Management’s Responsibility for Leadership

In my previous post I introduced John Adair’s Action-Centered Leadership model. His Action Centered Leadership theory clearly differentiates between leadership and management.

Adair’s model has 3 main elements that we will look at now in more detail. These are Task, Team, and Individual. In its visual depiction, these three circles are interconnected. This means that all of the three elements are interdependent on each other for success. So, all of the elements need to get the right amount of attention to achieve success. We have different focus areas and responsibilities within each element for it all to come together. 

The model becomes simple to use once you realize that Adair provided a list of the things managers and leaders must do for each of the three core management elements.

Achieve the Task 

As leaders, we need to focus on a number of responsibilities to achieve the TASK. Here we will explain some of them. 

Clear Vision

We need to have a clear vision to give proper direction. This allows us to show the path we are planning to take. It will show the route the team needs to take as well as milestones along the way. We need to be able to have a clear road map to create buy-in and clarity at the start of the task. This allows members of the team to understand the expected end result.

Identify the Right Skill Sets

Leaders also need to be able to identify the right skill set needed to achieve the task. Once we know what we want to achieve, we need to be able to understand the mix of experience, skills, and knowledge we will need. This is important to ensure the task can be achieved. We will need to have the right combination within the team of individual strengths and capabilities.

Secure Resources

Also, leaders need to be able to secure the right resources for the team to complete the task. This can include finances, software, equipment, and machinery. We cannot expect the proper results without being able to supply the necessary tools and equipment to get the task done.

Areas of Responsibilities

Another responsibility we have is to ensure we have clarity about areas of responsibility. The team members need to understand their roles as well as their level of accountability. Here, we can set out a detailed plan of what everyone will be doing throughout the entire task. Also, we should be clear about any possible consequences for not achieving their part of the task as stated.

Set Standards

We also need to set the expected standards to achieve the task. We cannot have different people in the team doing the same task in different ways. These can be quality standards that everyone should follow. We can also set standards by creating visual or situational examples of these expectations. For example, we want the store set up in a particular way. We can provide visual aids that clearly define the expected layout that is required.

Report Progress

Additionally, we need to have progress reporting systems in place. This can be done through regular team meetings to review the task progression. Or we can introduce written reports that show progression against set targets.

While this element may have other components, these are some of the main ones to consider.

Build and Maintain the Team

The next element of action centered leadership looks at the team. We all understand the importance of a properly functioning team. So, we might consider the following.

Set the Tone

First, you need to set the tone for the team. You need to be able to guide them in terms of expectations and outcomes. We all want our personality and individuality to shine, however, that might hinder rather than help a team dynamic. It’s important for us to create an inclusive culture for everyone in the team to feel comfortable. We need to develop a sense of belonging within the team.

Define Roles and Responsibilities

Next, we need to define the roles and responsibilities of each member of the team. If there are sub-groups within the team, we need to be clear on the reporting structure. Also, we need to be able to give them a level of empowerment within these defined roles. That way, they will feel more committed to the task at hand.

Clear Communication

We need to be able to communicate with the team during the whole process. This is where we as leaders need to include the team in group discussions, decision-making, problem-solving, and creative thinking. We will see greater productivity from the team when their input and opinions are considered and their feedback is taken on board.

Overcome Difficulties

We need to be able to manage any difficulties that arise within the team. This can be anything from petty disagreements to open conflict. As leaders, we need to be able to keep the team harmonized and working as a unit. Conflict will happen. We need to be ready to deal with it. And of course, prevention is always better than cure, so look out for any tell-tale signs that something is not right within the team dynamic.

Be Ready to Make Adjustments

We need to be able to adjust the team set-up and roles where required. If we see something isn’t working towards the achievement of the task then changes will need to be made. We need to be ready to make those decisions and action those changes. Nobody will benefit from maintaining a status quo that is not producing results.

Develop the Individual

So, we understand the components of the task and the team. We now need to understand the element of the individual in the action centered leadership model.

