Mentoring is Vital to Developing Lean Thinking

One key area frequently overlooked in process improvement deployments is the importance of developing experts who understand both the art and science of mentoring to grow real internal capabilities.

Mentoring can be defined as a significant, long-term, beneficial effect on a person’s life or style, generally as a result of personal, one-on-one contact. A mentor is one who offers knowledge, insight, perspective, or wisdom that is especially useful to the other person.

People who have been mentored often recognize that something very special has happened, but they may not even know what to call the experience. Mentoring can be done by anyone, at any time, in almost any place. Mentoring can take the form of a one-sot intervention or a lifelong relationship. It can be carried out informally as an element of friendship, or formally as part of a highly structured employee orientation program.

Mentoring is a process whereby mentor and mentee work together to discover and develop the mentee’s latent abilities and to encourage the mentee to acquire effective tutor, counselor, friend, and foil who enables the mentee to sharpen skills and hone her or is thinking. There should be a genuine interest in both parties in what you are trying to achieve, what you are learning, and what will be next.

Mentoring also can happen almost unconsciously. Someone may do or say something that will have an important effect on someone else. Or the recipient may become only slowly aware of how important a given intervention has been in his or her life. Yet these empowering links are not just beneficial accidents. Their power springs from the giving nature of the mentor and the receptiveness of the mentee to absorb, digest, and use the lessons passed to her or him. Probably we have all had such experiences, both as mentor and as mentee.

Effective mentoring requires going above and beyond. It is a relationship in which a person with greater experience, expertise, and wisdom counsels teaches, guides, and helps another person to develop both personally and professionally to meet exceptional standards of performance.

It is the role of executives and managers to create an environment and the systems in which employees can and will take responsibility for the practices, behaviors and thinking that achieve, sustain and build on improvements made with Lean. Mentoring is an important component to building this learning environment to support process improvements.

The mentor is checking that the mentee is learning the right skills and thinking to develop the organization. As each level in the organization begins to understand their role in coaching/mentoring the next level - and gain both the skill and perspective to do it, the organization achieves a cascading coaching/mentoring environment where continuous Lean improvement can flourish.

Mentoring is vital to develop and teach the thinking that is key to promoting and propagating the principles that underlie the Lean methodology. Without an embedded mentoring structure, the organization cannot deploy the deep understanding necessary for proliferating, or even sustaining, continued learning. Also, without a long-term commitment to mentoring employees, the learning developed in each employee would only reach a superficial level.

Don’t overlook the critical role mentoring plays in a Lean thinking organization.

Lean Quote: Mistakes Are Inevitable But You Can Learn From Them

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 mistake is an event, the full benefit of which has not yet been turned to your advantage." — Ed Land (Polaroid) 

Nobody likes making mistakes. It is human nature to make mistakes. If you go through life afraid to make a mistake, you’ll spend most of your life doing absolutely nothing. There is no harm in making mistakes, it is an essential part of learning. If you feel the need to avoid mistakes at all costs, it becomes a psychological barrier to taking risks.

Learning from your mistakes is one of the greatest personal achievements you can make. From your own mistakes you can gain wisdom and accelerate self-improvement. Mistakes, because of their relationship with risk taking, are essential to success. The important thing is to view mistakes as a useful stepping stone to a higher confidence and a broader perspective.

Learning from mistakes requires three things:

·       Putting yourself in situations where you can make mistakes
·       Having the self-confidence to recognize and admit to them
·       Being courageous about making improvements

The most important lesson in making mistakes is to trust that while mistakes are inevitable and you can learn from them. No matter what happens tomorrow you'll be able to get value from it, and apply it to the day after that. Progress won't be a straight line but if you keep learning you will have more successes than failures, and the mistakes you make along the way will help you get to where you want to go.

 

How to Avoid 6 Common Pitfalls of Process Mapping

Earlier this week I discussed the benefits of processing mapping.  Process maps are used to develop a better understanding of a process, to generate ideas for process improvement or stimulate discussion, build stronger communication, and — of course — to document a process.  Creating a process map is a relatively straight forward process but some mistakes can derail the process.  

Here are the most common pitfalls in process mapping and some possible remedies:

1. "Unbalanced" map (too much detail in some areas, not enough in others).
   Remedy: Compare to other parts of the map; ask, "Does this step contain roughly the same amount of effort as that step?"
2. Gaps (missing or uncertain steps).
   Remedy: Ensure that those who help create the map are knowledgeable of the process, or hav others review the draft for completeness and accuracy.
3. Map too "busy."
   Remedy: Use additional paper and plenty of white space, or expanded maps cross-referenced to base map.
4. Takes too long, or people get bogged down.
   Remedy: Establish ground rules:
   - outstanding items list
   - move on after 5 minutes
   - follow rough draft principle; first get it down, then get it good
   - use a facilitator.
5. Unclear terminology, or cannot remember what was said about a particular step.
   Remedy: Take notes while mapping, create a glossary of terms.
6. Group is mixed or defers to designated decision makers.
   Remedy: Stress that firsthand knowledge of the work process is what matters.  Strive for equal participation, even if it means redefining the group.  Try to prevent this problem by staffing the group with the right mix up front and explaining to management that they should select those closest to the work. 

