executives actually pay attention to. She spent years as a consultant and coach to senior leaders, watching what gets through and what doesn't. She now works as a Senior Lean Strategist at KaiNexus, configuring software to meet executive needs and watching CI programs across many organizations from a vantage point most practitioners don't have. The session draws on all three.
The substance is built around three things: a working definition of what executive engagement requires (and why "buy-in" sets the bar too low), three elements that generate pull instead of push, and a habit-science-based template for designing executive CI routines. The worksheet is downloadable above and is genuinely useful — Stephanie walks attendees through filling it out during the session.
What follows is the substance of the session, organized so the page is useful whether you watched it or are landing here from search.
Stephanie names two reasons CI practitioners systematically under-invest in executive engagement.
The first is upbringing. Most CI practitioners are taught early that the work happens at the front line — that's where value is created, that's where waste lives, that's where engagement matters. The training is right about the front line. It's wrong about the implication that executives are someone else's problem. Frontline engagement and executive engagement aren't competing investments. Both are necessary. CI programs that get one and not the other plateau predictably.
The second is sphere of influence. Most CI practitioners view senior leaders as outside their reach — too senior, too busy, too political to engage directly. So practitioners focus their energy where it feels easier to get traction. The result is a CI program that grows in the middle of the organization while the top of the organization watches passively. When budgets tighten, the program is exposed.
Stephanie's reframe: executives are not a mysterious creature. They are not different from CI practitioners. If you put executives and CI practitioners in the same room, you couldn't pick them out. The first move toward engaging them is to apply the same principle you'd apply to engaging anyone else — start with how you yourself would want to be approached if someone wanted you to try something new.
That move alone closes most of the gap. The work isn't finding a new executive engagement methodology. The work is bringing the same human attention to senior leaders that you'd bring to a frontline supervisor.
Stephanie's diagnostic question to the audience: when you think about your CI program, are you pushing it or is there pull?
The audience answer was overwhelming and consistent — somewhere around 80% push. People said "always push," "push push push," "slow pull," "mostly push." That distribution is not unusual. Most CI programs operate in push mode most of the time, and most practitioners feel it.
The image Stephanie uses for push is a person being pressed backward toward an edge they can't see over. The actual emotional response — even when the stakes aren't existential — is fear and resistance. The more you push, the harder the other person pushes back, because they don't know what's behind them. Push generates push-back as a structural matter, not a personality matter.
Pull is the alternative. Instead of arguing executives into engagement, you create the conditions where they ask to be involved. The session's central question: what does it take to generate pull?
Stephanie's framework has three components. They work together — none of them alone is sufficient.
Timing. Different executives need different preparation before they're ready to engage. Some are early adopters who want to try new things and need very little setup. Others are skeptical or cautious and need significant groundwork before they'll lean in. The CI practitioner's job is to recognize which is which and prepare accordingly.
For more cautious executives, the preparation typically includes established processes the program can demonstrate, measurable impact already documented, and wins worth sharing. The wins matter more when they come from someone other than the CI practitioner. A peer in another department speaking to the value of the program lands differently than the CI lead making the same case. The executive likely already knows the CI lead's agenda. They don't yet know whether their peer thinks it's working.
Trusted relationships. The ideal is direct relationships with each executive. Where direct access isn't possible, Stephanie recommends working through what she calls the three I's: information, influence, and introduction. Find people who already have trusted relationships with the executive. Learn what you can from them. Understand the executive's existing pattern of behavior and what tends to influence it. Get an introduction from someone the executive already trusts — that introduction carries weight that a cold approach never will.
A practical note from the session: administrative assistants are often the most useful and most overlooked resources in this work. They know the executive's patterns, priorities, and pain points. They are usually patient. They can shape the timing and framing of an interaction in ways that make a meaningful difference. CI practitioners frequently route around them. That's a mistake.
What the leader values. This is the deepest of the three elements and the one most CI practitioners skip. The questions Stephanie returns to: what keeps this person up at night? What do they value? What do they measure?
Value and measurement are not the same thing. Measurement is what the business holds the executive accountable for. Value is what the person cares about regardless of the role — what stays constant whether they're at work, at home, or anywhere else. Engaging an executive on what they measure produces transactional cooperation. Engaging them on what they value produces sustained engagement.
Stephanie shares a story that illustrates the distinction. She joined an organization to run their CI program and met with each senior leader one-on-one. One executive opened the conversation by saying, "I hate Lean." She accepted it without arguing and shifted into asking about him — what kept him up at night, his story, how he'd grown through the company. Toward the end of the conversation she asked whether he'd be willing to let her work with one of his frontline employees. They'd meet monthly, she'd coach in between, they'd solve a problem together.