Understand the Team Members

First, we need to understand the team members as individuals. We should know their strengths, limits, areas of improvement, and their unique personalities. This can help if you need to group people up for jobs within the main task. It can also help you identify where people can really shine in terms of their skills and capabilities.

Set Individual Roles Within the Team

Next, we should focus on the individual roles and responsibilities within the team. We need to create clarity and direction so each member of the team understands their position and contribution. You don’t want people doubling up on the same task unnecessarily. This is only a waste of time and can cause frustration.

Recognition to Motivate

We, as leaders, should acknowledge the contribution of the individuals within the team. This will boost morale and affect the level of motivation. It will also encourage others to perform to high standards to gain recognition for their contributions.

Finally, we need to provide feedback, support, encouragement, and correction, where necessary to the individuals in the team.

Managers and leaders have many demands on their time. You can think of Action Centered Leadership as being a compass to help you determine where and how to spend your time so you can build a high-performance team, which delivers the right things in with the right behaviors. The Action Centered Leadership model can be applied at all levels, from CEO through program managers and project managers, and on to team leaders.

Start Your New Year Off Right

With the hustle of the holidays over we turn to the New Year.  This is the time of year when people are trying to turn over a new leaf. The New Year is the perfect time to make a change. This is when people make New Year’s Resolutions. But good intentions tend to fade out after a month or two, so let’s approach the New Year properly, with a manageable plan that’s focused, realistic and achievable. To start off the New Year on the right foot let’s review three ways to do it properly.

1) Do a Yearly Review

Take stock of where you’ve been and appreciate all of the accomplishments you’ve made in the last year.  In a typical yearly review, you should answer these types of questions:

What went well for me last year?

What accomplishments did I have?

How did I improve my life?

How did I improve my relationships?

What did I remove from my life that is now making me happier?

What do I wish I had taken more time for?

Ask these types of questions about all the important areas of your life, such as family, relationships, financial, career, home, etc. These questions will help you appreciate all you’ve accomplished in the previous year, and you can use this information to start the new year off right, and set better goals for the next year.

2) Finish What You Started

Which projects, errands, and general list of to-do items do you have left over from the previous year that you can complete in 2 hours or less? Do them now to clear your mind of the old items.

Keeping projects around like pets doesn’t do us any good—they just weigh on our minds, and people will spend hours thinking about something that will only take 10 minutes to take care of. Cross those things off your list and give yourself a fresh start.

3) Focus on What You Really Want

Dreaming is fabulous and highly recommended, but if you want to accomplish some improvements in your life, you need to be realistic. As much as you may want something, it’s very likely you don’t really believe you can have it. (If you did you would already have achieved it.) We have to turn a dream into something we can picture accomplishing before it can become a reality.

Take your dream and start breaking it down into milestones. Break those steps down further so you can create a game-plan and start working towards accomplishing that dream.

While it’s true the New Year is an opportunity for change, what is more important is to recognize you don’t need a special occasion to change things. In every single second the ability for positive growth is open and available.

A new year inspires renewed energy and excitement for what could happen. It’s a fresh start and the perfect time to reflect on the past and plan for the future–to set goals and figure out how to meet them.

Lean Roundup #163 – December 2022

A selection of highlighted blog posts from Lean bloggers from the month of December 2022.  You can also view the previous monthly Lean Roundups here.  

 

10 Top Books on Culture, Organizational Change, and Strategy – Katie Anderson shares her top 10 list of books on how to build an intentional lean culture, lead transformational organizational change, and develop (and deploy) strategy.

 

Annual Performance Evaluations are a Poor Management Practice – John Hunter says the contributions any individual brings to an organization is largely dependent on the system in place therefore impacting performance evaluations.

 

Viva Iceland – Pascal Dennis shares reflections on Lean thinking in Iceland highlighting some important lessons for all of us.

 

Effective Visualizations – Michael Baudin talks about how to make effective factory visualizations and why it’s important.

