A Successful Company Begins and Ends With a Quality Culture

Culture is the shared beliefs, values, attitudes, institutions, and behavior patterns that characterize the members of a community or organization. In a healthy business culture, what's good for the company and for customers comes together and becomes the driving force behind what everyone does.

Leaders of business have a powerful influence on the development of the company's culture. You might not be very aware of your culture, or you may just think of it as "the way we do things around here." But your company does have a culture, and it probably reflects your leader’s values for good or bad: People will have adopted the manager’s behaviors and attitudes toward their work.

Quality is not just about implementing a system or working towards a set of standards. It is an attitude, a way of working, that not only improves an organization but also the way the organization works.

Senior managers must create and maintain buy-in for quality improvement at all levels of the organization. Management commitment is vital to overcoming uncertainty, establishing credibility and providing the stability to allow change to gain a foothold in the organization. Leadership must manage the organization’s culture and be a visible advocate for quality--“talk the talk and walk the walk.”

Talk is free, but quality takes work. Senior management must set the organization’s quality policy and strategies. Leaders must create sensitivity to changing and emerging customer requirements/needs throughout the organization.

To create a foundation for success, senior management must demonstrate commitment to change by removing roadblocks, providing necessary resources (training, time, etc.) and inviting contributions from all members of the workforce.

It is not enough to use slogans and posters to promote commitment to the quality journey. Quality requires understanding various tools (such as problem solving, root cause analysis, preventive/corrective action, lessons learned) and implementation of methodology, so that results become more predictable and not a surprise. Management commitment is required to introduce these tools and methodology in the organization – through investment as well as personal participation – and sustain their use throughout the organization.

The story of any successful company begins and ends with quality. Quality improvement places a stronger emphasis on leadership rather than management competencies and attributes. Leadership’s critical task is to integrate, institutionalize and internalize quality.

Lean Quote: The Best Time is Now

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 best time to take action toward a dream is yesterday; the worst is tomorrow; the best compromise is today." — Alvah Simon, Author of North to the Night

I am often asked when the best time to start your Lean Journey is. Well, the short answer is now.  There is never a convenient or inconvenient time for change.

Sometime, I hear “we are not ready for lean”. This is a rather circular argument, because effectively what the management is saying is that business processes are too bad and therefore it can’t implement improvement. Of course this means that the business will never improve! I have never seen a business where the processes where too bad to start improving.

Many organizations are waiting for the optimum time to change.  Unfortunately, tomorrow never comes.  If you allow it you will always find another distraction.  There is never a better time to start than now.  We really must invest everyday in our future since you can't get back lost time.

Don’t spend your time trying to wait till things are perfect. Perfection is elusive. It is more important to get started. And it's better to get something done imperfectly than to do nothing perfectly.

 

Poka Yoke: Mistake Proofing to Reduce Errors

Some may say that it’s impossible to eliminate mistakes. And they are right; it is, most of the time. But, to be honest, they are missing the point.

Poka yoke, or mistake proofing, describes any behavior changing constraint that is built into a process to prevent an incorrect operation or act occurring.  The three aims of mistake proofing are:

• To reduce the risk of mistakes or errors arising.
• To minimize the effort required to perform activities.
• To detect errors prior to them impacting on people, materials, or equipment.

Ideally, poka-yoke ensures that proper conditions exist before actually executing a process step, preventing defects from occurring in the first place. Where this is not possible, poka-yoke performs a detective function, eliminating defects in the process as early as possible.

This can be achieved using three rule. Following are three rules of poka yoke

1. Make it impossible to get it wrong (Occurrence)
2. Make it impossible to pass the defect onto the customer (Severity)
3. Make it blatantly obvious that there is a defect (Detection)

In our normal lives we are all familiar with many different mistake-proofing concepts, such as windows that don’t open fully in order to prevent people falling out, self-closing fire doors, lights that turn themselves off when they detect no one is there, and so on. You will also have seen warning instructions and traffic lights, as well as having read work instructions, all of which aim to reduce the risk of error. However, you will also notice that some of these are more effective than others. For example, the windows that don’t open on the 15^th floor of a hotel to prevent you falling out are likely to be more effective than leaving the windows able to open fully and providing an instruction pamphlet in one of the drawers that tells you to be safe when opening the windows. This shows there is a hierarchy of mistake proofing concepts, with a decreasing level of effectiveness.

The five levels of the hierarchy of mistake proofing are shown below.

1. Eliminate – the most effective but also normally the most costly level involves eliminating the source of risk completely. In reality, it is very difficult to completely remove risk.
2. Redesign – if you can’t eliminate the risk then you might want to try to replace it with a less risky process.
3. Reduce – when it is not possible to redesign the problem you need to think about reduction techniques.
4. Detect – here we are no longer trying to prevent mistakes: we are trying to detect  they have occurred.
5. Mitigate – at this lowest level we are simply trying to reduce the damage caused by the mistake arising.

