Daily Lean Tips Edition #75 (1126-1140)

For my Facebook fans you already know about this great feature. But for those of you that are not connected to A Lean Journey on Facebook or Twitter I post daily a feature I call Lean Tips.  It is meant to be advice, things I learned from experience, and some knowledge tidbits about Lean to help you along your journey.  Another great reason to like A Lean Journey on Facebook.

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Here is the next addition of tips from the Facebook page:

Lean Tip #1126 – Redefine Failure To Find a Solution.

This is important both to handle fear of failure and to get you started trying different solutions without too much hesitation. The definition of failure we are brought up with in society might not be the best and most useful to have. If you look at the most successful people you quickly notice that they have a different response to failure than the more common one. They don´t take failure or rejection that seriously. They know it´s not the end of the world if they fail. Instead they look at each failure and see the good part about: what they can learn from it and improve next time. They have an abundance-mentality. They learn from failure and then they try again. Redefine failure as feedback and as a natural part of a successful life.

Lean Tip #1127 - Keep Your Motivation Up.

It´s easy to be discouraged, especially if you fear failure and your first and second solution to a problem didn´t work. You might feel like just giving up. Then it´s time to give yourself a boost of motivation. Changing your mental state to a brighter, more positive and more motivated one can make all the difference in the world. It will keep you going. Even though you might just a few minutes earlier felt like all hope was gone.

Lean Tip #1128 - Use Parkinson’s Law When Solving Problems.

This law says that a task will expand in time and seeming complexity depending on the time you set aside for it. For instance, if you say to yourself that you´ll come up with a solution within a week then the problem will seem to grow more difficult and you´ll spend more and more time trying to come up with a solution. Combine this law with the 80/20 rule to find solutions quickly. Focus your time on finding solutions. Then just give yourself an hour (instead of the whole day) or the day (instead of the whole week) to solve the problem. This will force your mind to focus on solutions and action.

Lean Tip #1129 - Create Fewer Problems.

A lot of our problems are created by ourselves. You save yourself a lot of trouble by being proactive, thinking before you speak and trying to avoid creating or complicating problems more than necessary.

Lean Tip #1130 - Find the Lesson or Opportunity Within the Problem.

There is almost always a good side of a problem. Perhaps it alerts us to a great way to improve our business. Or teaches us how our lives perhaps aren’t as bad as we thought. Finding this more positive part of the problem reduces its negative emotional impact and you may even start to see the situation as a great opportunity for you. When you are faced with a problem ask yourself: How can I use this? What is the good thing about this? What can I learn from this? What hidden opportunity can I find within this problem?

Lean Tip #1131 - Management Needs to Listen and React to Employee Feedback

When it comes to leadership skills, employees need to know they’re being heard and respected. Management should work hard to solicit employee feedback and work on the common problems and issues which arise. Employees who see their issues addressed will feel empowered to continue making suggestions. Soon these employees will become leaders in the workplace because they know the organization values their contributions.

Lean Tip #1132 - Empower Employees to Think Differently

While it’s important to set clear goals and responsibilities, the key to having a successful business and engaged workforce is to empower all your employees to make decisions on their own. Make sure employees are comfortable and confident asking questions, bringing forward new ideas and even taking a different approach that may fail. Out of that failure will come knowledge and longer-term success.

Lean Tip #1133 – Empower Employees With Clarity and Trust

If management truly wants to empower employees to be leaders, they have to deploy two (often scarce) resources: clarity and trust. Clarity ensures that the employee’s well-intentioned efforts are aligned with management’s goals. Trust is the fuel on which new leaders run. Clarity without trust produces inaction. Trust without clarity produces wasted effort.

Lean Tip #1134 - Give Employees the Authority to Fail

If an employee is not worried that failure will lead to firing, they will take risks. Risk takers, by definition, gain followers — when successful — and having followers is the definition of a leader.

