Lean Quote: Take Time to Watch the Leaves Turn

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.

"Everyone must take time to sit and watch the leaves turn."   —  Elizabeth Lawrence

Seasons change and each one beckons a new energy. Autumn, when the light is equal to the dark, is a period of both abundance and surrender. It invites you to celebrate your bounty – the fruits from the seeds you planted in the spring. Then, it reminds you to be grateful, demonstrating both the impermanence in nature and the possibility of regeneration.

So, pause to watch the leaves turn. Take time to reflect on the cycles of life. If you have received great favor, then determine how you can share the love. If your harvest was not as robust as you would like, then start planning for next season.

Just as leaves fall from the trees, it’s a good time to consider your strongholds and shed anything that doesn’t serve your spirit or may be holding you back from reaching your highest potential. As you let go of dead weight – whether it be habits, beliefs, activities or even people – you make way for new growth. You may just fall into a more vibrant version of yourself.

You’ve been working hard and playing hard. A great way to prevent burnout is to create space and time for yourself. Fall offers us a colorful window to sit and take in Nature’s work, to revel in the beauty that truly is all around us. Enjoy the peace, quiet, and beauty that autumn brings.

Autumn is the Season for Reflection and Gratitude

A new season greets us. Fall has arrived, and with it comes crisper air, warm sweaters and blankets, and natural beauty. For me there is a special magic in this season.

Leaves begin to burn into an explosive palette of colors, a crisp and cold air is blowing, the days are shortening, pumpkins are appearing announcing Halloween.

Symbolically, Autumn is a time for reflection and gratitude.  It's time to slow down and remember where we are coming from and where we're going.  It is time to reap what we sowed in the spring and time to commit to new projects.

Autumn leaves remind us to slow down and enjoy the life going on around us, right this moment. It’s a time to reflect

As leaders, we spend a great deal of our time looking for the right results – planning, measuring, and refining.

Again, these are often all necessary essentials if we are going to be effective in our roles. However, these results are not the goal of true leadership. They are simply the by-product of the true goal – helping people grow.

Autumn, and the measured slowness it brings, naturally creates an opportunity for us to simmer down, hit pause, and actually relate to our teams. It’s a time to remind ourselves that they are the resource, not the vehicle used to produce the resource.

Take time to interact with your people, all without agenda or expectation. Invest time in deepening your knowledge and understanding of who they are, what their hopes and dreams might be, and how you can help them become the people they were always meant to be.

Regular periods of self-reflection help leaders ensure they’re headed in the right direction with regard to engaging their teams, making progress on their own leadership development, and creating a legacy that is sustainable over the long-term.

Whether you are in a leadership role, an aspiring leader or you just want to be your best in work and life, the habit of reflection can build self-awareness, efficacy, and resilience. If done with purpose and intention, it can help you establish and achieve more meaningful goals and prepare for the new year ahead.

6 Tips For Building a Collaborative Work Environment

Nowadays, many employers cite collaboration as a key employee skill. It's a great way to encourage people to share knowledge and resources. It can provide great opportunities for cross-training and networking, and can even improve employee engagement levels.

Collaboration means working together with people from across the business to achieve a shared goal. Although similar to teamwork, a collaborative partnership is not hierarchical – everyone has equal status, no matter their seniority. You can collaborate with members of your own team or from other departments, as well as contractors, clients, or even other organizations.

Collaboration can demand a lot from people. It means being open-minded, listening to other people's opinions and putting personal agendas to one side. So, it's essential that you try to encourage collaboration across your organization. You can do this by:

Share knowledge, insights, and resources. Knowledge, as they say, is power. And if knowledge is shared amongst your team, they will feel more empowered to contribute on an even playing field.

Leading by example. People watch how you act. If you aren't afraid to listen to new ideas and offer solutions – even when it makes you vulnerable – you'll encourage others to do the same.

Building trust. Collaboration can stall when people don't feel able to open up. Combat this by setting up team-building activities, and encouraging people to give honest and constructive feedback. This will help to strengthen team bonds, to create a sense of shared responsibility and to give people the confidence to speak up.

Fostering a creative culture. Creative thinking underpins good collaboration. It can help to drive innovation and allows you to avoid groupthink. Encourage this behavior by making use of creativity tools and processes.

Achieve "Buy-In". While some people will jump at the chance to collaborate, others may not be so keen. They might see it as an imposition on their time and be worried about the extra work or stress that it could bring. So, before you ask someone to collaborate think about how it can benefit him or her. Identifying the wider strategic goal, like fine-tuning a process to increase income, can be persuasive.

Get out of the office. Getting out of the office regularly helps teams build relationships based on mutual interests rather than what they share in common within working hours. It helps employees see each other as humans rather than just colleagues.

Team collaboration is the cornerstone of any successful business. Collaborative workplaces see increased levels of trust, a more engaged workforce, and improved performance. Running a collaborative team environment is no simple feat. It takes a concerted effort to integrate co-operative values throughout your whole company's ethos.

Lean Quote: Lean is, Quite Simply, the World's Most Powerful Scientific Management Approach With a Focus on Work as Flow.

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 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

Lean is a collaborative scientific management approach that fosters creativity, innovation and agile organizations. By developing everyone to collaboratively solve problems to the flow of value to customers every day. Everyone engages in observation and experiments to improve flow. Lean management also continuously improves the system within which people work.

The genius of Taiichi Ohno (father of the Toyota Production System) to focus on a truly scientific object of study - flow as energy moving through a system, with few assumptions and that follows robust existing laws and principles - is what sets Lean management apart from others.