He agreed. Six months later, he was a raving fan of continuous improvement. The reason — which she only learned during the work — was that he had started in the organization 20 years earlier as a frontline employee and worked his way up. What he valued was frontline engagement and giving frontline people voice. He had hated Lean because his prior exposure had treated frontline workers as objects to be optimized rather than people to be developed. The coaching engagement let him see CI in the form he actually cared about.
The lesson generalizes. The executive who says they hate Lean usually isn't rejecting the underlying values. They're rejecting a previous experience or a previous framing. The work is to find what they do value and connect the program to it.
The working session walks attendees through a worksheet they can use afterward. Three steps.
Step 1: define the routine. What specific behavior do you want senior leaders to do on a recurring basis to influence the CI program? Stephanie's example throughout the session: attending frontline huddles once a week and expressing appreciation. That's specific enough to plan against. "Be more supportive" is not.
Step 2: assess each leader's readiness for change. List three senior leaders. Score each on their current readiness to adopt the routine — Stephanie uses a 1-to-5 scale generally, simplified to 1-to-3 for the worksheet. Add the rationale.
In her worked example: Lucy is a 1 because she's been vocal about a negative experience with CI at her previous company. Henry is a 3 because he earned a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt at his previous company and frequently asks how he can help. Eda is a 2 because she's perpetually busy and her standard line is that she's fine with staff doing CI as long as they don't have more important work to do. (Stephanie notes the names are her cats. The accuracy of the readiness scores apparently holds.)
The point of the rationale column is to keep the assessment grounded in observable behavior rather than in labeling. Mark's note during the working session — that Stephanie's framing of Lucy as someone with a prior bad experience is meaningfully different from labeling Lucy as resistant or difficult — is the move that makes the assessment usable. As Stephanie's mentor Steve Dickinson taught her years ago: it's never the person, it's always the behavior, and most behaviors have reasons behind them.
The worksheet is a living document. Readiness changes. Names rotate. Stephanie also flags that this is one of the few CI tools she keeps private rather than shares openly. The assessment names specific people and their willingness to engage. That data shouldn't be advertised.
Step 3: force field analysis. Identify the contributing factors and opposing factors for the routine — the forces pulling toward the behavior and the forces pushing against it. The standard form of the diagram is left-to-right with arrows pointing toward a center line representing the behavior; on the worksheet it's compressed to fit one page.
Stephanie's framing for why force field analysis matters: it's not enough to give someone compelling reasons to change. If reasons alone produced change, no one would eat junk food. We know why we shouldn't, and we eat it anyway because the forces pushing against the change are real. Reducing friction usually moves behavior more than adding more reasons. The contributing factors and opposing factors both need to be visible.
For the huddle attendance routine, contributing factors might include: it's an inexpensive way to recognize staff, more steps in the day, real-time data for decision-making, visibility into how goals are cascading. Opposing factors might include: the leader is already overwhelmed, there are conflicting meetings, the information might be disappointing and they don't have a poker face, they've been told they come across as negative when asking staff questions. The force field analysis surfaces both honestly.
A point Stephanie raises during the working session that's worth surfacing because it changes how CI practitioners read executive resistance.
Working through force field analyses with practitioners in earlier sessions, she found that some of what gets read as executive resistance is actually about psychological safety at the executive level. The assumption most CI practitioners make is that executives are confident, decisive, and unbothered — they hold the power, so they must feel safe. The reality is often different. Executives have all eyes on them. They're making big decisions that could go wrong. They sometimes lead people they used to be peers with. The CEO or the board may not be treating them in ways that build safety.
The implication for CI engagement: when an executive resists a routine like attending huddles, the resistance isn't always about the routine. Sometimes it's about being seen by the front line in a context where they don't yet know how to behave, or being asked to ask questions when they're worried about giving the wrong impression, or being put in front of disappointing data without time to process it first. Treating those concerns as legitimate friction — and designing routines that reduce them — produces engagement that argument alone won't.
Mark's reinforcing note during the session: don't assume someone in a senior position feels a high level of psychological safety just because they're an executive. The dynamics flowing down from the CEO and the board shape executive safety the same way executive behavior shapes safety further down. Executive engagement work and psychological safety work are connected, and CI practitioners benefit from recognizing both.
Once the routine is defined, the leaders are assessed, and the force field is mapped, the next column on the worksheet is engagement ideas — specific actions that increase contributing factors or reduce opposing factors for each leader.
Stephanie's worked examples:
For Lucy (the executive with the bad prior CI experience), use Henry to influence her, demonstrate prior wins and impact, offer standard work and talking points to guide a positive experience. The standard work matters because part of Lucy's hesitation is worry that she'll come across negatively in front of the staff — coaching her on what to say and ask reduces that friction directly.
