Lean Leadership - use of internal and external consultants

Lean Nation;

This week's post will continue on my lean previous started leadership series and I will discuss the use of internal and external lean consultants. One of the job's of the lean leader is to ensure that the right capability exists in your organization to deliver results, build internal capacity, and create a culture of improvement. There are two primary ways to acquire internal expertise;  hire it or use an external third party to provide it.

Regardless of your choice,  the role of the "lean" expert is to do three things:

1. Transfer improvement knowledge to the organization.  Everyone in a lean organization should be striving to become and expert.  Lean is a process of the people not a process of the expert. Your expert should ensure that everyone is continuously building lean improvement capacity and knowledge is being transferred.
2. Provide leadership coaching and mentoring to the organization.  In my opinion, lean expertise should never be acquired simply for an expertise in lean tools.  Tools can be taught and learned.  There is a much narrower pool of lean leaders that have the capability to develop and train the organizations leaders. This skill is essential if you want to create a culture of improvement.  Your expert should have a history of delivering lean management coaching and leadership.
3. Mitigate transformation risk.  Done well, lean transformation can take your organization on a journey of double digit improvement in the areas of staff engagement, quality, delivery, cost and growth.  Tremendous rewards for those willing to get their hands dirty.  The flip side is you can spend tremendous amounts of expense on lean improvement without any real results if you don't know what you are doing.  An expert with both lean management and leadership expertise along with expertise in the lean tools can greatly reduce organizational risk of failure.

Experts with all three skills are available for hire both inside your organization and as external resources for your organization.  The main benefit of having the position inside your organization is the reduced expense for gaining capability, assuming you can hire someone with skills in all three categories described above.  Most people that are looking for internal expertise want all if the benefits of transfer of knowledge, leadership mentoring, and risk mitigation,.  The common mistake organizations make is they end up hiring someone with either lean tools without lean leadership skills, or lean leadership without tool expertise.  Both will lead to dramatically reduced results.

A great benefit of hiring an external lean expert comes from the fact that the third party is not part of the organization.  This allows the outside expert to be much more candid about the real performance of the organization.  The outside resource can be more critical of leadership without the political repercussions of the candidness.  Again this candidness only occurs if you hire the right lean consultant.

Both choices can take you to the same place.  Be sure you hire or outsource someone with the right skill set to be successful.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw

President and Sensei, Breakthrough Horizons Ltd.

Shingo Prize Award Winning Author

www.breakthroughhorizons.com