The Role of a Lean Leader

There is often a missing link in many Lean organizations - which is, the set of leadership structures and behaviors that constitute a lean management system. People frequently equate ‘Lean' with the tools used to standardize processes and generate efficiencies; and organizations tend to focus more on the implementation of these tools. However, implementing tools only accounts for, at most, 20% of the effort needed in lean transformations. The remaining 80% should be spent on changing leaders' behaviors and practices; and eventually their mindsets.

Lean leadership bridges a crucial divide: the gap between lean thinking and lean tools. Lean leaders have an essential role to play in lean transformations.

What’s Lean Leadership?

Lean leadership is all about commitment; commitment to your employees, commitment to the system and commitment to making changes towards improvement. Leaders in a lean environment need good communication skills to understand the problems their people face.

Lean leaders can give their teams the tools to succeed and encourage them to make wise decisions that lead to long-term, competitive growth. It typically involves helping individuals achieve professional and personal progress and acknowledging their contributions to the workplace. This type of leadership can foster a culture of continuous improvement through employee engagement, decision-making and communication.

Here are some roles and responsibilities of lean leaders:

Coach and develop others

As a leader, it may be your responsibility to help others improve. Coaching can enable continuous improvement and personal growth. When your teammates reach their full potential, this can ultimately make your task as a leader easier. Coaching can also enable you to take an interest in your team's development and show that you care about their success, possibly making them more loyal to the company. Giving your team the tools to succeed and encouraging them to make wise decisions can lead to long-term, competitive growth. Mentoring employees can also make them more valuable to the company.

Challenges

The lean leader should serve their team by providing support, guidance, and development opportunities while challenging them to improve performance. Lean leaders must challenge their teams to go beyond their comfort zones and aim to achieve excellence. This can involve setting ambitious goals, providing feedback, and encouraging team members to take risks and learn from their mistakes.

Facilitate Teamwork

Teamwork is a key component because lean leadership requires employees from different departments to collaborate to improve processes. Encouraging teamwork can help streamline communication channels and ultimately improve communication. Teamwork can also contribute to developing a positive culture, which can boost employee satisfaction by motivating them while at work.

Go to Gemba (Walk the Floor)

As a lean leader, you can use Gemba, a method that encourages you to visit the workstation and engage with employees face-to-face. Instead of depending primarily on reports, executive summaries and other edited forms of information, you can go to the source to listen to employees and learn about the processes that guide the organization’s success. To create an effective environment for improvement, it can be helpful to develop faith in your team's abilities, expertise and experience.

Drive Continuous Improvement Mindset

A lean leader empowers their workers to take on the responsibility for resolving their own problems, by making it acceptable to attempt something even if it does not work out. It's essential to demonstrate that participating in improvement activities, challenging existing practices, and observing processes, are all part of a complete problem solving approach that will advance the organization.

When leaders are true role models for Lean behavior, this inspires everyone within an organization to deepen their understanding of Lean, fully engage with a transformational program, and close the gap between Lean tools and Lean thinking to fully realize the value of Lean.

Lean Quote: True Leadership is Servanthood

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.

"True leadership is servanthood. Put the interests of others at the center of your decisions."   —  Dave Ramsey

Servant Leaders, whose vision is to make people better in various ways, naturally exhibit many ideals in their day-to-day leadership of their people. Here are seven important elements of servant leadership:

• Strong character. A servant leader maintains integrity, makes decisions based on ethics and principles, displays humility, and seeks to serve a higher purpose in the organization.

• Puts people first. Successful servant leaders demonstrate care and concern for others and help employees meet their goals while encouraging personal growth.

• Excellent communicator. Communication skills are integral to any business leader, but especially a servant leader. Make a point of listening to and speaking with workers and inviting their feedback.

• Strong collaborator. Servant leadership means keeping an eye on the future and anticipating anything that might impact the organization. Maintain a positive vision and take decisive action when necessary.

• Has foresight. The servant leader must be a visionary, able to imagine possibilities and anticipate the future, with the courage to take action when necessary.

• Strategic thinker. Servant leaders must be comfortable navigating complex environments and be adaptable to change.

• Leader with moral authority. It is critical to establish trust and confidence in your workplace. Establish employees’ trust and confidence by adhering to quality standards, accepting and delegating responsibility, and fostering a culture that makes room for accountability.

The results of servant leadership are exponential: by leading as a servant, you multiply success and satisfaction — personal and professional, for you and your colleagues — above and beyond the limits of traditional leadership outcomes.

