Team Them to Fish, More Than a Saying

There's an old saying, usually attributed to Confucius, that goes something like "Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you've fed him for a lifetime." There's an important life lesson in that simple statement. Some people translate it conceptually into something like "Education is the most important thing you can give someone to better his circumstances." For me I don’t believe this gets to the heart of the matter.

The translation I like goes something like this:

Give a man the answer, and he'll only have a temporary solution. Teach him the principles that led you to that answer, and he will be able to create his own solutions in the future.

It's considerably less catchy, of course, but I think this is the true meaning of Confucius’s statement.

Suppose someone is trained on how to create a simple graphic in Excel. No doubt he or she will be quite able to create a graphic, but they will have problems doing other things because they have not been educated about the many functionalities and applications of Excel.

Then suppose you have someone else, someone who has been educated about Excel’s full capabilities. This person understands the major concepts that underpin Excel’s functionalities and made them necessary in the first place.

This second person will be able to apply their background knowledge, and compound it with creativity, to find solutions to problems they have not encountered before and they can inventively use Excel to do things they have never been trained to do.

You train someone to do something. It is task-oriented. It is skill-based. You can train someone to increase their proficiency. But in essence, you get what you put into it. A trained person may get faster, but they’re unlikely to find a truly new and better way to do something. Because training has a skill-based focus; it does not provide the depth needed for creative problem solving and innovation.

You train people for performance. You educate people for understanding.

Lean Quote: The Power of Teamwork

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.

"Alone, we can do so little; together we can do so much." — Helen Keller

We all have roles in our organizations but it is the power of teamwork that makes our endeavors successful. It takes everyone working together on a common goal to be successful in Lean.

A team of people can achieve far more than the sum of the total of the individuals skills alone. In business teams can achieve:

     They can generate a wider range of ideas and innovation than individuals;
     They are able to motivate themselves;
     They can bounce ideas off each team member;
     They often take more risks than individuals;
     They have a range of personalities such as workers, thinkers, leaders who contribute the right  balance of skills necessary to achieve high performance;
     They support each other and are not just task-orientated;
     They can be a support mechanism which provide mentoring and allow others to grow in self- confidence.

Teamwork is important to the success of an organization, but as the saying goes: “it’s like getting rich or falling in love, you cannot simply will it to happen.” Teamwork is a practice. Teamwork is an outcome. And teamwork leverages the individual skills of every team member. 

Groups don’t just become teams because we use that name and it is not about teamwork. Teams act as a collective unit with shared commitment and not a band of individual contributors. Just like in Lean the whole, or in this case, the team is greater than the sum of the individual parts. Teams often are more difficult to form because it takes time for members to learn to work together. Management must support and encourage the use of teams in their organization.

Collaboration and team work create an environment that allows the collective knowledge, resources and skills of each team member to flourish. When people work together they can complete tasks faster by dividing the work to people of different abilities and knowledge. Teamwork can lead to better decisions, products, or services.

 

Guest Post: Simplify Safety by Thinking Lean

Unfortunately, safety measures and procedures can often turn into more of a burden rather than an efficient system for safety for many different organizations. Often the cost of the safety precautions and measures taken is much higher than expected and can hinder the business as well as the safety at the workplace.

The good news is - it is possible to reduce the cost for safety measure without decreasing the quality and safety level. In fact, it can make safety even more efficient.

The first thing you should do is measure the time which your personnel - from workers to supervisors and safety professionals spend for safety related activities per day. If it turns out that they are spending more than half of the work day or shift on safety specific activities, you can do the math and see how much time is actually left for work itself. If you are a production company and your employees all spend more than 50% of their time doing something other than actually producing things, neither the owners, nor the management or your customers will be happy with the results.

The fact is, that most of the safety related activities and procedures which you have implemented in your organization could be too time consuming. For example, do you have complicated safety forms which need to be completed? Or do your supervisors spend too much time investigating incidents and monitoring the safety conditions? Do you have everyday safety training which takes a lot of time?