For Henry (the advocate), ask him how he could better engage his peers, ask for positive outcomes and stories from his Lean practice. Henry is already an asset — the work is to expand his reach.
For Eda (the busy one whose standard line is "if they don't have more important work to do"), educate on how CI integrates with daily work rather than competing with it. The framing matters because Eda's friction is the assumption that CI is additional work. Showing that it's the same work, done differently, removes the wedge.
The pattern: the engagement ideas come directly from the force field analysis. They're tailored. They reduce specific friction or amplify specific contributing factors for specific people. Generic engagement strategies don't produce sustained change because they don't address the actual forces in play.
The second half of the session shifts from assessment to design. Stephanie draws on three books — The Power of Habit (Charles Duhigg), Atomic Habits (James Clear), and Tiny Habits (BJ Fogg) — and applies the habit loop framework to executive CI behavior.
A habit loop has three components: a cue, a routine, and a reward.
Cues work best when they're tied to time, location, or another existing habit (habit stacking). For an executive attending a weekly huddle, the cue might be a calendar notification. For an executive with a more cautious starting position, it might need to be reinforced — a phone reminder, a check-in from a peer, or a colleague stopping by their office. The more resistant the leader, the more cueing they typically need to start the cycle.
Routines are the specific behavior — attending the huddle, expressing appreciation, asking a question that signals attention to the substance.
Rewards are most effective when they combine an immediate reward, a long-term reward, and a tie to identity. Immediate reward: real-time data the executive can use in their next decision. Long-term reward: visible improvement in frontline engagement and performance. Identity tie: the executive seeing themselves as the kind of leader who is genuinely connected to the work.
Stephanie's personal example illustrates how identity ties amplify routine. She's studied a language on Duolingo every day for over two years. The cue is her morning coffee — habit-stacked onto an existing routine she'd never skip. The routine is the daily lesson. The reward includes the immediate satisfaction of the streak, the long-term ability to communicate, and the identity she's moving toward — a woman who travels internationally and can speak the local language. The identity tie is what makes the streak hold across two years. Streaks built on motivation alone fail. Streaks built on identity persist.
The same pattern applies to executive engagement. An executive who attends huddles because they were told to will stop attending under pressure. An executive who attends huddles because that's the kind of leader they're becoming — and the data they get there improves their decisions — will keep showing up.
A point worth lifting because it's the operational explanation for why senior leaders matter so much.
Habit loops at the executive level become cues at every level beneath them. When an executive consistently attends huddles, recognizes contributors, and follows through on what they hear, the cue for the frontline is "if I bring an idea, it will be seen by someone who matters." That cue produces more ideas. More ideas produce more recognition and visible impact. More recognition and impact reinforce the executive's reward — they see the program working, they see their behavior making a difference, they show up next week.
Conversely, when an executive's engagement is sporadic or transactional, the cues going down are weaker. The frontline sees that ideas might be ignored. Engagement decays. The executive sees less impact. The loop weakens at every level simultaneously.
The CI program isn't a system the executive supports from outside. The executive's behavior is part of the system. That's the operational meaning of "executives are influencers" — their habits become the cues for everyone else's habits.
A Q&A point from the session worth surfacing.
When Stephanie talks about rewards, the first instinct most people have is financial. But recognition — public acknowledgment, peer kudos, handwritten thank-you notes, internal "honor roll" mentions, name-checks in all-hands meetings — does work that money typically doesn't.
Mark's note during the discussion: financial rewards generally flow top-down. Recognition can flow in any direction. A frontline employee can recognize an executive. Peers can recognize peers. Recognition is the form of reward that closes the loop the fastest because it can happen the same day as the behavior, and it ties directly to identity in a way money usually doesn't.
Stephanie observes that even at KaiNexus, executives are often recognized less than other employees in their weekly all-hands meetings. The assumption is that executives don't need it. The reality is everyone wants to hear thank you. An executive whose engagement in the CI program is being recognized — by peers, by the front line, by their CEO — gets a reward signal that reinforces the behavior. An executive whose engagement is taken for granted doesn't.
The practical move: build recognition for executive CI behavior into the system the same way you'd build it for frontline behavior. The recognition doesn't have to be elaborate. It does have to be specific and consistent.
Stephanie's closing framework, useful as a self-check before any executive engagement conversation.
Generating pull comes from a combination of the program and the practitioner. Both have to hold up.
On the program side: be honest about what the program currently provides versus what the executive is seeking, and what it can realistically provide in the future. Don't over-promise. Executives have well-tuned detectors for inflated claims, and one over-promise costs more credibility than ten under-promises.
On the practitioner side: make sure the perception of working with you is solid. Reinforce the positive relationship over time. Trust is the prerequisite for the executive being willing to invest their attention, and trust is built through consistent small interactions, not through one big pitch.
