Lean Leadership - Management and Staff Development

Lean Nation,

One of the primary responsibilities of leadership during a performance and cultural transformation is to develop management and staff.  Why does the management and staff need to be developed? Likely many habits exist within your organization.  These habits show up in actions that occur daily.  An organization really shows its colors when it is placed under stress. 

Is lean thinking exhibited, or are traditional solutions employed when problems surface.  Even if you are in years 3, 4, or 5 of your improvement journey,  when stressed you will consistently see non-lean solutions to problems encountered.  Hiring extra people, ordering additional resources, working overtime,  inspecting in quality problems,  purchasing extra equipment, etc.  The list goes on.

Does an A-3 get opened, or an A-4?  Do we practice kaizen?  Is our approach to eliminate waste in lieu of adding resources?  This is how a lean organization would respond. A kaizen week, for example,  might eliminate hiring a new staff member that could take up to six weeks.

Our goal is to create a culture of continuous improvement; one that sees and eliminates waste in real-time.  To get to this point we have to learn habits that enable excellence.  This is why both staff and management need to be developed.

There is very long list of what the staff and management need to know.  At a minimum  everyone should know the 5 principles of improvement and the 7 wastes.  Additionally,  I prefer everyone understand A-3 thinking which is the documentation and thinking used to execute the (PDCA) scientific method.    Finally everyone needs to know the common tools to see and eliminate waste.

Management needs even more skills. In addition to the skills listed above, management needs to understand problem solving using the fish bone diagram and 5 why skills. Management also needs the discipline of following standard work.  They need to hold the staff accountable for their standard work and they need to follow their leadership standard work. Management finally needs some data collection and measurement skills.

This list is not inclusive of all the skills needed, but would be a great place to start.  ? And  by the way for your organization to become competent in this list of skills, you are looking at multiple years. If your organization is not on a track to develop these skills,  you will not see the change needed to overcome the inertia of your current culture.  This is why I recommend you get a Sensei.  Having a single expert in your organization is not even close to sufficient. But hiring someone with the skills and experience to navigate the challenges and issues can be quite beneficial.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
http://www.breakthroughhorizons.com/

Problem Solving

Lean Nation,

No matter how good your lean design is, there will be always be waste trying to creep back into your processes. Recall that waste is any activity that does not directly meet your customers needs.

Why is this the case?

1. You cannot predict all of the circumstances that your process will be subject to. Sometimes an unavoidable situation arises.
2. We do not design lean solutions to cover 100% of the situations. We would be gridlocked to a stall is we tried to have a solution to every possible situation before implementing a lean solution.
3. Removal of one layer of waste exposes additional layers of waste. Much of the waste is still hidden regardless of how great our design.

So we need to have a system to address problems when they arise. There are many approaches that lean organizations use to addrtess problems. Ironically it takes several years for organizations to adopt these proven approaches. In fact one of the the leading indicators I have of assessing lean maturity is the sophistication of organizational problem solving.

Here are the five steps:

1. Go to gemba - go to the source of the problem
2. Check the gembutsu - identify relevant facts at the source; who, what where, when, why, how often, how many (also known as 5W and 2H)
3. Install a temporary countermeasure - contain the problem immediately. Develop a solution immediately, albeit temporarily stop the problem. This may require additional resources or extra effort in the short run.
4. Determine the root cause of the problem- usually a fishbone diagram and/or 5 Why problem solving.
5. Standardize the solution to prevent the problem from re-occurring.

Most organizations are really deficit in their problem solving approaches. Root cause problem solving takes discipline and time. But it prevents problems from coming back.

How many times have you solved the same problem?

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw

President, Breakthrough Horizons

http://www.breakthroughhorizons.com/