 

Central Principles of the Continuous Improvement Model – Maggie Millard shares 3 principles that guide the continuous improvement model.

 

Lean Banking: Transformation in Financial Services – Jeff Roussel discusses how the lean methodology has been applied in the financial services sector.

 

What is the best way to become more effective at work? – Greg Jacobson recommends making standard work part of your process to become more efficient at work.

 

The collaboration equation – Jim Benson discusses the importance of building collaboration in your teams and explains why this is the only way to consistently deliver value.

 

Lean Thinking is personal development - Michael Ballé explains how lean provided everyone, everywhere with a framework to work their intuition muscle and develop insights.

 

Ask Art: What is the Best Lean Leadership Development Program? – Art Byrne breaks down leadership development challenge into four broad areas.

 

Putting Customers First - Michael Ballé and Nicolas Chartier,the cofounders of a successful startup share how lean thinking and practices helped ensure they kept their focus on the customer from startup to scaleup.

 

Process Behavior Charts: The Christmas Tale / Le Conte de Noël [eBook] – Mark Graban shares an eBook about Process Behavior Charts and Christmas written by Charles Desneuf.

 

Quick Way To Time A Process – John Knotts shares a simple, quick, and easy method of process timing, you can gain a very good estimate of how long a process should take on average.

 

Give Yourself the Gift of Time

'Tis the season for giving — that’s what they say, anyway. There are times when in order to take care of others you need to take care of yourself first. It sounds counterintuitive and certainly against the spirit of the holidays, but sometimes it’s true.

Here are three tips to help you make more time for yourself:

1. Practice making intentions.
When you are not fully conscious, you are not completely aware of your thought process hour by hour. Everything you do or say takes place below the level of awareness. Making intentions gives you the opportunity to choose to take time for you.

2. Leave your comfort zone.
Make an intention to do something that takes you out of your comfort zone or that scares you or makes you feel strange. Making an intention to be brave makes you super aware of yourself--the sense that you own your day, your life. It's easy to feel that other people drive your life when, in fact, you are the only one who has the ability for choice.

3. Take on challenges or change.
Life never remains static. Learn to live skillfully by choosing to take on challenges or change. Allowing your mental skill to see things exactly as they are gives you the ability to consciously assess the challenge or change that is required for your personal growth. Once that course of action is set and your choices are clear and consistent, possibilities open up to make more time and space for yourself. 

Your life is truly important; your life is a gift that needs to be cherished and honored. It's difficult to make time in your life without examining or breaking old patterns of organization, control issues, things we can never change. Paradoxically, you actually lose control by limiting your life to these external issues. The real value of your life resides on the inside and that process takes personal time to develop. Decide what you really want in life.

This season, give yourself the gift of time to learn a new skill. This will be time well spent. It will benefit you, those around you and your employer.

So if I have one recommendation for you for this New Year, it is to carve out some space for you. Give yourself the gift of time.

Top 10 Lean Quotes from 2022

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 cannot improve.

10. "Employees who believe that management is concerned about them as a whole person — not just an employee — are more productive, more satisfied, more fulfilled. Satisfied employees mean satisfied customers, which leads to profitability."   —  Anne M. Mulcahy

9. "Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens efforts and turns even labor into pleasant tasks."   —  James A. Baldwin, author

8. "A boss creates fear, a leader confidence. A boss fixes blame, a leader corrects mistakes. A boss knows all, a leader asks questions."   —  Russel Ewing

7. "When we work for a bigger purpose, we find an endless supply of happiness at work."   —  Jon Gordon, author and motivational speaker

6. "Your number one customers are your people. Look after employees first and then customers last."   —  Ian Hutchinson

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

4. "You don't need a title to be a leader."   —  Mark Sanborn

3. "Transformational leadership’s potential to address issues that are relevant in the modern, changing, and uncertain work environment is the main reason for its positive influence."   —  Beng-Chong Lim & Robert E. Ployhart, 2004

2. "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

1. "Empathy is being concerned about the human being, not just their output."   —  Simon Sinek, Author and Motivational Speaker

These are the top 10 quotes on A Lean Journey website in 2022.

