10 Ways to Adopt a Lean Culture Today

Building a Lean culture is not an easy task. A Lean culture starts with managers who understand and believe the implications of the system’s view and know the necessity of serving customers in order to succeed. The result of that understanding is a culture where a positive internal environment and the creation of delighted customers go together. It is a culture that naturally emphasizes continuous improvement of processes, one that results in a healthy workplace, satisfied customers, and a growing, profitable company.

The best leaders understand the present is nothing more than a platform for the envisioning of, and positioning for, the future. If you want to lead more effectively, shorten the distance between the future and present. Inspiring innovation and leading change call for more than process– they require the adoption of a cultural mindset.

Implementing Lean Thinking is a cultural change that requires leadership…because in the end it’s all about people. Here are 10 things your leadership can do right now to change the culture:

1. Define Your Vision and Values

A clear vision and values can guide your organization. A vision statement shows how your company sees itself in the future, complementing the mission and values you've developed. Your vision should describe your purpose, goals, and ideal state. Your values should reflect your principles, beliefs, and expectations. Communicating these throughout the business:

•           Gives employees information about why and how to optimize company processes or protocols
•           Helps employees understand the value of their specific contribution, which builds feelings of appreciation

2. Leaders Must Lead the Way

The leadership of the company has a significant influence on the company culture. For this reason, the leaders must be the ones to lead the way, open the conversation, and make examples. An important point here is that leaders in Lean manage the work, not the people. Focusing on workflow management will also create an environment of shared leadership, where everyone collectively contributes to the end result.

3. Challenge the Process

Continuous improvement encourages teams to question the status quo, seeking ways to optimize processes and minimize waste. They use Lean Thinking to look for innovative ways to improve the organization. In doing so, they experiment and take risks.

Don't miss the opportunity to identify the actions you need to improve the improve the process, while also being open to the knowledge and skills you need to develop. Challenging the process, particularly by searching for opportunities and experimenting and taking risks, is a key behavior to adopt in a Lean culture.

4. Eliminate Fear of Failure

Experiments will not always bring exceptional results. Not every new idea will be a winning move. For this reason, in a Lean culture, it is essential to show tolerance to failure. Otherwise, extreme criticism can create fear in your people and block experimentation.

A Lean culture is a learning culture, so it is of great importance to extract learnings from failures as much as from successes. Promote small-batch testing to minimize potentially harmful results from unsuccessful experiments. Also, as a company leader, make sure to speak openly about your failures and the learnings from them to give an example of how they should be analyzed and built on.

5. Empower Employees

Empowering employees is a key aspect of a Lean culture. This means giving employees the authority and resources they need to make decisions and improve processes. By empowering employees, organizations can tap into their knowledge and experience and create a culture of continuous improvement. This can be achieved by providing training, coaching, and support, and by creating a culture of collaboration and teamwork.

6. Train Employees

Training in Lean is essential for employees to understand how they are expected to work in the new culture. This cannot be a one-off activity though. Ensure they are taught specific Lean philosophies and Lean tools and supplement this with periodic training to help them stay current with the latest developments in Lean methodology. Leaders can go a long way to reinforce training by talking to employees about the training they have attended and how it has enabled them to be better practitioners of Lean.

7, Foster a Learning Environment

Continuous improvement depends upon employees learning and choosing to optimize their performance. In a Lean culture, company leaders help every employee continually learn new skills and advance their careers. This commitment to development usually encourages employees to be proactive about continually improving organizational processes. Strategies for fostering an environment of continuous learning and improvement include:

•  Developing internal training opportunities, such as courses or job shadowing
•  Sending employees to industry conventions, workshops, or conferences
•  Providing ways for employees to make suggestions about their department or the company
•  Soliciting anonymous feedback about aspects of the organization

8. Make Change Everyone’s Responsibility

Continuous improvement requires the participation of everyone in the organization. This includes the executive suite, management, and line workers. The continuous improvement program becomes effective when employees are engaged in developing the culture and are proactive in identifying areas for improvement. To do this, everyone should understand their role and contribution to the company’s continuous improvement program. Only by “rowing” together can the goals of the improvement program be achieved. Part of working together on this effort is sharing the responsibility of the program across the entire organization.