Lean Tip #1135 - Create Opportunities for Employees to Shine

While every company is pleased to have natural-born leaders, others may need a bit more prodding. Empower those employees by providing them with a bit more freedom to pursue to their passions. Then give them the opportunity to demonstrate their work to other employees.

Lean Tip #1136 - Implement Structure and Processes

When the team achieves success in a specific area, attempt to implement a structure or process that repeats that success over and over. Creating and adhering to checklists or standard operating procedures (SOPs) will increase the efficiency and success of the team.

Lean Tip #1137 - Recognize and Acknowledge Team Member’s Efforts and Successes

Acknowledge employees when they achieve a success or positively impact the team in an extraordinary way. Recognizing other’s effort gives team members a sense of accomplishment and inspires other employees to go above and beyond their assigned responsibilities. It can be as simple publicly highlighting their accomplishment in a team meeting, presenting a certificate, or offering vacation time. Recognizing employee’s efforts should make the team feel valued and inspire them to work even harder.

Lean Tip #1138 - Promote Open Communication

Gone are the days of the top-down communication structure within companies. The one-way communication, from management down to employees, prevents an opportunity to hear valuable feedback from people who are actually on the front lines. Regularly engage in open dialogue with your team, so they can feel comfortable sharing their ideas, feelings, observations or concerns. This will allow employees to have a greater sense of investment in and commitment to the company.

Lean Tip #1139 - Encourage Safe Failure

It is natural to have a fear of failure. By human nature, most people prefer to avoid risks, especially in the workplace. However, a fear to fail in the office can stunt employees’ growth and inhibit the company from exploring creative, new ideas and strategies. Create opportunities where employees can experiment with new ideas that doesn’t expose the company to any risk, but allows them to learn from their failures and success. This will allow the team to feel comfortable thinking outside of the box.

Lean Tip #1140 – Promote Open Communication

Gone are the days of the top-down communication structure within companies. The one-way communication, from management down to employees, prevents an opportunity to hear valuable feedback from people who are actually on the front lines. Regularly engage in open dialogue with your team, so they can feel comfortable sharing their ideas, feelings, observations or concerns. This will allow employees to have a greater sense of investment in and commitment to the company.

Lean Quote: Leadership Starts With A Positive Attitude

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.

"Great leadership usually starts with a willing heart, a positive attitude, and a desire to make a difference. " — Mac Anderson

We are often not in control of the issues we face at work or home. Problems just present themselves. And chances are the issues you're facing aren't so cut and dry. The solution to the problem might just be your attitude. 

You can find at least two ways to look at virtually everything. A pessimist looks for difficulty in the opportunity, whereas an optimist looks for opportunity in the difficulty. Unfortunately, many people look only at the problem and not at the opportunity that lies within the problem.

Having the right attitude can make the difference between success and failure. A positive attitude can motivate other people to change their negative thinking and come over to your side. Everything is possible with right attitude behind you to push you forward. And since you do have a choice, most of the time you'll be better off if you choose to react in a positive rather than a negative way.

The attitude of the leader has a huge impact on the culture, environment, and mood of the department or organization. The leader’s attitude tends to spread and affect others dramatically. A good leader has the attitude of serving his employees at all times, often at the expense of his own morale or personal needs. A good leader truly cares about the morale of the team, pushes and motivates his team with respect, a relentlessly positive attitude and with a genuine heart.

 

Lean Is Like LEGOS: You Build It Brick By Brick

Who doesn't love LEGOS? It's fun, it's practical, and...it's philosophical. Approach Lean like a LEGO project: brick by brick.

"Today I want you to stop worrying about that final plan, and instead focus on just putting the next LEGO brick in the right spot. THAT'S IT." That's pretty much how you build with LEGO. One brick at a time, placed in the right place. Don't worry about the next brick. Just the brick in front of you.”  - Steve Kamb, NerdFitness

You build small, simple pieces that are easy to understand and then you assemble them in a variety of complex ways to accomplish a particular goal. When faced with a challenge that seems overwhelmingly complicated at first break it down until you can understand the pieces, then watch how they fit together - suddenly almost anything seems doable.