Top 10 Lean Tips From 2022

As 2022 comes to an end and we look toward 2023 I wanted to revisit some tips. The Lean Tips published daily are meant to be advice, things I learned from experience, and some knowledgeable tidbits about Lean to help you along your journey. Here are the top 10 Lean tips from this past year:

Lean Tip #2970 – Show Employees That You Care

When you listen to their issues and solve it, they believe that you care for them as an employer. When they know you care, then they work harder and aim higher than expected results.

 Employees love to work under leaders who care for them, they do not want to be looked as tools or resources utilized for the success of the organization. Employees always want to have a good relationship where employers listen to their concerns at times of professional hardships.

Lean Tip #2992 – Set the Right Targets to Challenge Your Team

Your team members may not be as unmotivated as you think; they probably don't have the right targets to challenge them.

When tasks are too easy, employees become complacent because they know they'll be fine with the barest minimum. Don't give them impossible tasks just because you want to challenge them. You'll end up killing their morale.

Aim for a balance. The idea is to make them stretch themselves beyond their comfort zones to get the job done. The outcome might surprise you

Lean Tip #3015 – Train the Managers to Coach Effectively

Coaching is one of the greatest methods to build an employee’s confidence level as well as competence. Managers need to know how to apply the right blend of “clarity coaching” and “skills coaching” to their employees, two of the critical elements that organizations need to provide to their managers while training them. Having the ability to coach others is one of the core skills in the 21st century, required by every manager to be regarded as a successful leader. Long gone are those days where the managers used to command and control leadership in order to get their work done. Today, the most effective way for the managers to lead is through coaching and collaboration. If the managers are not skilled enough to coach their employees, it is highly unlikely that they will be able to achieve positive results for the organization or even themselves in the long term.

Lean Tip #3085 – Keep on Keepin’ On

The part of continual process improvement that can feel overwhelming is the continuous aspect. With continuous improvement there is no perfection, and there is no end, but one of the first rules of project management is that every good project should have a start and end date. Where process improvement differs is that there is likely to always be more we can do, and things we can change. Don’t get defeated by this, but see it as a chance to break up the monotony, and keep innovating.

One thing that makes this easier is that there will always be new technology, solutions, software, or cultural changes that enable us to rethink how we do things. This can keep things exciting. The biggest difference with process improvement from your typical project is that there will always be something new for us to consider. If we ignore this, we run the risk of stagnating or falling behind.

Lean Tip #3086 - Start Small.  If Everything is a Priority, Nothing is a Priority

As you delve into a problem, there are many paths for improvement that will open up to explore.  It’s very easy to get distracted from what you set out to accomplish when you start to see all of the potential opportunities for intervention and improvement. It’s imperative to keep your goal front and center and continue to ground yourself in what you are trying to accomplish.

To achieve sustainable, meaningful improvements, rigor (being thorough and accurate) to the process must be maintained. What seems at the surface level to be an “easy fix” requires a thoughtful establishment of the new way of doing things for improvement to truly take hold.

Lean Tip #3098 – Create a Learning Culture

Incorporate learning and growth into your core values and make sure they shine through in your people strategies and business decisions. Talk about career growth throughout the employee lifecycle, beginning with recruitment and onboarding, and continuing during one-on-ones and performance reviews.

Encourage your team members to engage in learning activities during the work day and to share their learnings with their colleagues. Demonstrate the value you place on learning and growth by rewarding your developing team members with recognition, promotions, and raises.

A learning culture enables your employees to grow in their current roles and achieve upward mobility within your organization.

Lean Tip #3119 – Provide Opportunities for Contributing Employees

Opportunities can take many forms. But, all of them are outside of the normal day-to-day requirements of their job plan.

Employees appreciate chances for training and cross-training. They want to participate in a special committee where their talents are noticed. They’d like to lead a team that is pursuing an important objective.