These are some of the questions you need to ask yourself before considering making improvements and simplifying your safety system, without affecting its efficiency.

Here are some ideas how thinking lean can help you improve the efficiency and effectivity of your safety system and procedures:

1.    Integrate the safety actions and procedures in your work and support procedures. In other words, add a safety process into the operational procedure itself. This way, the person responsible for the job will be responsible for the specific safety procedure for it. For example, add the lockout process for energy control in the work procedure. This will make the entire workflow more efficient and actually safer.

2.    Integrate the procedures for safety analysis and job hazard risk analysis into your work procedures as well.

3.    Integrate as much of the safety training into the work training as possible, and also do specific safety training for the people who are actually in risk of the specific hazards, rather than wasting the time of all employees for all the various risks. This will save time, and is actually a more efficient training method.

4.    Visualize the safe conditions.  This means making unsafe or hazardous things and processes more apparent for safety professionals or supervisors. Examples include: defining the correct and safe body position, or position/condition of potentially hazardous equipment, tools, and others. Use simple diagrams including “right” and “wrong” conditions, allowing anybody passing by to see that something is wrong.

5.    Watch out for employees who are taking shortcuts and are skipping important safety procedures or using the wrong instruments in order to make their work easier or faster. Try to improve employee engagement, because such shortcuts can be dangerous and can lead to serious injuries, damage and other problems. It is important that you inspect the work process procedures, as well as any indications that shortcuts are being taken, carefully conduct research and analysis for the reasons for this nonconformity and take corrective actions. This can mean redesigning your work procedure, so that the process becomes the shortcut. It is recommended that you include the employees who used the shortcut to take part in the re-designing of the work procedure. In many cases, this will lead to a more efficient and yet safe operational procedure, and thus better productivity and improved safety in your organization.

About the Author: Mike Pierce is an outdoorsman, lean thinker, and footwear fanatic who manages the team at Mybootprint.com. He also works on another site ShoeMatters.com that helps people find high quality footwear for their needs.

Lean Quote: Use Every Person's Skill Set to the Fullest

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.

"Use every person's skill set to the fullest. Both optimist and pessimist contribute. An optimist invents the hot air balloon, and a pessimist invents the parachute." — Ramesh Lohia and Surbhi Lohia, Consultants, Six Sigma, Kaizen

The worst kind of waste is the lack of employee involvement and creativity. Lean doesn’t work unless everyone is involved and has input. We must involve employees in the continuous improvement process because the people actually carrying out the job know how to do that job better. The best companies in the world tap the creativity and talent of the whole organization and not just a select few.

The lack of ongoing employee involvement at the shop-floor level has been identified as a major reason for the non-sustainability of Lean in the organization. When there is a lack of staff involvement, and management fails to seek employee input on critical decisions, employees may feel dejected and detached from the organization.

This happens frequently in large organizations where the skills and backgrounds of everyone are not common knowledge.  This can vary from not capturing ideas that employees might have for new products or innovations, to the six-figure salary executive correcting data entry errors in a financial spreadsheet. The biggest crime in this category is not empowering or enabling the people most intimate with a process to improve the process.

Lean thinkers at Toyota believe that showing respect for people means you allow them to think for themselves and solve their own problem. It is often said that the mission of Toyota is about developing exceptional people who happen to make great cars. The point is that it is more about people and less about the problem.

 

Guest Post:The SWOT Analysis and What It Can Do for You

Do you ever feel like your team or business is struggling, but aren’t sure how to approach the problems that you have? You might want to try a SWOT analysis.  A SWOT analysis examines the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that a business faces, and it’s a great way for your team to sit down and figure out what to do about it.  Aside from the advantage to employees and managers, SWOT also helps investors see the likely risks and returns of a given venture. Investors want to know more than hopes and visions; they want to know how physical, human and intangible assets such as brand name recognition will be used to drive growth. Here, we go over what SWOT entails, how the analysis can be used by team leads and project managers, and general execution strategy of SWOT-based reforms.