9. Create New Habits

Creating a continuous improvement culture requires changing people’s habits. Habits are the set of things that people do subconsciously on a daily basis. They are in fact very difficult to change. Part of the challenge of starting and sustaining a continuous improvement program is identifying a set of desired behaviors and continuously reinforce them. This can include training and retraining employees, helping people understand when their behaviors are misaligned with the continuous improvement efforts, and giving positive feedback to those who exemplifies the desired behaviors.

10. Celebrate success

Continuous improvement is hard. It requires employees to critically think about their work and examine potential ways of improving it. As your continuous improvement program begin to gain more momentum it is important to remember the people who make it possible. One way of sustaining the process is to regularly share success stories and recognize those involved. Many employees take pride in their work and are intrinsically motivated to improve them. They are simply looking for recognition and praise for a job well done.

Constant change is a business reality, and organizations must continually adapt to their environments to stay competitive or risk losing relevance and becoming obsolete. For each change, leaders must define it, create a vision of the post-change world, and mobilize their teams to make it.

Fundamentally, a change of culture occurs when people start behaving differently as a result of a change in the climate of the organization. There are many different models of how an organizational culture is shaped by the prevailing climate and how it can be assessed.

Leaders who protect the status quo through control must surrender to change in order to secure the future for their organization. Don’t be the leader who rewards herd mentality, and me too thinking. Don’t be the leader who encourages people not to fail or not to take risks. Be the leader who both models and gives permission to do the exact opposite of the aforementioned – be a leader who leads.

Lean success requires a change in mindset and behavior among leadership, and then gradually throughout the organization. So it follows that success in Lean implies a change in what leaders reinforce—a change in leadership behaviors and practices. Change begins when leaders start acting differently. It’s that simple (but not that easy).

3 Benefits for Developing a Coaching Culture Within Your Organization

In the ever-evolving landscape of modern workplaces, organizations are recognizing the transformative power of fostering a coaching culture. It's not just a trend; it's a strategic approach that empowers individuals, enhances teamwork, and propels businesses toward unprecedented success.

In a coaching culture, managers and leaders act as coaches, guiding their team members towards achieving their goals and potential. This promotes a positive and empowering work environment, where employees feel valued, supported, and motivated to take ownership of their growth and development. It aligns with the idea that everyone has untapped potential, and with the right guidance, individuals can unlock their capabilities, enhance their skills, and contribute more effectively to the organization's success.

Consider the following benefits of a coaching culture, and you won’t have to wonder why your company needs it — you’ll be wondering why everyone’s not doing it.

1. Empowered employees

Coaching helps empower employees to come up with solutions and implement their ideas. This benefits the organization because empowered employees know they have the freedom to be proactive and make decisions that will improve the company.

When employees understand the boundaries and freedoms that have been defined for them, they are able to use their knowledge and skills to the fullest. Research shows that employees who work for organizations that promote employee empowerment are more engaged, take more initiative, and report greater job satisfaction. When employees are granted the autonomy to make decisions within their scope of expertise, not only do they feel valued, but they also make their organization more responsive, more innovative, and, ultimately, more productive.

2. Improved performance

Another benefit of coaching is that it can greatly improve individual performance. Most employees want to do a great job. In addition to providing training and the necessary resources to do the work, organizations that also provide one-on-one coaching are able to improve individual performance, which ultimately leads to better organizational performance.

The importance of ongoing interactions in a coaching relationship cannot be overstated, especially when the goal is to improve performance. It starts with providing clear direction for a specific task or goal and laying out a path to achieving it. A good coach will periodically check in—ideally, at least once a week—to discuss the progress that has been made, help overcome any hurdles, and highlight areas for improvement. When coaches explain why something is done a certain way and how that method evolved, employees gain new knowledge and can apply it to other work.

