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Friday, December 30, 2022

Lean Roundup #163 – December 2022



A selection of highlighted blog posts from Lean bloggers from the month of December 2022.  You can also view the previous monthly Lean Roundups here. 

 

10 Top Books on Culture, Organizational Change, and Strategy – Katie Anderson shares her top 10 list of books on how to build an intentional lean culture, lead transformational organizational change, and develop (and deploy) strategy.

 

Annual Performance Evaluations are a Poor Management Practice – John Hunter says the contributions any individual brings to an organization is largely dependent on the system in place therefore impacting performance evaluations.

 

Viva Iceland – Pascal Dennis shares reflections on Lean thinking in Iceland highlighting some important lessons for all of us.

 

Effective Visualizations – Michael Baudin talks about how to make effective factory visualizations and why it’s important.

 

Central Principles of the Continuous Improvement Model – Maggie Millard shares 3 principles that guide the continuous improvement model.

 

Lean Banking: Transformation in Financial Services – Jeff Roussel discusses how the lean methodology has been applied in the financial services sector.

 

What is the best way to become more effective at work? – Greg Jacobson recommends making standard work part of your process to become more efficient at work.

 

The collaboration equation – Jim Benson discusses the importance of building collaboration in your teams and explains why this is the only way to consistently deliver value.

 

Lean Thinking is personal development - Michael Ballé explains how lean provided everyone, everywhere with a framework to work their intuition muscle and develop insights.

 

Ask Art: What is the Best Lean Leadership Development Program? – Art Byrne breaks down leadership development challenge into four broad areas.

 

Putting Customers First - Michael Ballé and Nicolas Chartier,the cofounders of a successful startup share how lean thinking and practices helped ensure they kept their focus on the customer from startup to scaleup.

 

Process Behavior Charts: The Christmas Tale / Le Conte de Noël [eBook] – Mark Graban shares an eBook about Process Behavior Charts and Christmas written by Charles Desneuf.

 

Quick Way To Time A Process – John Knotts shares a simple, quick, and easy method of process timing, you can gain a very good estimate of how long a process should take on average.

 

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Wednesday, December 28, 2022

Give Yourself the Gift of Time

'Tis the season for giving — that’s what they say, anyway. There are times when in order to take care of others you need to take care of yourself first. It sounds counterintuitive and certainly against the spirit of the holidays, but sometimes it’s true.

Here are three tips to help you make more time for yourself:

1. Practice making intentions.
When you are not fully conscious, you are not completely aware of your thought process hour by hour. Everything you do or say takes place below the level of awareness. Making intentions gives you the opportunity to choose to take time for you.

2. Leave your comfort zone.
Make an intention to do something that takes you out of your comfort zone or that scares you or makes you feel strange. Making an intention to be brave makes you super aware of yourself--the sense that you own your day, your life. It's easy to feel that other people drive your life when, in fact, you are the only one who has the ability for choice.

3. Take on challenges or change.
Life never remains static. Learn to live skillfully by choosing to take on challenges or change. Allowing your mental skill to see things exactly as they are gives you the ability to consciously assess the challenge or change that is required for your personal growth. Once that course of action is set and your choices are clear and consistent, possibilities open up to make more time and space for yourself. 

Your life is truly important; your life is a gift that needs to be cherished and honored. It's difficult to make time in your life without examining or breaking old patterns of organization, control issues, things we can never change. Paradoxically, you actually lose control by limiting your life to these external issues. The real value of your life resides on the inside and that process takes personal time to develop. Decide what you really want in life.

This season, give yourself the gift of time to learn a new skill. This will be time well spent. It will benefit you, those around you and your employer.

So if I have one recommendation for you for this New Year, it is to carve out some space for you. Give yourself the gift of time.


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Friday, December 23, 2022

Top 10 Lean Quotes from 2022


Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we cannot improve.