Once both are solid, buy-in and engagement follow more or less on their own. The pitch isn't really a pitch — it's the natural next step in a relationship that's already been built.
A few specific things the platform does that connect to the work in this session.
KaiNexus tracks improvement work in a way that gives executives the real-time data Stephanie names as one of the strongest contributing factors for huddle attendance. The data is current, specific, and connected to outcomes — not the lagging quarterly summaries that executives often feel disconnected from.
The platform supports the cue-routine-reward design Stephanie walks through. Notifications for executives when there are improvements to review or comment on. Visible engagement metrics that reward consistent participation. Recognition flows that surface executive contributions to the broader organization.
It also supports the impact tracking that justifies continued investment in CI work — both the financial impact that some executives care about and the engagement, quality, and safety outcomes that others care more about. As Stephanie notes during the Q&A: even if your executive today doesn't care about a particular kind of impact, your executive in two years might care a lot. Track everything. The data you'll need later is the data you have to start capturing now.
If your CI program is producing good results in pockets but not generating the executive engagement you need to scale, the gap is usually the infrastructure that makes executive participation easy and rewarding. That's the gap KaiNexus is built to close.
Stephanie Hill is a Senior Lean Strategist with KaiNexus and owner of Light Bulb Moment Consulting. She has over 23 years of experience applying Lean to various industries, including legal, manufacturing, retail, insurance, healthcare, and government. She has certifications in Strategic Human Resources Leadership and Scaled Agile, a Master Black Belt in Lean Six Sigma, a master's degree in Public Health, and a bachelor's degree in Chemistry. She lives near Columbus, Ohio, and enjoys building LEGO sets, dancing, and traveling. She is also preparing to publish her first book, A Life of Learning: Lessons in Leadership from Raising a Boy with Autism.
Why do CI programs that depend on a single executive sponsor tend to fail?
Because the program's reach is limited to that executive's reach. When the sponsor leaves the company, gets reassigned, or shifts priorities, the program loses its anchor. CI programs that engage the entire senior leadership team are durable across executive transitions because the engagement isn't concentrated in one relationship. The work is to spread engagement, not just secure it.
What's the difference between push and pull in CI program engagement?
Push is when the CI practitioner has to convince executives to participate in every interaction — the energy comes from the practitioner. Pull is when executives ask to be involved because they see the value and want what the program offers. Stephanie's diagnostic survey of CI practitioners typically finds about 80% are operating in push mode. Push is exhausting and produces resistance because being pushed creates a structural pushback response. Pull is sustainable because the energy comes from both sides.
What three elements generate pull from senior leaders?
Timing (recognizing that different executives need different preparation before they're ready to engage), trusted relationships (built directly when possible and through introductions when not), and understanding what the leader values (which is often different from what they measure). All three are needed. Strong relationships without timing produce premature asks. Timing and relationships without understanding what the leader values produces engagement that doesn't last because it's not connected to anything they actually care about.
How do you engage an executive who says they "hate Lean"?
Stephanie's example from the session: don't argue. Accept the statement, shift the conversation to what they care about, and listen. The executive who hates Lean usually had a bad prior experience with a specific framing of CI — not with the underlying values. The executive in her example had started as a frontline employee and worked his way up, so what he actually valued was frontline engagement and voice. Once the work was framed around coaching frontline employees rather than around Lean methodology, he became a strong advocate.
What's a force field analysis and why does it matter for executive engagement?
A force field analysis maps the contributing factors (forces pulling toward a behavior) and opposing factors (forces pushing against it) for any change. It matters for executive engagement because giving someone compelling reasons to do something doesn't usually produce change — the opposing forces also have to be addressed. As Stephanie notes, if reasons alone produced change, no one would eat junk food. Reducing friction usually moves behavior more than adding more reasons.
How does habit science apply to executive CI engagement?
Through the cue-routine-reward loop. Cues work best tied to time, location, or another existing habit. Routines should be specific and small. Rewards work best when they combine immediate reward, long-term reward, and a tie to the executive's evolving identity as a leader. Executive habit loops also cascade — when an executive consistently engages, that becomes a cue for their direct reports, whose engagement becomes a cue for their teams, and so on through the organization.
Does psychological safety apply to senior leaders too?
Yes. The assumption that executives are confident and unbothered isn't always accurate. They have all eyes on them, make decisions with significant consequences, and are subject to the dynamics flowing down from the CEO and the board. CI practitioners who treat executive resistance as personality friction often miss that some of it is about safety — the executive doesn't yet know how to behave in the new context being asked of them. Designing routines that reduce that friction (standard work, talking points, prepared questions) produces engagement that argument alone won't.
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