Lean Tips Edition #297 (#3481 - #3495)

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.

Click this link for A Lean Journey's Facebook Page Notes Feed.

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

Lean Tip #3481 – Consider General Business Goals When Setting KPIs

The first step when creating a successful KPI system should be to look into your general business goals, as this will help you understand which elements should be included in your system. It is very likely that your goals will involve several areas and departments. Therefore, sitting with various stakeholders and discussing these objectives will help narrow down strategies and pick the right indicators to measure.

Lean Tip #3482 – Implement Tools to Unify Your KPIs

One of the greatest challenges when building one of these systems is getting everything together for analysis. Online dashboard tools make this possible by providing a centralized view of all your most relevant KPIs to make informed decisions considering the full picture.

The value of this KPI system is not only that it unifies all aims into one location, but its visual nature makes it easy to understand at a glance. The likelihood of reaching a target is depicted in a range of colors so that you can easily see the status of the different initiatives.

Lean Tip #3483 – Examine Industry Standards and Benchmarks

Another key means of implementing an effective KPI system is by exploring industry standards and benchmarks. Conducting data-driven research in your niche or industry will help you refine your smart KPI goals to ensure your aims or benchmarks are realistic as well as progressive.

Carrying out competitor research is a good way of understanding what standards or targets other brands within your sector are working towards when it comes to activities related to sales, marketing, fulfillment, inventory management, logistics, and more. 

Online research will also give you a clear indication of industry-wide benchmarks related to various processes. Naturally, you will base your benchmarks on your current performance—but cross-checking everything against industry standards is always good practice.

Lean Tip #3484 – Work With Visualizations That Offer Consistent Value

Another important consideration when working with KPI goals and objectives is to ensure every visualization within your system offers consistent performance-boosting value. 

With a unified view of your KPI target visualizations, you will be able to drill down deeper into each metric to ensure it represents your data in a way that offers a clear-cut objective insight into your processes and progress. If there are any charts or visuals that you find misleading or redundant (offering very little in the way of performance-boosting insight), you can omit them from the system or replace them with something more suitable. 

During this phase of the process, you should ask relevant stakeholders within the business to test each KPI and offer objective feedback on their value. Doing so will ensure that everyone in the business benefits from your newfound visual benchmarking and tracking initiatives. 

Lean Tip #3485 – Ensure Accessibility and Collaboration

Collaboration is key when it comes to dealing with relevant KPI data. Your business goals attain various departments that need to stay connected to build cohesive strategies based on the general company vision. With traditional means of communication, such as static Excel sheets or PowerPoint presentations, the topic of accessibility and collaboration becomes a hardship due to the static nature of these tools.

That said, a well-thought-out system should consider collaboration as a basis. Luckily, various online reporting software has been developed to allow users to easily share their KPIs from any device with an internet connection. The online nature of these tools ensures a collaborative environment thanks to real-time access to data. 

Lean Tip #3486 – Review Any Targets Made as a Team

Once you've set your KPI goals, review those targets with the team. Targets have a higher chance of succeeding if the entire team agrees on them and understands what the expectations are. If a target isn't realistic or attainable, then it won't be helpful when setting expectations for how people work together towards achieving those goals in the future. Listen to any feedback and discuss viable alternatives.

Lean Tip #3487 – Audit Any Progress and Adjust

Review progress and adjust targets as necessary. Set a time limit for each KPI, then review your progress at the end of that period. If you don't meet your target, adjust it to reflect reality and try again. You may find that an interim review is also helpful in this step, especially if there are multiple performance indicators involved. For example, instead of reviewing all goals annually or quarterly, consider checking progress every six months and adjusting accordingly. Make sure the new targets are realistic after adjusting the previous ones. 

Lean Tip #3488 – Establish a Time Frame

Define the time frame for achieving each KPI goal. This means ensuring they're realistic and achievable. Some targets may be quicker to achieve than others, so track each target individually and record any interim deadlines. Doing so allows you to measure and compare your progress against previous successes and keep track of results. Confirming that all parties agree on this time frame helps ensure a smoother process.

Lean Tip #3489 – Establish How Often You Collect Data

Another key consideration is how often you aim to collect your insights. The frequency of data collection is usually appropriate to the KPI and is consistent with the organization’s culture and processes. For example, if a company sets up monthly meetings with all employees to discuss their performance metrics and goals, then it's likely that this schedule will continue for subsequent months as well.