Some common examples of mistake proofing that most people should be aware of – and the levels they represent in the mistake proofing hierarchy:

• Hard hats - mitigate
• Drain hole at the top of a sink to prevent it overflowing - mitigate
• Fuel low warning lights on cars – detect
• Blood pressure monitoring equipment - detect
• Safety glasses – reduce
• Standard operating instructions – reduce
• Filing cabinets that won’t allow you to open more than one drawer at a time – redesign
• Garage door sensors that detect an obstruction – redesign
• Irons that turn off automatically – redesign

The guiding principles of mistake proofing should be as follows:

• People are fallible and even the best make mistakes.
• Errors are inevitable.
• Errors can be eliminated.
• Error-likely situations are predictable, manageable, and preventable!
• Events can be avoided by understanding the reasons mistakes occur and applying the lessons learned from past events.
• Defects are preventable and zero defects can be achieved.

There is a perception in some organizations that particular people are “error proof” and that they do not and cannot make mistakes. If you believe that anyone is immune to making mistakes then you will be sorely disappointed in the very near future.

Restarting Your Lean Journey

Despite the enormous popularity of Lean, the track record for successful implementation of the methodology is spotty at best. Some recent studies say that failure rates for Lean programs range between 50 percent and 95 percent.

A Lean journey is full of steps not all of which are forward. Failure will occur. Its ok, the purpose is learning, and we learn through experimentation. Trying new approaches, exploring new methods and testing new ideas for improving the various processes is exercise for the mind.

Restarting the Lean journey can be difficult. It is critical to have alignment and clearly state the need for improvement from the beginning. There are ten key steps that should be taken when restarting the journey towards a Lean improvement.

1. Establish a need to improve and obtain management commitment

2. Define the improvement objective

3. Identify and acquire necessary resources

4. Collect information and determine current state

5. Uncover the root cause

6. Identify and test countermeasures that will meet the improvement objectives

7. Develop plans for implementing the countermeasures which ensure buy-in

8. Implement the improvement

9. Standardize the improvement

10. Repeat starting a step 1

Lean implementation is not simple or easy. However, results show that, when done properly, Lean lives up to its promises. Lean and its elements work. All of the failure modes presented here can be avoided or overcome.

Lean improvement is about the entire organization and everything it does. Lean Thinking has to be a prime concern of executive management and its success depends upon commitment from them. Their commitment must also be highly visible. It is not enough to demand improvement. If executive management does not demonstrate its commitment by doing what it says it will do they cannot expect others to be committed either.

The adoption of Lean is never a short or simple journey. A Lean transformation takes time. It begins with understanding the core tenets of the Lean philosophy and with focusing on the customer. It continues by incorporating the methodology into the organization and involving every employee in developing a refined work ethic. Overall, Lean is about adopting a lifestyle change—one that requires an ongoing commitment to achieve organizational health and longevity.

If you want Lean to succeed in your organization, management has to become a student of Lean in order to be a successful sponsor. In other words, you have to apply Lean to your management process first in order to understand how to apply it to others.

Three Reasons You Need a Lean Coach

Lean manufacturing is a very broad philosophy for business improvement that has many tools/techniques to aid you in making your production or service more efficient and better at offering your customer a great value. Being able to successfully implement Lean across a company is not something that you can pick up from reading a few Lean implementation books, nor is it something that you can learn from a training course in your local hotel, to truly be able to implement Lean you have to have lived and breathed it for several years to gain enough experience.

The focus of a Lean coach is to provide coaching on the principles and practices of Lean Thinking to individuals and groups of employees within manufacturing and service industries. A Lean coach can be advantage because of the following reasons:

1. Knowledge

A Lean coach brings a range of experiences from previous Implementations that can help you to ensure that your implementation will be smooth and efficient. They also have the experience of implementing the various lean tools in different situations so they will understand how to involve your people and guide them in achieving the best possible results. Most Lean coaches will also have people and organizations that they can go to gain additional expert advice and help, contacts in other industries and companies with whom you can share experiences and view successes.

2. Perspective

A Lean coach that is independent from your organization and not burdened by the internal politics or any pre-conceived ideas of how the place should work has a clear mind with a bias for action. They can challenge status quo and ask those hard questions to get you out of your comfort zone and to think of those out-of-the-box ideas you need.

3. Pressure

A good Lean coach should be continuously pushing your company. They will be able to focus on the specifics of the implementation and not be distracted by the other things that may be going on within your company. A Lean coach can apply the constant gentle pressure required for transformation to take hold.

Choosing the right Lean coach to help you make the move from traditional manufacturing to Lean manufacturing is very important. A successful Lean coach must have the ability to convince people at all levels of the organization. No matter whether you are using a Lean consultant or someone on staff, full company-wide support is imperative in making the changes work. Management will have to fully support the Lean coach in Lean projects, and employees will have to be convinced to implement the changes wholeheartedly.