SWOT Internals - Strengths and Weaknesses
Generally, strengths and weaknesses are under a high degree of control by management and employees. Note, however, that control doesn't mean ease of implementation. Internal processes can be notoriously complex, especially if rooted in an organization's culture. Also professional censure and personal risk aversion steer employees and leaders towards smaller, incremental and perhaps ineffectual changes. Bold reforms, while optimal on paper, come with challenges and pitfalls that can be hard to overcome.

SWOT Externals - Opportunities and Threats
Opportunities and threats address the market and financial environment outside the business. The key in dealing with opportunities and threats is identifying likely profit drivers and hazards and attempting to steer business marketing and operations accordingly. Reforms with respect to SWOT externals present a more volatile risk/reward profile. Here, it’s important not to punish occasional bad performance since doing so will dampen the kind of creativity and drive required for success in dealing with SWOT externals.

Team and Project Management
A team leader or project manager would be wise to divide employees into two groups. The first should specialize in understanding business internals such as operational processes, channels of influence, and staffing needs. The second group focuses on team members who lean more towards knowledge of the market, sales strategies, customer needs, financials, and competitors. Have internal employees focus on expanding the strength and weakness aspects of a SWOT analysis, while external-focus employees focus on threats and opportunities. Then, combine your findings into several improvement plans.

Executing SWOT reforms
Analyze the risk and likely rewards of each feasible improvement plan. Begin by executing a relatively low-risk improvement plan, but don't neglect the possibility for phenomenal growth. Remember that higher-risk projects could pay off greatly, but be careful not to confuse established internal operations or customers about business goals and core competencies.

SWOT is not a cure-all, but it is very useful in assessing likely business success and, in fact, can be useful in nearly any discipline. Someone pondering a new career can draw up an analysis of personal strengths and weaknesses as well as identify where in the labor market those combined personal traits would carry the greatest reward and/or present the least risk. For example, an introvert would not be wise to go into commission-only sales, nor would someone without a head for numbers be well-served by investing in graduate-level physics courses. SWOT analysis is not perfect, but it is useful in many aspects of life including business management.

About the Author:

Rachel Stires is a media relations specialist for the Management Training Institute. She enjoys talking about trends in management and how industry leaders can make the most of the opportunities available to them.

7 Wastes Demonstration From Students

When thinking Lean, you should always be thinking about waste. Each business potentially has 7 Deadly Wastes according to Lean thinking. 

The 7 wastes are:
• Defects
• Overproduction
• Transportation of product
• Waiting
• Inventory
• Motion of people
• Processing

Students participating in a education program at IDEXX Laboratories made a video to illustrate the 7 wastes.  This video reminds me of the Toast Kaizen video.



Do you have a favorite 7 or 8 Wastes video that you use for demonstration with your teams?  

Lean Quote: Leadership Emphasizes Asking the Right Questions Not Finding the Right Answers

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 most common source of mistakes in management decisions is the emphasis on finding the right answer rather than the right question." — Peter Drucker

Ability of leaders to ask the right questions is critical to the success of a project. The type of questions will determine the quality of process improvements. If leaders do not know what to look for, teams would get the message that they can get away with whatever is possible.

All management should learn to ask these three simple questions:
       1) What is the process?
       2) How can you tell it is working?
       3) What are you doing to improve it (if it is working)?

Nothing sustains itself, certainly not Lean manufacturing or Lean management. So, establish and stick to a routine including regular visits to the Gemba, check the status of visual controls, follow-up on daily accountability assignments, and ask the three simple questions everywhere. Lean management is, as much as anything, a way of thinking.

Guide by asking questions, not by telling grown up people what to do. People generally know the right answers if they have the opportunity to produce them.

When an employee brings you a problem to solve, ask, "what do you think you should do to solve this problem?" Or, ask, "what action steps do you recommend?" Employees can demonstrate what they know and grow in the process.

If you don't ask the right questions, you don't get the right answers. A question asked in the right way often points to its own answer.