If an organization doesn't have such regular meetings in place and instead relies on its managers or supervisors to set goals for their teams, then collecting metrics on a more ad hoc basis may make more sense, such as every few weeks.

Lean Tip #3490 – Align All KPIs With the Company's Values

It's beneficial to ensure that the KPIs you set align with a company's values. If an organization has a strong culture of innovation, for example, consider creating a KPI related to consistently developing new products or services. Similarly, if the company's goals focus on reducing costs, you'd likely benefit from setting targeted KPIs around reducing expenses but only as long as these goals don't conflict with other key aspects of the business, such as serving customers.

Lean Tip #3491 – Get the Whole Team on Board

To get the greatest advantages out of Lean, the entire organization should adopt and promote its practices, and extend its influence to suppliers as well. You must involve the people who are the closest to the work and you must get support from senior management as well.

Lean Tip #3492 – Take a Lean Tour

Sometimes we learn best by first witnessing the success of others. See the benefits of lean in action. It is not difficult to find organizations that will allow you to see their lean implementations (referred to as the Gemba walk). Take detailed notes of what is highly effective in their Lean implementations, ask questions, and get as much valuable information as you can in order to help you formulate you own Lean strategy for implementation.

Lean Tip #3493 – Discard Conventional Fixed Ideas

Part of problem solving is thinking “outside of the box.” Encourage fresh perspectives and ingenuity in your team in order to develop innovative ways to forward Lean manufacturing without changing what is already efficient and successful. With such a rapidly evolving climate in manufacturing, sometimes conventional thought is what leads to the problem in the first place!

Lean Tip #3494 – Don’t Just Talk About it, Do it!

Once you have a Lean strategy in place, put it into fast and thorough action. Naturally, implementation is what ultimately yields results and improvement. The last think you want is to devise and formulate a Lean campaign that then sits on the shelf and collects dust. Run with your Lean plans as soon as you have everything nailed down.

Lean Tip #3495 – Concentrate on Bad Processes, Not People

By concentrating on the processes and building continuous improvement, you will have the culture change that you are looking for. Also, correct mistakes immediately. Don’t wait for the next shift, the weekend or maintenance to do it.

Here's a Nod to the Always Creative Mark Graban on April's Fools

I've been following Mark Graban's Lean Blog for so many years now. He's been a friend for quite some time due to our connections within the Lean community. His contributions in this area have certainly been highlighted here before. Perhaps like many of you each year you may look forward to today to see what he'll come up with on April Fool's. Mark is incredible creative and it's great fun to see the spoofs.  

Here's a look at some of his prior goodies.

April Fool: A New Way to Learn Lean? Wii Lean!

April Fool 2011: New “A3” App Utilizes Two iPads & Virtual Sensei Technology

April Fool: Back to the Future: Hospital CEOs and Virtual Reality “Gemba Bots”

April Fool: Announcing my Next #Lean Book Project – Baby’s First Lean Book

April Fool: The 10 Best Lean Management Secrets You’ll Ever Want to Learn & Use

April Fool 2015 — Announcement: Lean Blog is now “Lean Buzz” with Listicles, Polls, and MORE CATS!

[April Fool] Coming Soon – 4th Revised Edition of “Lean Hospitals”

[April Fool] Special Announcement: Our New @KaiNexus Suggestion Box Builds on Proven Box Technology

My Next Book: Datum-Driven Lean… and one More Future Release [April Fool]

Announcing My Next Book: “Management by Emoji” [April Fool]

Do you have a favorite?

Lean Quote: The Lesson of Good Friday Is One of Hope

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 lesson of Good Friday is to never lose hope or at least give it 48 hours."   —  Robert Breault

Hope is the one thing that lifts the human spirit and keeps us going despite our difficulties that we face. Hope looks beyond life’s hardships to a better, brighter tomorrow. It keeps us believing and expecting that out of today’s darkness, tomorrow’s light will shine brightly. Hope is seeing the future; a future we can attain if we keep moving forward and, as needed, adjusting, and adapting. A leader’s hopeful outlook enables people to see beyond today’s challenges to tomorrow’s answers.

Leaders must give hope for the future, mobilize people in a direction, and believe deep in the core of who they are that there are great opportunities on the horizon. Here are 7 ways leaders can instill hope:

• Be visible. Be Present.
• Be as open, honest, and as fair as possible.
• Emphasize Optimism.
• Encourage and Motivate.
• Focus on Possibility.
• Let your people know how much you Value them.
• Invest in People

Giving hope to your people combines the alignment, engagement, and vision of the organization. A leader's ability to do so will reap enormous benefits for your organization and your people.