Lean Quote: Finding Better Ways To Do Things Is Lean

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.

"Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." — Maya Angelou

This quote pretty much sums up the aim of Lean. The lean approach to managing operations is really about:

• Doing the simple things well
• Doing things better
• Involving employees in the continuous process of improvement
• …and as a result, avoiding waste, providing value

Good is the enemy of great. Good gets in the way of doing our best. Good holds us back from tapping into our true potential. Many people accept the status quo and misguidedly believe that thinking, creativity and innovation is someone else’s job. Some people have literally turned off their curiosity. They have become apathetic, hopeless and indifferent.

Finding a better way does not necessarily mean making enormous changes. You can make huge leaps through small steps. Small improvements made repeatedly lead to great discoveries and successes. Getting into a continual improvement mode requires a different mindset, which for some, may be difficult. I believe that anything worth having is worth working for. Just remember experience is a tough teacher! Make learning the job. You can’t separate learning from innovation. Learning triggers creativity.

The focus of Lean Thinking is to foster an organization that is committed to finding better ways to serve its customers. Lean is all about finding better ways to do things, so that they require less effort, less time and fewer resources. It is not about cost reduction – penny-pinching, cutting investment, taking out people – it is about finding better ways to get work done. It is about developing a mindset, methods and tools to identify and eliminate waste in all its forms at every opportunity. It is about freeing-up resources because you no longer need to use them.

 

Managers Must Be Teachers

In Paul Borawski’s post this month on The View from the Q Blog he asks about our experience with training.  He shared some results regarding the matter from ASQ’s Global State of Quality research. (Remember, you can download the entire report for free at the above link.)

From the research:  “Organizations that govern quality with a centralized group are roughly 30 percent more likely to provide quality training to staff than organizations where a senior executive governs the quality process” (page 6).

I continue to find this an interesting differential in successful businesses. Training plays an important role in the success of your business. A manager should provide the tools, the opportunities and the skills to assist staff to grow and develop.

Managerial training responsibilities extend far beyond simply going over work procedures and sending employees to classes when they need to master a new skill. Effective workforce training is an ongoing process that requires supervisors to engage in ongoing skill development with their employees. Managers must engage in informal training needs assessment on an ongoing basis, paying attention to employees' strengths and weaknesses and identifying gaps that can be overcome through training opportunities.

According to a 2011 report from Accenture, 55% of workers in the U.S. say they are under pressure to develop new skills, but only 21% say their companies have provided training to learn those new skills within the last five years. Training is a lever that changes the rate of improvement you can achieve.

Proper training should not be reserved for new employees. In order to maintain a staff of trained and well-integrated employees, it's critical to promote continuous learning throughout their careers. There are always new things for employees to learn and the rate of change in the business world demands new skills, fresh perspectives and new ideas. Training should be utilized to ensure that your employees are continually learning and improving.

Regular, effective and relevant training is massively important and a great motivator. If you want them to perform properly and consistently then you have to give them the tools to do so. Training is always good, it keeps people up to date and focused on the job at hand, it keeps their skills at the forefront and it will show them that management are obviously concerned with how well they do their job, etc. If they are given good quality training that covers the topics and issues they are faced with then they will respond and to a certain extent motivate themselves to stick with what they learn.

Creating a positive learning environment will encourage development and help your employees gain confidence in their position. Trainers should be relaxed and clearly explain the reasoning behind every new exercise and lesson. Negativity will only inhibit the learning process, so it's important to be patient, allow for mistakes, and always reward new achievements. This positive feedback will reinforce and affirm the efforts of your new recruits, and encourage them to continue learning.

It is important for employees to be challenged or learning new things in their job.  Too often managers don’t allow their employees to expand beyond their areas of expertise.  Managers are fearful that they will need to expend too much energy on training or reviewing work, that there will be too many mistakes, or that the employees don’t want to have to learn more.  Job sharing, job rotations, special projects, strategic offsites, or even including employees in on key decisions can have a significant and positive impact on long term motivation.

If you think of training as a business expense, that's what it becomes. However, if you think of training as an investment, that's what it becomes. What would you rather do, pay bills or invest in your team? By thinking of training as an investment, you will also expect a return. This focus guides you in everything from selecting the right training to evaluating its results.

It is a proven that companies that invest in the continued training and proficiency of their employees enjoy improved performance, lower attrition rates and a greater overall return on their investment. Intellectual capital is now a critical factor for competitive advantage in today's global world. The organizations that recognize the benefits and value of providing continuing training opportunities to employees will be better able to compete in a rapidly changing world.

Leaders play a critical role in changing the thinking of the members of the organization. This responsibility cannot be passed on or delegated. By delegating these activities you are sending the message that this is not important. Company leaders must understand that development cannot be delegated away.

I’m part of the ASQ Influential Voices program. While I receive an honorarium from ASQ for my commitment, the thoughts and opinions expressed on my blog are my own.