10. "Employees who believe that management is concerned about them as a whole person — not just an employee — are more productive, more satisfied, more fulfilled. Satisfied employees mean satisfied customers, which leads to profitability."   —  Anne M. Mulcahy

9. "Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens efforts and turns even labor into pleasant tasks."   —  James A. Baldwin, author

8. "A boss creates fear, a leader confidence. A boss fixes blame, a leader corrects mistakes. A boss knows all, a leader asks questions."   —  Russel Ewing

7. "When we work for a bigger purpose, we find an endless supply of happiness at work."   —  Jon Gordon, author and motivational speaker

6. "Your number one customers are your people. Look after employees first and then customers last."   —  Ian Hutchinson

5. "Leadership is essentially another-centered activity not self-centered one."   —  John Adair

4. "You don't need a title to be a leader."   —  Mark Sanborn

3. "Transformational leadership’s potential to address issues that are relevant in the modern, changing, and uncertain work environment is the main reason for its positive influence."   —  Beng-Chong Lim & Robert E. Ployhart, 2004

2. "I will say this again: the only way to generate a profit is to improve business performance and profit through efforts to reduce cost. This is not done by making workers slave away […] or to generate a profit by pursuing low labor costs, but by using truly rational and scientific methods to eliminate waste and reduce cost."   —  Taiichi Ohno

1. "Empathy is being concerned about the human being, not just their output."   —  Simon Sinek, Author and Motivational Speaker

These are the top 10 quotes on A Lean Journey website in 2022.

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Wednesday, December 21, 2022

Top 10 Lean Tips From 2022

As 2022 comes to an end and we look toward 2023 I wanted to revisit some tips. The Lean Tips published daily are meant to be advice, things I learned from experience, and some knowledgeable tidbits about Lean to help you along your journey. Here are the top 10 Lean tips from this past year:

Lean Tip #2970 – Show Employees That You Care

When you listen to their issues and solve it, they believe that you care for them as an employer. When they know you care, then they work harder and aim higher than expected results.

 Employees love to work under leaders who care for them, they do not want to be looked as tools or resources utilized for the success of the organization. Employees always want to have a good relationship where employers listen to their concerns at times of professional hardships.

Lean Tip #2992 – Set the Right Targets to Challenge Your Team

Your team members may not be as unmotivated as you think; they probably don't have the right targets to challenge them.

When tasks are too easy, employees become complacent because they know they'll be fine with the barest minimum. Don't give them impossible tasks just because you want to challenge them. You'll end up killing their morale.

Aim for a balance. The idea is to make them stretch themselves beyond their comfort zones to get the job done. The outcome might surprise you

Lean Tip #3015 – Train the Managers to Coach Effectively

Coaching is one of the greatest methods to build an employee’s confidence level as well as competence. Managers need to know how to apply the right blend of “clarity coaching” and “skills coaching” to their employees, two of the critical elements that organizations need to provide to their managers while training them. Having the ability to coach others is one of the core skills in the 21st century, required by every manager to be regarded as a successful leader. Long gone are those days where the managers used to command and control leadership in order to get their work done. Today, the most effective way for the managers to lead is through coaching and collaboration. If the managers are not skilled enough to coach their employees, it is highly unlikely that they will be able to achieve positive results for the organization or even themselves in the long term.

Lean Tip #3085 – Keep on Keepin’ On

The part of continual process improvement that can feel overwhelming is the continuous aspect. With continuous improvement there is no perfection, and there is no end, but one of the first rules of project management is that every good project should have a start and end date. Where process improvement differs is that there is likely to always be more we can do, and things we can change. Don’t get defeated by this, but see it as a chance to break up the monotony, and keep innovating.

One thing that makes this easier is that there will always be new technology, solutions, software, or cultural changes that enable us to rethink how we do things. This can keep things exciting. The biggest difference with process improvement from your typical project is that there will always be something new for us to consider. If we ignore this, we run the risk of stagnating or falling behind.

Lean Tip #3086 - Start Small.  If Everything is a Priority, Nothing is a Priority

As you delve into a problem, there are many paths for improvement that will open up to explore.  It’s very easy to get distracted from what you set out to accomplish when you start to see all of the potential opportunities for intervention and improvement. It’s imperative to keep your goal front and center and continue to ground yourself in what you are trying to accomplish.

To achieve sustainable, meaningful improvements, rigor (being thorough and accurate) to the process must be maintained. What seems at the surface level to be an “easy fix” requires a thoughtful establishment of the new way of doing things for improvement to truly take hold.

Lean Tip #3098 – Create a Learning Culture

Incorporate learning and growth into your core values and make sure they shine through in your people strategies and business decisions. Talk about career growth throughout the employee lifecycle, beginning with recruitment and onboarding, and continuing during one-on-ones and performance reviews.

Encourage your team members to engage in learning activities during the work day and to share their learnings with their colleagues. Demonstrate the value you place on learning and growth by rewarding your developing team members with recognition, promotions, and raises.