Hope is not always a guarantee for success, but a leader will take the slightest amount of hope to chip away at the barriers of reality and impossibility. An astute leader will dove-tail hope into the vision and mission of their organization. They will work to make sure that everyone is "laser focused" on the task at hand. More importantly, they will make the vision bigger than the obstacles that threaten the mission itself.

The ability to instill hope is a necessary leadership trait. The leaders’ hope surrounds the belief that his/her goal will be attained. It enables one to face tough times with creativity and resilience. Leading in these uncertain times requires inspiration more than ever.

Lean Roundup #178 – March 2024

A selection of highlighted blog posts from Lean bloggers from the month of March 2024.  You can also view the previous monthly Lean Roundups here.  

 

The Power of One Page – Pascal Dennis discusses the power one page has to enable quick effective communication when used to tell stories.

 

Revolving Door Leadership – Bob Emiliani answers whether the revolving door leadership at the top and management churn below really is the problem that produces a lack of sustainability of Lean management.

 

Cultivating a Culture of Candor: Transforming Workplace Communication for Better Outcomes – Mark Graban talks about encouraging people to be candid by cultivating a feeling of psychological safety and rewarding their candor instead punishing it.

 

Process Improvement Across Industries – John Knotts takes a deep dive into the contrasting landscapes of various industries aimed to illuminate the unique challenges and opportunities each sector presents.

 

Dogs & Buns – Bruce Hamilton shares a fun story and real example about the mismatches in your processes causing waste in your operations.

 

The Two Directions of Poka Yoke – Christoph Roser talks about poka yoke, and the two fundamentally different directions poka yoke can take.

 

Operations IS Your Customer - Steve Shoemaker describes how redefining operations as the primary customer of engineering can transform product development, enhance collaboration, and drive unprecedented improvements in quality and efficiency.

 

A Satisfied Employee Will Switch – Christopher Chapman shares a quick analysis of a labor market survey through a Deming lens.

 

Value in an Age of Endless Innovation – Pascal Dennis says there’s a good chance we do not understand value and explains what it means in our modern era.

 

Shigeo Shingo & Norman Bodek on Learning From Mistakes, Including Shingo’s – Mark Graban shares some older material from his bookshelf, Zero Quality Control by Shigeo Shingo published by Norman Bodek on Mistake Proofing lessons.

 

Why There Are So Few Lean CEOs – Bob Emiliani explains why some people motivated to become Lean CEOs and most others are not.

 

Respect for People – Not an Optional Principle for Successful Lean Companies

Respect for People is one of the most overlooked principles of Lean.  Respect for people means developing employees’ latent skills in both on the job and off the job training. It is easy to invest money in new technology, software, or equipment. It takes time, effort, and planning to invest in employee skills development.

Without respecting, involving, and drawing upon the expertise of employees who perform the work every day, you overlook the most fertile source of practical and ready-to-implement suggestions for improvement.

By engaging people in the process of problem solving, it reduces resistance to the recommended solutions. Rather, participants want to see their ideas implemented and be successful because they are their ideas. Lean is inclusive; it is not done to people; it is done by people who feel empowered to create value.

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.

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.

Many attempts to implement Lean have been superficial. Unfortunately, the reason is that most companies focus too heavily on tools such as 5S and just-in-time, without understanding that Lean is a system that must permeate an organization’s culture and emphasize respect for people.

Tools and techniques are not secret weapons for transforming a business. Toyota’s continued success at implementing these tools stems from a deeper business philosophy based on its understanding of people and human motivation. Its success ultimately rests on its ability to cultivate leadership, teams and culture; to devise strategy; to build supplier relationships; and to establish and maintain a learning organization.

Whether you work at a small or large company, consider how you can create a Lean thinking culture. You may have made some hard decisions about whether or not you have the right people in the right roles to foster this. Having the right talent with the right attitude goes the distance. You can never teach drive and passion. You can always teach skills.

Ask yourself if you are fostering a culture of Lean thinking where you respect your employees and the expertise, they provide each day. Can you leverage this to create lasting value in your company and drive out waste?

In the end Lean is all about people.  The power behind Lean is a management's commitment to continuously invest in its people and promote a culture of continuous improvement.  Establishing good working conditions to promote teamwork is a key component of respect for people.