They are happy to attend professional association meetings and proud to represent your organization at civic and philanthropic events. They’d appreciate the green light relative to implementing an idea they have for increasing morale in your workplace.

They are eager to stop doing portions of their job that have become rote in favor of new goals and assignments that stretch their skills and build on their abilities.

Lean Tip #3136 – Organize Your Materials and Parts for Efficient Retrieval

The amount of money (and time) that is wasted through a lack of organization can be staggering.

This particularly true if materials or components are stored at various points in the manufacturing process – with time spent retrieving these items making up a significant portion of your costs.

Making sure your storage and warehouse facility is well organized will improve this “picking” process, which can be further improved through the use of suitable parts or picking bins.

The increased speed at which the parts or components arrive at your manufacturing line will lead to increased productivity, as well as helping to avoid delays and production even stopping whilst waiting for items. This is also true for reducing picking errors, which organization can again help with.

And better organization can also highlight shortages of any stock more quickly, again preventing downtime.

Lean Tip #3151 – Build a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Having a lean and healthy culture requires many components. One of those is instilling an environment of continuous improvement.

Gradual, consistent change that sustains continuous improvement is critical. It doesn’t mean you have to train staff in strict fundamentals. It does mean you need the idea of continuous improvement to be part of everything you do.

Seek out ideas about how to improve production processes. Making everyone part of the change shows that you appreciate their opinions. It can also increase employee engagement and foster a more inclusive environment.

Lean Tip #3168 – Be Grateful for the Person, Not Just Their Output

Cultivating a positive and engaging environment begins with expressing gratitude beyond what people do at your company.

In short, workers should be appreciated for more than accomplishing their day-to-day responsibilities. Instead, focus on expressing gratitude for their unique insights, skills, contributions, and also for their personality.

Expressing gratitude for someone’s “soft” skills like their contagious positive attitude and sense of humor, or keen ability to think critically, is a great way to ensure gratitude is sincere and genuine.

These 10 Lean tips can help you with your journey in 2023. What advice would you share for the New Year?

Top 10 Posts of 2022

The end of the year is traditionally a time to look back and reflect. One way to reflect is to evaluate popular blog posts. I have been taking time to reflect on the year that was and as part of that reflection I have flipped back through the 150 blog posts I have written so far this year and compiled a list of my Top 10.

What were some of your favorite Lean posts from 2022? Any recommendations for next year?

10. Three Most Important Questions in a Continuous Improvement Culture - The ability of leaders to ask the right questions is critical to the success of a lean culture.

9. Transformational vs Transactional Leadership - While a wide variety of qualities set modern leaders apart, most ultimately fall under one of two main categories: transactional and transformational.

8. Servant Leader as Change Agents - Are employees are more accepting of change and improvements when they have a leader who is being a servant leader?

7. 10 Characteristics of Effective Performance Metrics - Regardless of the metrics you use or your method for tracking, make sure to educate your organization on how the metrics are derived, what they indicate, and how they will be used in addition to regularly communicate relevant metrics to your team members.

6. What Every Leader Can Learn From Their Younger Self - You may be surprised to learn that effective leaders have a source of inspiration that is far closer to home: their younger selves.

5. Defining Employee Engagement - If there’s one thing you come away with after reading this post, let it be this: Employee engagement is NOT the same as employee satisfaction.

4. 5 Myths of Employee Engagement - There are many myths and half-truths about employee engagement.

3. FAST Diagram: The Function Analysis System Technique - Within the functional analysis phase (step 2) a FAST (Function Analysis Systems Technique) diagram can be used to deepen the teams understanding of all the functions within the scope of study.

2. 10 Things I Learned from Lean Thinking - Reflection on key learnings since my journey began in 2000.

1. 5 Ways to Get Employees Engaged in Process Improvement - Businesses in virtually every industry wrestle with how to engage teams in efforts to improve business processes.

Thanks for your continued readership in 2022. I hope you enjoy the holiday season and go on to achieve Lean success in 2023.