3. Higher engagement

Improving employee engagement is a goal for many companies, and coaching is one way to get individuals to stay tuned in. Gallup estimates that the cost of poor management and lost productivity from employees who are either not engaged or are actively disengaged is between $960 billion and $1.2 trillion per year. This loss can have a major impact on the bottom line, especially for companies with larger workforces.

Despite this dismal statistic, the modern workforce wants to be engaged. Employees want to understand how their roles connect to the larger team and to the organization as a whole. According to the Gallup study referenced above, employees who strongly agree that they can link their goals to the organization’s goals are 3.5 times more likely to be engaged. Unfortunately, only 44 percent of employees say that they can see this connection.

Engagement is directly linked to the frequency of communication with a manager and the content of those conversations. The same Gallup report indicates that employees who receive daily feedback from their manager are 3 times more likely to be engaged than those who receive feedback once a year or less.

Creating accountability through coaching and goal-setting also helps improve engagement because employees own the results of their actions and behaviors and are accountable to both themselves and their coach. When individuals know that they are responsible for completing a task or behaving a certain way—and have the skills and competencies to do it—they are motivated to stay engaged and meet their goals.

The benefits of coaching extend beyond just increased engagement, better performance, and empowered employees. Developing leaders from within the organization helps build the leadership pipeline and grows institutional knowledge.

Teaching leaders how to be coaches also helps them become better at their jobs. They learn how to give and receive feedback, set measurable goals, and track milestones. They must also model the behavior they want to see in their employees, which means they are more accountable for their own actions and behaviors. All of these skills can be applied in future leadership positions, as well.

Four Ways to Show Gratitude at Work This Thanksgiving

Employees spend a great majority of their time at work. Many dedicate long hours to the corporate hustle, and while some are motivated by overtime, others feel they do not have an option, but to work beyond their weekly forty hours.

When employees feel appreciated for their work and by their employer, they are more engaged and able to perform at their best.

Appreciation and recognition aren’t all about money either. At many companies, employees feel their best efforts go unnoticed or ignored.

Consider these four ways to thank and celebrate your employees:

1. Take the time to talk to, and get to know, your employees. The most significant way to thank your employees is to get to know them. Take them to lunch or schedule time to ask about their values, hobbies, and interests. Understand your employees. Use what you now know about them to build a customized skills-improvement performance plan. Spend time with, and become interested in, each of your employees.

2. Ask employees what they think. The best way to feel appreciated is to be included – to feel that your perspectives matter. In a Lean environment, we need input from all of our employees to be successful. Including employees in company issues, challenges, and opportunities empowers them, engages them, and connects them to strategy and vision of the company.

3. Say thank you, and mean it. Most managers actually do thank employees who do great work. Employees work for more than money. They work for the praise and acknowledgement of their managers. A sincere thank you, said at the time of a specific event that warrants the applause, is one of the most effective ways to appreciate employees. Remember the phrase, “What gets rewarded, gets repeated.” Start to say “thank you” or “I appreciate what you do” when it is deserved and it will inspire the behaviors to continue. Make it personal and sincere. Catch employees doing great things and respond. It empowers them, appreciates them, and celebrates their performance.

4. Share gratitude. Set an example by showing gratitude to your team members and praising a job well done, so other managers will follow. Show timely gratitude once a job is done. Employees want to feel recognized as soon as the job is done and not weeks later during board meetings.

Being thankful doesn't have to be just an activity during Thanksgiving. You can also make it a regular routine. At the start of a meeting, you can ask each person to share something they are grateful for.

It is common today to live on autopilot or in survival mode. This is an individual choice, but it can severely impact employee engagement. When employees start to be more present at work, feeling engaged and contributing from a place of gratefulness, teams can benefit from better interactions, a sense of belonging and increased psychological safety, with a significant impact on business performance in the long term.

