The secret sauce of lean leadership

Lean Nation,

I have been very blessed in my life.  I have worked for and with many companies.  Some were large and some were small.  Some were publicly traded and some were private.  Some were union and some were non-union.  Some were high tech with new products coming to market and lots of automation and some companies were low tech with lots of labor.  But most importantly, some had great leadership and some had atrocious leadership.  I am now convinced that every job was a stepping stone to something better, even though I couldn't see it at the time.

This is a lean blog, though, and I am pretty sure no one cares about my work history.  But I took two important learning's away from this experience. The signs had always been there, but they were never clear. The signs were solidified about a month ago in a conversation with a 40 year lean veteran.  I asked him what are the keys to creating a culture of improvement .  He said unequivocally the key is leadership.

I asked him to be more specific.  He said leadership needs two skills to be successful at improvement. The first is not a surprise.  He said that leaders need to hold everyone accountable to follow standard work.  This means staff and management.  This means "special" employees like physicians and engineers, and lawyers. And this means leadership like directors, chiefs and vice presidents.

I see in many organizations that the staff is held accountable. But the further you get from the staff,  the less accountability there is.  This creates many problems, but most notably, lack of leadership standard work drives the majority of the waste in the system.

The second leadership skill is the ability to create a tangible vision.  While lean at its most fundamental, is about seeing and eliminating waste, sometimes the entire system is so wasteful, it needs to be totally re-designed.  While many leaders agree with this statement, many fail to act in any meaningful way.  The risk of failing is too great.  The culture change too large. We will upset people.  This has worked in the past. Look how we benchmark....The list goes on.

One way this plays out is the creation  a fuzzy strategy, with unattainable or un-measurable goals. The lower levels of management, in an attempt to meet the strategy, embark on multiple and frequently competing initiatives. This results in limited improvement, poor results, and lots of frustration.

Great lean organizations have a clear vision and strategy.  There is no guessing on the approach, measures or expectations.  And they don't dodge the unpopular issues, sacred cows, or silo-ed organizational structures. There are no untouchable employees.  Everyone participates and every is accountable.  Transformation is the goal.

So looking back on my career and my consulting practice, I can attest that every transformation that failed was because of a gap in one of the two leadership skills. Either the accountability framework was not in place, or leadership did not have the courage to create the correct and clear vision leading to sub-optimal results and no culture change.

How's your transformation going?

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
President and Sensei
Breakthrough Horizons Ltd.
www.breakthroughhorizons.com
2 time Shingo award winning author

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/

Empowering your Lean (Kaizen) Teams

Lean Nation;

Following up from last week's lean blog, I want to discuss empowerment this week.  What exactly is Empowerment? Dictionary.com defines empowerment as the following:

"1.to give power or authority to; authorize, especially by legal or official means: I empowered my agent to make the deal for me. The local ordinance empowers the board of health to close unsanitary restaurants.
2.to enable or permit: Wealth empowered him to live a comfortable life. "

For empowerment with respect to improvement teams, I am talking about allowing the teams to make the decisions to change how the work is done,  who is doing it, what the work sequence is, and how long the should take.   As a manager, or the manager of a manager this is extremely scary.  Why would I trust the foxes to make good decisions about the hen house?

As a lean leader, you get to create the conditions under which teams can be empowered.  I encourage organizations to follow three rules before empowering the teams.  First,  leadership defines the measures and the targets for improvement.  It is your responsibility to establish the measures for success and the percentage improvement expected.  For example, reduce the lead time (wait time) for services from two weeks to one week.  Or reduce the hours expended per unit by 25%.  The team's job is to meet the targets.

Second, leadership gets to define the process the teams use to deliver on the goals.  Leadership can require PDCA (plan -do -check-act) thinking documented on an A-3.  For example, the team is required to use the common tools to see and eliminate waste and is required to use the principles of lean thinking to develop solutions.  Additionally, the solution must be managed visually and supported by management standard work.

Thirdly,  management defines the team members to be engaged in creating the improvement.  There are a couple of theories with respect to team make-up.  One theory supports have team members that come from the supplier group, the people that work within the process, and representatives from the customer group.  This ensures that the people/departments in front of the area of focus and downstream of the area of focus are represented on the team.  This prevents waste from being pushed around the system.  We want waste removed from the system not shifted from one area to another.

Another theory involves the rule of 1/3,1/3 and 1/3.  One third of the team should be from the area being improved.  Not just from the area, but the actual people that do that work. The next third, should be the subject matter experts.  Perhaps you have someone that is an expert in clinical practice, or an expert in forging.  The last third should come from somewhere else in the organization.  This group brings "fresh eyes" to the process to help with some out of the box thinking. 