What advice would you give others when mapping a process? 

5 Benefits of Process Mapping

Complete Guide: 5 Key Benefits of Process Mapping in Business

Understanding Process Mapping

Process mapping is a powerful visualization technique that transforms abstract business workflows into clear, actionable diagrams. By creating visual representations of how work flows through an organization, process mapping serves as one of the most essential process improvement tools available to modern businesses. Whether you're documenting existing procedures or designing new operational pathways, business process mapping provides the clarity needed to optimize performance and enhance customer satisfaction.

What is Process Mapping in Business?

Business process mapping involves creating detailed visual representations of workflows, procedures, and operational sequences within an organization. These visual tools—often presented as process flowcharts—capture the specific combination of functions, steps, inputs, outputs, and decision points that define how your organization delivers value to customers.

A well-constructed process flowchart serves as more than just documentation. It becomes a strategic asset that reveals the intricate relationships between different operational components, highlights dependencies, and exposes opportunities for enhancement. Workflow mapping makes the invisible visible, transforming tacit knowledge into explicit documentation that everyone in the organization can understand and utilize.

The Two Primary Applications of Process Mapping

Current State Mapping

When applied to existing operations, process mapping creates a snapshot in time that documents exactly how work currently flows through your organization. This "as-is" representation captures your current pathways of customer satisfaction, providing invaluable insights into:

• How tasks transition between departments and team members

• Where bottlenecks and delays typically occur

• Which steps add genuine value versus those that consume resources without meaningful benefit

• How information and materials move through the organization

• Where decision points exist and who holds decision-making authority

Future State Design

Process mapping in business also serves as a powerful design tool for envisioning improved workflows. By analyzing current process performance against customer requirements and competitive benchmarks, organizations can create "to-be" process flowcharts that illustrate optimized pathways. These future-state maps become essential prerequisites for successful organizational design initiatives, process re-engineering projects, and benchmarking exercises.

5 Key Benefits of Process Mapping

1. Enhanced Visibility and Communication

The foremost benefit of process mapping lies in its ability to make work visible across the entire organization. When workflows are documented visually, they become accessible to stakeholders at all levels—from frontline employees to executive leadership. This increased visibility dramatically improves communication by providing a shared frame of reference that eliminates ambiguity and ensures everyone understands their role within the larger operational context.

Visual workflow mapping transcends language barriers and departmental silos, creating a common vocabulary that facilitates productive discussions about process performance. Team members can point to specific steps in a process flowchart when discussing issues or improvements, making conversations more concrete and actionable.

Key Advantages:

• Breaks down communication barriers between departments

• Creates shared understanding across diverse teams

• Provides reference material for training and onboarding

• Facilitates more productive problem-solving discussions

• Reduces misunderstandings about roles and responsibilities

2. Accelerated Employee Onboarding and Training

New employees face a significant challenge when joining an organization: understanding the complex web of processes, procedures, and interdependencies that define daily operations. Process mapping dramatically shortens the learning curve by providing visual guides that illustrate exactly how work flows through the organization.

Rather than relying solely on verbal explanations or written procedures, new team members can study process flowcharts to understand their responsibilities, see how their work connects to others, and grasp the bigger picture of organizational operations. This visual approach to training improves retention, reduces errors during the onboarding period, and helps new hires become productive contributors more quickly.

Training Applications:

• Orientation programs for new employees

• Cross-training initiatives for existing staff

• Documentation for temporary or seasonal workers

• Reference materials for process compliance

• Knowledge transfer from experienced to newer employees

3. Data-Driven Process Improvement Opportunities

Business process mapping transforms process improvement from guesswork into a systematic, data-driven discipline. When workflows are visually documented, improvement opportunities become immediately apparent. Process improvement tools like value stream mapping can be overlaid onto process flowcharts to identify specific enhancement targets.

Through careful analysis of mapped processes, organizations can systematically work to:

Improvement Area	Process Mapping Benefit
Cycle Time Reduction	Identifies sequential steps that could be parallelized and eliminates unnecessary waiting periods
Defect Prevention	Reveals quality checkpoints that are missing or inadequately positioned within the workflow
Cost Optimization	Exposes redundant steps, excessive handoffs, and resource-intensive activities that don't add value
Productivity Enhancement	Highlights automation opportunities and workload distribution imbalances
Non-Value-Added Elimination	Distinguishes between activities that customers value and internal steps that consume resources without benefit
Performance Measurement	Identifies appropriate points for establishing customer-driven metrics and monitoring mechanisms

The visual nature of workflow mapping makes it easier for improvement teams to conduct root cause analysis, experiment with process redesigns, and model the potential impact of proposed changes before implementation.