Regardless of your style and how you do it, connecting with employees and taking the opportunity to thank them, when ever you can, pays dividends for everyone. Appreciating and thanking your employees isn’t hard or costly. So take the time to make a difference in your employee’s life. You will be pleasantly rewarded by them making a difference in yours.

5 Tips to Build A Thriving Culture

Company culture has been a hot topic among people leaders in recent years. Many executives will probably say their organizational culture is their most valued asset when considering what makes their company unique. 

While many organizations take pride in their culture, the truth is not many leaders have wrapped their heads around it. Company culture is not tangible; therefore, it is not easy to understand, measure, and iterate. 

A strong workplace culture runs deeper than having a laid-back dress code, free beverages, and team-building activities. It is about shared values, goals, and principles that drive the entire organization. 

Here are five tips on building a thriving workplace culture in your company: 

Know your company's core values  

Because your company's culture is built on the foundation of its core values, it's important to take time to assess these values. Ask yourself, are these values reflected in the existing culture? And, if not, what kinds of changes need to be made? 

Make cultural fit a priority 

While it's easy to be dazzled by a candidate's skill set and work background, your company culture should stay top of mind during your hiring process. At its core, culture is about people, and assessing any potential new team members for cultural fit will go a long way toward cultivating the kind of company culture that's in line with your business's core values and beliefs. 

Recognize the power of feedback and engagement 

Communication plays an important role in the development of a culture that properly reflects your business's vision, but growing the culture you want requires more than top-down communication. Leveraging the power of employee feedback and engagement is a key step in developing the right culture for your company. 

Lead by example  

Culture is a nebulous, intangible concept. Developing and promoting culture requires a lot more than simply telling employees what the existing culture is. Leadership and top management drive the direction of your company's culture, and this means you and your top personnel must be the culture you want to develop and maintain for your company. 

Focus on creating an environment that inspires  

Many business owners are used to being the driving force behind any new initiative their company takes. But company culture is that intangible something that springs, as its name suggests, from a deep sense of community. In other words, you should not strive to be the sole source of inspiration for your employees. 

No two organizations can have the same work culture. It is the culture of an organization which makes it distinct from others. The work culture goes a long way in creating the brand image of the organization. The work culture gives an identity to the organization. 

The culture of an organization is learnt over time. It can be taught to new employees through formal training programs but is more generally absorbed through stories, myths, rituals, and shared behaviors within teams. Organizational culture will impact positively or negatively on everything you try to do whether you want it to or not. 

Build a Culture of Gratitude at Work

Few things will demoralize employees more easily than feeling like they’re not being appreciated for their efforts. Making sure that employees who are delivering effort and results hear you express something along the lines of “thanks for your hard work” is vital. Even this basic action gives them recognition for their efforts, which becomes feedback to inspire even better team performance.

Thanking your employees when you think they’ve genuinely performed may boost their commitment to delivering more. When your team knows that you won’t be stingy with your praise when they’ve made extra efforts, they will trust you enough to go the extra mile without having to be pushed.

Why don’t we say “thank you” at work? Perhaps it’s because we don’t like to thank people for something we feel is just an ordinary part of each day—a part of what’s expected? Or we don’t want to cross that line of kissing up or showing favoritism? And everyone knows thank-you emails are taboo.

But, building a culture of gratitude at work has benefits to both the person receiving and the person expressing the thanks:

1. Saying “thank you” shows people you value them. It doesn’t just acknowledge someone’s effort, thoughtfulness, intent or action … it acknowledges the person themselves. When we receive thanks, it gives us a heightened sense of self-worth. But, it doesn’t stop there. It also triggers more helpful behaviors toward both the person we are helping and toward other people.

2. Gratitude also has benefits for the person expressing gratitude. Research demonstrates that taking time to consider and express the things we’re grateful for has a powerful, positive effect. If practiced regularly, it can keep you healthier and happier. Higher levels of gratitude shown in people’s daily lives results in better sleep and lower anxiety and depression. Feeling and expressing gratitude activated brain regions that make us feel good.