Building with Lego bricks is a slow progression that takes patience, especially when you have a large number of loose blocks to sort through while you are building.

Trying to do too much when introducing a new process can be overwhelming. Strive to accomplish small steps over time and build on your successes.

Continuous improvement is about small changes on a daily basis to make your job easier.  Small step-by-step improvements are more effective over time than occasional kaizen bursts, and have a significantly greater impact on the organization culture - creating an environment of involvement and improvement.

Small victories tap into motivation. Achievement is fueled by making small amounts of progress, such as accomplishing a task or solving a problem. Help employees break projects, goals, and work assignments into small victories. Help them jump into an achievement cycle.

Making one small change is both rewarding to the person making the change and if communicated to others can lead to a widespread adoption of the improvement and the possibility that someone will improve on what has already been improved. There's no telling what might occur if this were the everyday habit of all team members.

Sponsored by Brick Dave. Learn more: Top 10 Ways Legos Are Educational for Your Child: Learning with LEGO

Lean Quote: Leaders Must Spread Hope To Employees

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.

"I believe the leader’s ultimate job is to spread hope. " — Bob Galvin, Motorola

Leaders must guide, motivate, and inspire. Guide your team in the direction you want the group to go by setting a vision, strategy, and goals. Motivate them to bring their best by expressing your passion, communicating with confidence and optimism, and connecting tasks to a greater purpose.  Your work doesn’t stop there; inspire them to act by continuously engaging their talents, re-recruiting their spirit, and celebrating successes.

Always maintain a positive attitude. Positive attitudes have power in more ways than one. As a business leader, you should exude optimism which will help your staff avoid patterns of negativity. When the economic climate is unstable, businesses will face continual challenges. If you are not optimistic about your ways of conducting business, it can negatively affect the mindset and productivity of those who work for you.

The attitude of the leader has a huge impact on the culture, environment, and mood of the department or organization. The leader’s attitude tends to spread and affect others dramatically. A good leader has the attitude of serving his employees at all times, often at the expense of his own morale or personal needs. A good leader truly cares about the morale of the team, pushes and motivates his team with respect, a relentlessly positive attitude and with a genuine heart

Lean leaders are optimists and believe the cup is always half full. They aren’t pie-in-the-sky types, but they see the positive side of an opportunity, and they believe in their ability to achieve their goals. Leaders provide inspirational motivation to encourage their followers to get into action.

 

You Can’t Inspect in Quality

Unfortunately, there are not enough organizations that understand quality. Quality is not additive or final. It must go beyond the product or service. We cannot add it at the end of the line or inspect it into the product. At best that is only a false sense of security. If we want a quality product it must be made with quality processes by quality minded people.

Inspection can be useful to gather data on the process. Using that data to see if a process has gone out of control and a special cause needs to be investigated is useful. Using that data to evaluate the success, or failure, of an attempt to improve (via the PDSA cycle) is useful.

Many traditional companies use a final inspection department to 100% check the product just before it is shipped to make sure that any errors that occurred in-process are caught before the product is shipped.

Inspecting to pull out the failed items from the production before a customer sees them is a path to failure. When companies do this, they are trying to inspect quality into the product.  However, 100% inspection has been shown to be only about 80% to 85% effective. If the process is this bad, the process needs to be improved.

"Inspection does not improve the quality, nor guarantee quality. Inspection is too late. The quality, good or bad, is already in the product. As Harold F. Dodge said, “You can not inspect quality into a product." — W. Edwards Deming, Out of Crisis, Page 29

In some organizations, we might as well give the quality folks a uniform, a badge and a gun. They act like they are the Quality Police. Progressive companies realize you cannot inspect quality into a product.  By the time product is inspected, its level of quality has already been established. The primary means of ensuring a quality product is delivered is not by waiting until the product is assembled to test it. Great companies build quality in from the start and maintain that quality throughout the manufacturing process. To improve quality, you have to improve the process that produced it.