A learning culture enables your employees to grow in their current roles and achieve upward mobility within your organization.

Lean Tip #3119 – Provide Opportunities for Contributing Employees

Opportunities can take many forms. But, all of them are outside of the normal day-to-day requirements of their job plan.

Employees appreciate chances for training and cross-training. They want to participate in a special committee where their talents are noticed. They’d like to lead a team that is pursuing an important objective.

They are happy to attend professional association meetings and proud to represent your organization at civic and philanthropic events. They’d appreciate the green light relative to implementing an idea they have for increasing morale in your workplace.

They are eager to stop doing portions of their job that have become rote in favor of new goals and assignments that stretch their skills and build on their abilities.

Lean Tip #3136 – Organize Your Materials and Parts for Efficient Retrieval

The amount of money (and time) that is wasted through a lack of organization can be staggering.

This particularly true if materials or components are stored at various points in the manufacturing process – with time spent retrieving these items making up a significant portion of your costs.

Making sure your storage and warehouse facility is well organized will improve this “picking” process, which can be further improved through the use of suitable parts or picking bins.

The increased speed at which the parts or components arrive at your manufacturing line will lead to increased productivity, as well as helping to avoid delays and production even stopping whilst waiting for items. This is also true for reducing picking errors, which organization can again help with.

And better organization can also highlight shortages of any stock more quickly, again preventing downtime.

Lean Tip #3151 – Build a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Having a lean and healthy culture requires many components. One of those is instilling an environment of continuous improvement.

Gradual, consistent change that sustains continuous improvement is critical. It doesn’t mean you have to train staff in strict fundamentals. It does mean you need the idea of continuous improvement to be part of everything you do.

Seek out ideas about how to improve production processes. Making everyone part of the change shows that you appreciate their opinions. It can also increase employee engagement and foster a more inclusive environment.

Lean Tip #3168 – Be Grateful for the Person, Not Just Their Output

Cultivating a positive and engaging environment begins with expressing gratitude beyond what people do at your company.

In short, workers should be appreciated for more than accomplishing their day-to-day responsibilities. Instead, focus on expressing gratitude for their unique insights, skills, contributions, and also for their personality.

Expressing gratitude for someone’s “soft” skills like their contagious positive attitude and sense of humor, or keen ability to think critically, is a great way to ensure gratitude is sincere and genuine.

These 10 Lean tips can help you with your journey in 2023. What advice would you share for the New Year?

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Monday, December 19, 2022

Top 10 Posts of 2022

The end of the year is traditionally a time to look back and reflect. One way to reflect is to evaluate popular blog posts. I have been taking time to reflect on the year that was and as part of that reflection I have flipped back through the 150 blog posts I have written so far this year and compiled a list of my Top 10.

What were some of your favorite Lean posts from 2022? Any recommendations for next year?

10. Three Most Important Questions in a Continuous Improvement Culture - The ability of leaders to ask the right questions is critical to the success of a lean culture.

9. Transformational vs Transactional Leadership - While a wide variety of qualities set modern leaders apart, most ultimately fall under one of two main categories: transactional and transformational.

8. Servant Leader as Change Agents - Are employees are more accepting of change and improvements when they have a leader who is being a servant leader?

7. 10 Characteristics of Effective Performance Metrics - Regardless of the metrics you use or your method for tracking, make sure to educate your organization on how the metrics are derived, what they indicate, and how they will be used in addition to regularly communicate relevant metrics to your team members.

6. What Every Leader Can Learn From Their Younger Self - You may be surprised to learn that effective leaders have a source of inspiration that is far closer to home: their younger selves.

5. Defining Employee Engagement - If there’s one thing you come away with after reading this post, let it be this: Employee engagement is NOT the same as employee satisfaction.

4. 5 Myths of Employee Engagement - There are many myths and half-truths about employee engagement.

3. FAST Diagram: The Function Analysis System Technique - Within the functional analysis phase (step 2) a FAST (Function Analysis Systems Technique) diagram can be used to deepen the teams understanding of all the functions within the scope of study.

2. 10 Things I Learned from Lean Thinking - Reflection on key learnings since my journey began in 2000.

1. 5 Ways to Get Employees Engaged in Process Improvement - Businesses in virtually every industry wrestle with how to engage teams in efforts to improve business processes.