4. Optimized Organizational Design and Resource Allocation

Process mapping in business provides critical insights for designing organizational structures that align with actual work requirements rather than traditional hierarchies. By understanding how work truly flows through the organization, leadership can make informed decisions about team composition, reporting relationships, and resource allocation.

Workflow mapping reveals the reality of cross-functional collaboration, showing which departments must work together closely and where coordination challenges exist. This intelligence enables organizations to:

• Evaluate alternative organizational structures before committing to restructuring

• Identify opportunities for shared services or centralized functions

• Determine optimal team sizes and skill requirements

• Assess whether work should be organized around products, customers, geography, or functions

• Establish clearer accountability by aligning authority with actual workflow patterns

Business process mapping also clarifies the inputs your department receives from other parts of the organization and the outputs you provide to internal and external customers. This understanding helps teams quickly get up to speed on their role within the broader organizational ecosystem and identify dependencies that must be managed effectively.

5. Strategic Foundation for Continuous Improvement Initiatives

Perhaps the most significant long-term benefit of process mapping is its role as the foundation for sustained organizational improvement. The improvement journey of any organization follows the pathways created by its work processes—the sequences of activities that create and deliver goods and services to customers, whether internal or external.

Process improvement tools become exponentially more effective when applied to well-documented workflows. Process mapping provides the baseline against which improvement can be measured, creating a "before and after" comparison that demonstrates progress and justifies investment in enhancement initiatives.

Strategic Applications:

Benchmarking Projects: Process flowcharts enable meaningful comparisons with industry best practices by providing standardized documentation of current procedures that can be evaluated against external standards.

Performance Measurement Systems: Workflow mapping helps identify appropriate metrics by revealing where measurement points should be established and which outcomes truly matter to customers.

Quality Management Systems: Visual process documentation supports ISO certification, regulatory compliance, and quality assurance programs by creating auditable records of standard operating procedures.

Change Management: When organizations implement new technologies, procedures, or strategies, process maps help visualize the transition from current to future states, making change more manageable and less threatening to employees.

Knowledge Management: As experienced employees retire or transition to new roles, process mapping captures institutional knowledge that might otherwise be lost, preserving critical operational intelligence.

Practical Implementation Considerations

Choosing the Right Level of Detail

Effective process mapping strikes a balance between comprehensiveness and usability. High-level maps provide strategic overview, while detailed process flowcharts document specific procedures for training and compliance purposes. Organizations typically benefit from creating process maps at multiple levels:

• Level 1 (Strategic): High-level value streams showing major process stages

• Level 2 (Tactical): Departmental workflows showing key activities and handoffs

• Level 3 (Operational): Detailed procedures with specific tasks, decisions, and responsibilities

Engaging Stakeholders in the Mapping Process

The most accurate and useful process maps emerge from collaborative efforts that engage the people who actually perform the work. Subject matter experts from different departments should participate in mapping exercises to ensure comprehensive coverage and buy-in for improvement initiatives. This collaborative approach to business process mapping also builds shared ownership and commitment to optimized workflows.

Maintaining Living Documentation

Process maps should be treated as living documents that evolve alongside organizational operations. Establishing regular review cycles ensures that workflow mapping remains current and continues to serve as reliable reference material. Many organizations now use digital process mapping tools that facilitate updates and make documentation accessible across the enterprise.

Conclusion: Mapping Your Path to Excellence

Process mapping represents far more than a documentation exercise—it's a strategic capability that drives operational excellence, enhances customer satisfaction, and positions organizations for sustainable competitive advantage. The benefits of process mapping extend across every functional area, from operations and quality management to human resources and strategic planning.

By investing in comprehensive business process mapping, organizations gain the visibility, understanding, and analytical foundation needed to continuously improve performance. Whether you're orienting new employees, evaluating organizational design alternatives, identifying improvement opportunities, or establishing performance measurement systems, process flowcharts provide the clarity and insight required for informed decision-making.

The improvement journey begins with understanding where you are today and envisioning where you want to go tomorrow. Process mapping in business provides both the current-state baseline and the future-state vision, creating a roadmap that guides your organization toward operational excellence and enhanced customer value delivery. As one of the most versatile and impactful process improvement tools available, workflow mapping deserves a central place in every organization's continuous improvement toolkit.

Lean Quote: Fear of Failure Should Not Limit Us

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.

"Fear is a bad guardian for a thing that ought to last." — Cicero 

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.