Offering gratitude and expressing messages of thanks to your team can truly motivate your team members and improve the workplace. Pay attention to good work, and offer thanks whenever you identify a job well done. Continue to apply team appreciation and establish it firmly in your workplace culture.

This helps to create a more satisfactory work environment where your employees are more inclined to feel appreciated and happy. Doing so increases engagement, participation, self-esteem and can even positively impact your bottom line. You may also feel more effective as a leader and likely more connected to your team and what they’re doing.

Gratitude is powerful. It’s up to the people with power to clearly, consistently, and authentically say thank you in both public and private settings. And the benefits go far beyond just letting someone know you appreciate their efforts. A simple “thank you” can trigger more good work and positive feelings for everyone involved.

5 Tips For Creating a Culture of Experimentation

"Experimentation" has become a buzzword for managers and business owners. Everyone wants their employees to think outside the box, develop creative ideas and be innovative. However, few organizations actually take the steps necessary to make that happen. 

Since the beginning of times, experimentation has served as a critical tool for challenging the status quo business models and driving radical changes. For organizations, it typically means the potential to take bold steps and decisions to improve the customer experience while minimizing business risks. It also provides an organization with endless opportunities to learn more about their customers by means of testing. 

1. Be Data Driven 

Don’t make the mistake of not measuring your data for better results. Data is what confirms results, validates change, and fuels growth. 

Don’t ignore even the seeming negative data, or opinions of users. Use these to fuel your next innovative move. Your consumers and users may have completely different ideas of what could work better. Listen to their feedback and study the data. Then, trust in that data enough to be driven by it. 

2. Be Open to Ideas and Creativity 

It is easy to get stuck in your ways. Instead, adopt a company approach whereby you are all open to ideas and creativity. 

Don’t be afraid to take a different path, to try different software, or just to do something completely different. Sometimes the biggest anomalies or most outlandish suggestions can produce the best results. After all, if you aren’t changing you aren’t growing. And if you aren’t growing, your business cannot progress. 

3. Break Down Silos 

For a company hoping to evolve, nothing will kill progress like silos. In a culture that values experimentation, collaboration and sharing is imperative. This is why it’s so important that all team members, regardless of position or department, are given the opportunity to present ideas and pursue new innovative opportunities. 

Oftentimes, the team members who are closest to the customer possess the greatest ideas for growth, yet they’re too afraid to come forward. By offering these individuals a platform to express their ideas, morale will be boosted and a sense of entrepreneurialism will be instilled across all levels. 

4. Integrate Experimentation Into Day-to-Day Life 

To make experimenting a habit in your business, it needs to be intertwined into your employees’ day-to-day life. Impending deadlines, on-going projects, endless meetings – it’s hard to find time to experiment. It’s the number one reason why employees feel held back from learning. If you’re part of an organization, developing a experimenting culture, you have to be an advocate for time. The concept of experimentation should be ingrained in your employees from the moment they join your organization. 

5. Learn from Failure 

My last tip: don’t be afraid of failure. Strive to grow from past mistakes, think outside the box, and embrace experimentation, even if it means you don’t get everything right from the beginning. Stagnation is one of the dangers of companies that start well but end up resisting growth. 

A culture of experimentation and risk taking is great for any organization. It keeps fresh ideas and opportunities flowing through the organization, helping the organization to optimize operations and maintain their competitive edge. 

With the tips shared above, you will be able to effectively push your team to take risks and create a culture where experimentation is the norm rather than the exception. 

Six Ways to Create a No-Fear Culture

Fear can manifest in an organization in many ways, but it typically occurs with a trickle-down effect, where ineffective leaders employ scare tactics to control the behavior of employees. If upper management provides mid-management no room to take risks and fail, middle management will be under constant pressure to hide anything short of a clear success, and, worse yet, place blame of their own employees for missteps, however minor. When every employee in the organization feels like she or he is walking on eggshells, it becomes impossible to focus on getting good work done.