Generally the most effective way to achieve quality is to avoid having defects in the first place. It is much less costly to prevent a problem from ever happening than it is to find and correct the problem after it has occurred. Focusing on prevention activities whose purpose is to reduce the number of defects is better. Companies employ many techniques to prevent defects for example statistical process control, quality engineering, training, and a variety of tools from the Lean and Six Sigma tool kit.

Start with the idea of preventing defects, not waiting until they are identified and correcting them. Many companies have an active Zero Defects policy where defect prevention is paramount and quality inspection is almost just a verification of what they already know – that the product is defect free. If we can start with quality and maintain that quality throughout the process we will have a quality product.

Quality is about prevention—you cannot "inspect" quality into a product. It has to happen before the inspection process.

5 Tips for Implementing 5S

5S is a process and method for creating and maintaining an organized, clean, and high performance workplace.  It enables anyone to distinguish between normal and abnormal conditions at a glance.  5S can be the foundation for continuous improvement, zero defects, cost reductions and a more productive work space.  The 5S methodology is a systematic way to improve the workplace, processes and products through employee involvement.

1. Start small

It would be unwise to try to implement 5S throughout your entire organization in one go (unless you have a small company), better to select one area in which to concentrate your efforts and provide a show piece for the rest of the organization. In my mind it would be best to select the worst area in the company so as to show what can be achieved and the differences it can make. Showing success in one area gains the confidence of others and a reason to buy-in.

2. Training

The whole team should be trained in the vision and objectives of the company and given a clear understanding of what the company is trying to achieve through them and their 5S program implementation. They need to have a clear understanding of the seven wastes of lean and an overview of basic lean principles. With this knowledge they will be ready to undertake their 5S implementation.

3. Leadership buy-In and commitment

Your management should understand and practice the ideas of 5S themselves so as to provide an example to your other employees, it would be hard to motivate your employees to keep a tidy workspace if every time they walked past their managers desk they saw piles of untidy clutter. Management needs to be ready to explain and help fix any situations that arise.

4. Don’t make it stand alone

Doing 5S is liberating.  We have all experienced that feeling after cleaning the basement or garage after a year of accumulating stuff.  But 5S is just one tool that enables stability that enables flow.   Well organized and sparkling clean waste is still waste.  Getting bogged down in 5S can be an avoidance pattern - avoiding the hard work of thinking about how to create flow and solve the real root cause problems inhibiting flow.

5. Monitor, review, and improve

Once the team has completed the first activities they’ll need to focus on sustaining. The team should create standard audits to assess and score their area so that they can be monitored on an ongoing basis. In addition, the team should meet to review how things are working and what additional improvements they could make. Photographs should be taken of the improved work area and a 5S story board put up to show the improvements gained. I would also suggest that the team be allowed to make a presentation to the management and the rest of the organization to show off their achievements.

The 5S system is a good starting point for all improvement efforts aiming to drive out waste from the manufacturing process, and ultimately improve a company’s bottom line by improving products and services, and lowering costs. Many companies are seeking to make operations more efficient, and the concept is especially attractive to older manufacturing facilities looking to improve the bottom line by reducing their costs.

Lean Quote: Lean Goes Beyond Tools To Challenge Thinking

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.

"A tool is just an opportunity with a handle. It's just a way of thinking about something differently. " — Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly

We all have stories of those who try to use Lean as a tool to improve their business but fail. Those of us who have experienced the true power of Lean understand that it is more than that.

Lean is not about the tools it’s how they are applied. A large number of organizations have failed to produce the desired results from the direct and prescriptive application of Lean tools. The tools themselves have been proven to work in many situations. The difference must then be in how the tools were applied, their appropriateness, but not the tools themselves.

There are thousands of Lean tools, because each problem requires its own unique tool to help solve it. However, tools do not solve problems but rather people do. People are needed to apply tools. Basically, leaders have to learn to think differently and see their customers and business differently, that’s people development, not tools development.

Lean is a way of thinking. It is about learning to see opportunities and continually improving them. Lean is a system of tools and people that work together.