Nobody likes to make mistakes. However, the simple reality of life is that at some point, all of us are going to be wrong. That’s just life. Failure is an expected part of the process of finding solutions. If workers feel that they have to “hit one out of the park” every time they come up with an improvement idea, they will be reluctant to provide their ideas.

We are going to make mistakes. A colleague of mine always says, “Learn to fail quickly.” Essentially, if you are going to fail you need to learn to do it quickly in order to get the data (results) that you can use to gradually improve. The faster you get at learning from unforeseen circumstances and outcomes, the faster you can find a solution that truly adds value.

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.

Fear of failure is one of the greatest fears people have. It is a genuinely scary thing for many people, and often the reason that individuals do not attempt the things they would like to accomplish. But the only true failure is failure to make the attempt. If you don't try, you gain nothing, and life is too short a thing to waste.

 

Tips for Creating an Inclusive, Respectful Learning Environment

As a leader, you want to do everything you can to be the best and most effective leader possible, and while there are many things to keep in mind, one important thing is to remember is to create an inclusive learning environment for the members of your group.

Creating an inclusive work environment is an effective way to make all employees feel comfortable and welcome within your workspace. Fostering this type of environment will likely enhance employee happiness and perhaps even productivity. Crafting an environment of this type, however, requires efforts toward helping workers overcome their fears of the unknown and even prejudices they may potentially be harboring.
Creating a learning environment that values diversity takes many factors into consideration. An inclusive, respectful environment will maximize learner engagement within the learning program.

Managers may incorporate multiple theories, methods and resources to create an inclusive, respectful learning environment. Suggestions include:

1. Develop awareness of biases and assumptions about culture, age, gender, educational background, etc.
2. Be aware of and understand individual differences in addition to cultural differences.
3. Use inclusive language and avoid stereotyping.
4. Involve learners and/or content experts in the learning process, especially in planning.
5. Be flexible in planning and delivery of learning programs.
6. Use a variety of media in learning activities to address multiple learning styles and personality types.
7. Value contributions from individuals, as well as groups and communities.
8. Clearly explain the purpose and anticipated outcome for activities to help establish a common understanding among learners.
9. Be prepared with support or referrals in case learners experience difficult emotions that arise from the reflection process.

Creating an inclusive work environment is an effective way to make all employees feel comfortable and welcome within your workspace. Fostering this type of environment will likely enhance employee happiness and perhaps even productivity. An inclusive environment is one in which members feel comfortable due to the respect and relationships between each other. Openness and honesty emerge, thus making for great synergy, satisfaction and learning.

5 Ways to Create a People Centric Culture

Putting people first at a company, what I call being People-Centric, promotes the sharing of ideas, suggestions and improvements. People are at the core of every organization, and an organization’s employees – its people – are the most important investment it will make. Even as technology advances and capital shifts, it is the leadership and personal contributions of the individual employees who comprise an organization’s workforce that ultimately set it apart from competitors.

Companies that reap the benefits of an engaged workforce understand that people are their greatest asset. Great workplaces foster an environment of communication, fairness, respect, and trust - while creating opportunities for people to grow as employees, and as individuals. A work environment in which people feel valued, heard and a sense of camaraderie is critical to employee engagement.

Here are 5 ways to create a people centric culture:

1. Communication is the key to empowerment.

Give every employee equal and direct access to information. Many companies have developed a trickle-down style of communication that alienates those employees who may not be "in the loop." The more informed employees are and the more communication is open, honest, direct and complete, the more likely employees are to feel empowered and connected to the daily operations and overall goals of their company.

2. Allow employees to suggest better ways of getting their jobs done.

Ask for employee suggestions for other ways of getting the task or project accomplished. Listen and be willing to really hear the employees' comments. Employees hate to have no input and be told exactly how to perform their jobs, leaving no creativity.

3. Show you have trust in your employees.

Allow them to make mistakes as a form of learning. Show that it is really OK to make mistakes. Trust that people have the right intentions and will make the right decisions, even if they are different than your own. Let them know you really support their decisions.

4. Encourage and reward improvement and innovation.

Employees may be afraid to offer insight and new ways of doing things because the company culture doesn't support them. If you really want to empower employees, you'll need to create a company culture that encourages and rewards innovation. You may start by asking individuals to look for ways to improve efficiency, output, safety, etc. in the tasks they perform every day.

5. Create a learning environment. 

Learning is the key to success—some would even say survival—in today’s organizations. Knowledge should be continuously enriched through both internal and external learning. Developing your people shows respect for them.  Building explicit (book) and tacit (hands on) knowledge and distributing it is equally important.

Asking people to improve their work and giving them the tools to do it (e.g. Kaizen) shows the ultimate form of respect in my opinion. In other words management is saying that we trust and expect that you will take a hand in making things better in order to ensure our survival. The implied message is one of mutual trust and respect.