Where Taiichi Ohno was truly ahead of his time however, was in creating a collaborative scientific model. In collaborative science, everyone, no matter the level of education or role can collaboratively gather data, analyze data and share learning. What this means in Lean organizations is that the people expending energy to flow value to customers are doing the actual measurements in real time and are best positioned to identify flow problems quickly and engage in controlled experiments in order to improve flow.

Scientific methods used in Lean organizations are varied and include, but are not limited to, experimentation (PDSA or PDCA). The method of observation, for example, is one of the most important to develop in absolutely everyone - not exclusively management - in order to see flow in real time.

The beauty of a scientific management system based on flow is its portability - as long as there is effort expended in a context, Lean applies. This moves Lean way beyond the confines of manufacturing.

Management in a Lean organization is more akin to scientific research management, aligning efforts organizationally with a steady focus on the flow. Developing everyone to be the best at what they do by improving the flow of value to customers in their own work every single day.

Transformational vs Transactional Leadership

Leadership takes many forms. No two leaders look exactly alike, and yet, radically different styles can produce impressive results.

While a wide variety of qualities set modern leaders apart, most ultimately fall under one of two main categories: transactional and transformational. Identified in James MacGregor Burns’s book entitled Leadership, these influential styles were initially regarded as mutually exclusive.

A transactional leader is someone who follows a routine or set of rules. They focus more on sticking to the procedure to achieve results, rather than trying new ideas or innovating. The term “transactional” comes from the fact that these types of leaders are looking to motivate by exchanging performance for rewards or discipline. A transactional leader will set a list of criteria for their employees or team members to meet, then judge them based on how well they meet those criteria.

Transformational leaders are more focused on the future and embrace creativity. A transformational leader will encourage their subordinates to innovate and try new things, with the ultimate goal of creating future success for the organization. With this style of leadership, you are less focused on the day-to-day operations and short-term goals, but rather on long-term success.

Whereas a transactional leader may micro-manage the work of an employee, transformational leaders will give them more room to operate. This allows employees to take on larger responsibilities and use more of their creativity. In turn, the employee feels like they have a larger stake within the organization.

A transformational leader wants each team member to be their best so that they can ultimately help the organization improve. They do this by motivating the team member not through money or punishments, but by getting them to see themselves as a part of something bigger.

It’s tempting to debate which style of leadership is better, but that misses the point. Both styles are valid, and what matters is context. Different management styles are suited to different situations. Some organizations need rigidity and a clear chain of command. Others work best in a fluid environment where leadership sets an example and establishes goals. Leadership styles that work for Google won’t work for the military — and vice versa.

In fact, both types of leadership styles might be needed in the same organization to counterbalance each other and help achieve growth and development goals. Transactional leaders make sure the team is running smoothly and producing results today, while transformational leaders spur innovation and look toward tomorrow. In either case education and training can be an effective tool in advancing one’s abilities as a leader.

What leadership style does your company need?

6 Steps for Benchmarking Best Practices

In Lean improvement, benchmarking is the regular, systematic measuring of an organization’s own products, services or processes against those of the recognized best practitioners in the world. The information collected about a company’s own processes analyzed in relationship to the best-in-class practices provides insight into the actions the company can take to improve its performance. Indeed, benchmarking analysis can even provide metrics by which an organization can measure its success in adding value to its business and work processes.

The key steps involved with benchmarking include:

Measure current practices: Teams determine an area where the company is underperforming. They then measure key performance indicators to see where they currently stand.

Research best practices: After measuring their own performance, businesses then measure those same key metrics in whatever operation or process they want to improve. Understand how your process work and how other group’s processes work.

Analyze best practices: Teams analyze how companies achieve a high standard in the key metrics. This often requires touring the world-class organization’s operations or meeting with people from the organization. Collection information and data to evaluate and compare.

Compare performance: Teams then compare their operations with those of the world-class organization, finding areas where they can make improvements. These changes will help them achieve a higher standard in the key performance metrics.

Model best practices: Teams make significant changes to improve current practices from what they learned. The project team’s next step is to set goals for the improvement of the company’s existing process. These goals can, and probably should, be stretch goals that will result in a process even better than the other organization’s best-in-class process.

Repeat

While benchmarking is not a perfect process if done properly and consistently it can be the start of improving your business and creating a more optimal learning environment.

One of the biggest advantages of benchmarking is the extent of improvements the organization makes by learning from the processes of others. A better and proven process can be adapted, with suitable modifications for company requirements, with less time invested for inventing new methodologies. Benchmarking also uncovers new ways of improving a company’s own processes by motivating actions learned from studying and experiencing those organizations with best-in-class processes.

Lean Quote: Eight Leadership Functions to Improve Ability

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.

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

John Adair (b.1934) is one of Britain's foremost authorities on leadership in organizations. Adair identifies eight leadership functions all leaders need to be able to perform, each of these must be constantly refined and developed:

1. Defining the task – this should be done using SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound)

2. Planning – leaders should be open-minded, positive and creatively searching for alternatives

3. Briefing – team briefings by the leader are a basic and essential function to foster teamwork and motivate individuals

4. Controlling – leaders need self-control, good control systems in place and effective delegation and monitoring skills

5. Evaluating – leaders must constantly assess the consequences of actions taken, evaluate performance and appraise and train individuals

6. Motivating – Adair identifies 8 basic rules for motivating people that include setting realistic but challenging targets, creating a motivating environment and treating each person as an individual

7. Organizing – good leaders must be able to organize themselves, their team and their company

8. Setting an example – the best leaders naturally set a good example for their teams, if this is forced, leaders will become complacent.

Adair considers that these leadership functions need to be developed and honed to constantly improve the leader's ability.