So which one is best?  Both approaches have strengths. For a fine scope, I prefer the latter, and for a larger, broader scoped project I prefer the former.

So let me summarize.  To empower a team, leadership must satisfy three conditions:

1. Select the right measures and targets
2. Use the correct process for the improvement
3. Populate the team with the correct stakeholders (team members)

If you have the correct goals, with the best process, and correct team members,  you can turn the team lose!

I would still encourage you to have periodic meetings to ensure that leadership is removing the barriers that hold the team back.  But you will not need to micro-manage the team and make and approve every change the team wants to put in place.

Empowerment done correctly, simplifies managements life and enables to team to reach its true potential.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
www.breakthroughhorizons.com

Lean Leadership

Lean Nation;

I have mentioned many times that the key to lean improvement, above all other things, is leadership.  James Womack commented in one of his e-newsletters that no enterprise transformational  efforts with the focus and commitment of leadership have ever failed to deliver meaningful results.  That is a pretty powerful statement.

So let's discuss briefly what we mean by lean leadership. 

• Leadership cannot be delegated.  Management can delegated,  but leadership cannot. 
• Leadership, loosely defined is doing the right things.  Management is doing things right.
• Lean leadership is about vision, accountability, and empowerment.

When it comes to leading an organization toward world class rates of improvement, there are several items that need "leading"  The list below is but a few of the topics for leadership:

1. management and staff development
2. improvement areas of focus
3. improvement pace
4. breadth vs depth discussion
5. measurement capture
6. skill building and use of internal and external experts
7. change management approaches
8. pay as you go results
9. demonstrated use of tools
10. organizational design and organizational structure when flow cells and value streams are created
11. dealing with "antibodies"
12. value creating (shop floor or patient care areas versus administrative improvement)
13. governance
14. staff engagement
15. new product/new process development
16. lean HR, lean finance, lean IT, lean supply chain, lean budget, lean marketing, lean strategy development
17. what to do with excess employees
18. sustainability and spread
19. leadership standard work
20. PDCA/A-3 Thinking

I think you get the idea.  If you were going to delegate your improvement, you might consider getting educated on exactly what you are delegating and if the person you are delegating to has the experience these issues horizontally and vertically through the organization.    Because of the need to develop leadership,  I have decided to commit more time to this topic.  Next blog we will talk about how to empower improvement teams. 

Lean blessings,

Ron

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

 

Leadership Standard Work

Lean Nation,

This week's blog will center on standard work for management.  So let's begin with a brief definition. Leadership standard work is the hour by hour activities of management to bring a lean improvement system to life.

Many of you are thinking "Hour by Hour"?  "Are you nuts"?  "I do not have enough time to get everything done in a day and now I have work to do every hour"? 

If you look at this work as outside of your roles and responsibilities, then you will be time challenged.  If I'm spending team each hour working on the things I am accountable and responsible for  then this is not extra time.  It simply is how I do my job.

If you can't or won't take this leap,  you can stop reading now.  You will never be able to create a culture of improvement and I would not recommend you waste anymore on this blog.

If you are curious, or you see improvement as part of your day to day responsibilities, then read on.

Leadership standard work is about carving time out of your schedule each hour and focusing on the process, focusing on improvement, or focusing on developing people.   Where should you spend your time each hour?   That depends on what your area of focus is.  But I will prove with a list of topics below and you can choose where you time is best spent.

Leadership Standard Work Topics:
•Address patient/staff/provider safety issues
–Asaichi– (morning market)
•Review and take action on process control
–Audit data integrity
–Address gaps and assign countermeasures
–Adjust  / flex staffing
•Observe and coach on standard work
•Daily huddle (3 layers)
–Delegate / Assign Actions
•Audit 5Sand take actions
•Create missing standards

•1 x 1 coaching

•Communication updates
•Work on improvement
–Formal or informal
–Review and update plans and status
–Work on open items / to do lists
•Survey customers
•Review and take action on results (from performance boards)
•Follow up on suggestions
•Capture  personal and department reflections
•Update our own standard work


There a few topics above likely that you might be struggling with understanding.  I will get into these topics over the coming weeks.

The question I'd like you to ponder right now is determining if this list of activities is on top of your core responsibilities today?  If so you might not be focused on the right things.

I'll discuss how you execute your leadership standard work in the next blog.

Lean Blessings;

Ron

Ron Bercaw
www.breakthroughhorizons.com