Thanks for your continued readership in 2022. I hope you enjoy the holiday season and go on to achieve Lean success in 2023.

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Friday, December 16, 2022

Lean Quote: How to Give Yourself the Gift of Time

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.


"The greatest gift that you can give to others and to yourself is time. Embrace the gift of time whether you give it or receive it.  —  Philip Zimbardo

The greatest gift that you can give to others and to yourself is time. Embrace the gift of time whether you give it or receive it.

Philip Zimbardo

Is your mind so very busy, so full of stuff, so anxious to do the next activity that clearing the mind seems antithetical to creating your life in a meaningful way? Is everything in life equally important, every value the same? When was the last time you gave yourself the gift of time?

Here are three tips to help you make more time for yourself in an otherwise crowded personal landscape:

1. Leave your comfort zone.

Make an intention to do something that takes you out of your comfort zone or that scares you or makes you feel strange. Making an intention to be brave makes you super aware of yourself--the sense that you own your day, your life. It's easy to feel that other people drive your life when, in fact, you are the only one who has the ability for choice.

2. Take on challenges or change.

Life never remains static. Learn to live skillfully by choosing to take on challenges or change. Allowing your mental skill set to see things exactly as they are gives you the ability to consciously assess the challenge or change that is required for your personal growth. Once that course of action is set and your choices are clear and consistent, possibilities open up to make more time and space for yourself.

3. Shift your mindset.

Your life is truly important; your life is a gift that needs to be cherished and honored. It's difficult to make time in your life without examining or breaking old patterns of organization, control issues, things we can never change. Paradoxically, you actually lose control by limiting your life to these external issues. The real value of your life resides on the inside and that process takes personal time to develop. Decide what you really want in life. Everybody secretly wants to love, to have confidence, respectability, and excitement. Why would you want to compromise these values by mindless entrapments that limit your ability to create time to accomplish your dreams and desires?

Taking time for you is a choice and a practice. It is undoubtedly one of the most important gifts you can give yourself. Time adds value to your life and enhances your happiness. So, will you take time for yourself today?

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Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Embrace Christmas Spirit Every Day

Although the Christmas-preparations can put us under stress, it still seems that during the few weeks before and around Christmas we are more caring and loving. We are much more of a family person all of a sudden, we think about world peace, we have more compassion, patience with others and start overflowing with altruism.

The holiday season often reminds of all that we have to be thankful for: our friends, family, and the collective joy many of us experience at this time of year. If we could keep that attitude in our hearts and hold it with us all year long, we could actually perpetuate some of the Christmas wonder on a daily basis. Perhaps the key is to focus on what we have, what we have been blessed with and not fixate on what we wish we had. 
  
We take more time for reflection, which leads us to think more of others who are less fortunate than us, and we give a little to charities. We go and buy presents for family and friends and therewith again we naturally spend more thoughts on others. All this gives us the feeling to do something good for other people. This in return makes us feel better, again.
 
This season is a scramble of parties, gifts, and festivities, driving to see family, coordinating events – what time is the church play? When is the band concert? Was I supposed to bring cupcakes to school?

But what if there was a way to preserve the spirit of good cheer and joy and celebrate throughout the year without having to keep up the crazy, overloaded schedule?

That sounds crazy, but maybe there is something you can do to keep the season alive in your heart year-round. Just try the following to keep up the Christmas spirit all year through:

1) Smile at people as often as you can and most people will smile back. 
2) Every day, do something small for somebody else. 
3) Show gratitude. Thinking, saying and writing gratitude helps us to be in the present moment and to focus on all the positive things in our lives, to concentrate on everything we have and our strengths.
4) Give your time. Give your experience! Your time is precious, and many nonprofits need volunteers. Plus, you’ll enjoy knowing you’ve made someone else’s day better.

Fortunately for us, the hectic schedule of the holiday season only lasts a little while, but the best parts of the holiday can last all year long.

This time of year is meant to remind us of how we should live our lives every day. The season is a celebration of values that are too important to be celebrated for only one or two months.

In A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge says, “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.”

Merry Christmas to all A Lean Journey Fans! I hope everyone takes the time to spend quality time with your family and enjoy all the things you have to be thankful for. Lean thinking is a gift to us individually and to organizations empowering and inspiring improvement all around us. This holiday season I want to take the opportunity to thank all those who share the passion for continuous improvement and share in the learning on this blog.

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