As a leader, you have the authority and the responsibility to eradicate fear from your organization. If you don’t take action, it’s unlikely that anyone else will, and your boat will eventually sink as your people focus on protecting themselves by withdrawing and playing it safe (or worse, attacking others). By removing fear from the equation, your team will be more comfortable, inspired, selfless and ultimately more productive. Here are some great ways to get started that you can use to encourage others to follow in your footsteps.

1. Respond Instead of Reacting.

A common behavior when presented with a challenge is to let your emotions drive the situation. We all have a fight-or-flight reaction when we feel unsafe. Incorporate a technique into your workplace culture that will help you take a moment to respond instead of reacting. A responsive solution may take a little more time in the beginning, but it can save you the hours of cleanup for a reactive action to the challenge.

2. Build Trust.

Building trust takes time. It is not usually a one-time event. You can build trust by maintaining authentic interactions during daily work activities. One highly effective way to build trust is to make sure that verbal commitments and behaviors match the actions. For example, if your company identifies in the mission that the organization is a friendly or caring place, then employees would want to exemplify this behavior as a measure of the authenticity of the individual. Or an employee who commits to completing a task at a particular time would want to either complete the work on time or communicate the change in timelines. When you give employees a culture that maintains trust, you reduce fractures to the organization. Leaders who exhibit an authentic alignment of words to actions give employees a place where they can focus on the work instead of the breakdowns in behaviors.

3. Maintain a Process.

A process offers employees a roadmap for what they need to do, how they need to do it, and when it should be done. You reduce fear at work when employees have this process-driven roadmap in place to monitor workloads and timelines. The process provides an organized sense of movement that gives constant feedback and accountability of individuals for each part of the project.

4. Measure Systems, Not People.

W. Edwards Deming proposed a theory to measure the performance of systems, not people, to help drive fear out of organizations. As one of Deming's 14 Points on Total Quality Management, he advised eliminating numerical quotas for the workforce, as well as numerical goals for management. You can't have a culture of continual improvement if people are afraid of suffering serious financial consequences as a result of their individual performance.

Instead, our goal is to get everyone to realize that we're all in this together, working as a team and measuring the output of the overall system. This intrinsically motivated mentality encourages individual innovation on the team. It leads to better behavior, better performance, and improvements that can become breakthroughs for the company over time.

5. Listen to Everyone’s Ideas.

Each one of your employees is with your company for a reason. Encourage employees to voice ideas. Even if the idea may need some work, it’s still important that everyone has his or her say. This will show that each member of your team is valuable and his or her input is just as important as a fellow coworker’s.

In group settings, it’s common for someone to raise an idea just to be quickly shut down. The embarrassment attached to being shut down in front of everyone can be tremendous, and can even be enough to cause them to choose to never raise an idea again. This is stifling to an organization, and instantly creates a culture of fear.

6. Open and Transparent Communication.

Healthy cultures have top-down, bottom-up, and cross-department communication. If conversations are only happening in one direction or aren’t happening at all, it hinders transparency and openness, which makes it harder to establish a sense of trust in leadership within an organization. Leaders and employees need to be on the same page when it comes to feedback—it’s a two-way conversation. Leaders need to give feedback to employees, and employees need to feel safe giving feedback to leaders.

Building a great company culture isn’t something that will happen overnight, but you can take the first steps by talking openly with your employees and setting a clear vision. Even a small shift in mentality can make a big difference in developing a company culture that is envied by others.

These are a few examples of how to begin to remove fear from your workplace. More important than these examples is the disposition required to execute them. As you adjust your disposition to align with the points above, you’ll naturally begin to behave in ways that remove fear. All of your interactions with people will improve, your workplace will be energized, your stress level will be reduced, and everyone will become more productive.