Daily Lean Tips Edition #61 (901-915)

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.

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

Lean Tip #901 - Turn Employees into Problem Solvers and Improvement Specialists.

The most important aspect of lean is to involve employees in developing lean processes. Many times companies create a culture in which the employees don't make the decisions, management does. Then when problems occur, employees are unable to diagnose or solve problems without involving a supervisor. Lean reverses that by revolving around employees and looking to them as the improvement specialists.

Lean Tip #902 - Establish and Communicate a Clear Message on Lean

Have a plan to communicate the value of lean throughout your organization. It should not only address the benefits of lean to the company and customers, but also how lean can improve the work life of your employees. A clear vision needs to be repeated regularly to show the company's commitment to lean. We highly recommend that company leaders make lean a part of their everyday pulse checks.

Lean Tip #903 - Measure, Audit, Review and Continue to Improve Processes

A common saying with our lean program is, “If you can't measure, you can't improve.” Without a baseline, you will not be able to show improvements, so you must measure virtually every process.

Use audits to not only sustain the improvements from Kaizen, but also expose new problems and resolve them with your employees' involvement and input.

Create a culture that continually looks to improve processes — even ones that aren't broken.

Lean Tip #904 - Empower The People Operating the Process.

The best person to improve a process is the person who carries out the process. Utilize employee’s full skill sets—can someone be doing more? If the process is improved, they will likely have time to take on higher level work.

Lean Tip #905 - Go on Lean Factory Tours

A great way to learn is to see other people’s lean operations in person. Many manufacturers are proud of their efforts and often very open to sharing what they have learned in the form of factory tours. Second best to going in person you can find some good virtual tours.

Lean Tip #906 – Encourage Employees by Sharing Information and Numbers

Let them in on what is going on within the company as well as how their jobs contribute to the big picture. When you keep you employees informed they tend to feel a greater sense of worth. Keep communication hopeful and truthful – do not be afraid to share bad news, instead be more strategic about how you deliver it. Improve performance through transparency – By sharing numbers with employees, you can increase employees’ sense of ownership.

Lean Tip #907 – Encourage Employees to Collaborate and Share on Problem Solving

When employees get the idea that their manager or leader is the one who has to solve all the problems, it takes away from their sense of empowerment, and ultimately is likely to decrease engagement over time. Encourage team members to take responsibility, and work through problems or issues on their own, or collaboratively. It’s not the manager’s job to fix everyone else’s problems.

Lean Tip #908 - Empower Each Individual On Your Team.

Every single individual contributes to the bottom line. Empowering them to excel in their role, no matter how large or small, creates a sense of ownership that will lead to meeting and exceeding expectations.

Lean Tip #909 – Encourage Employees By Supporting New Ideas.

When employees come to you with an idea or a solution to a problem they believe is for the betterment of the company, it’s a sign that they care. Supporting new ideas and giving an individual the chance to ‘run with it’ is motivating, whether or not it works out in the end.

Lean Tip #910 – Encourage Employees by With The Right Tools and Skills for the Job

Regardless of whether you are operating during a credit crunch or not – staff motivation is influenced by the following factors: having the right person in the job who is capable of doing it; equipping them to do the job by giving them the right tools and support and finally setting realistic targets that they believe can be achieved. 

Lean Tip #911 - Training is Always Good, It Keeps People Up to Date and Focused on the Job

Regular, effective and relevant training is massively important and a great motivator. If you want them to perform properly and consistently then you have to give them the tools to do so. Training is always good, it keeps people up to date and focused on the job at hand, it keeps their skills at the forefront and it will show them that management are obviously concerned with how well they do their job, etc.

If they are given good quality training that covers the topics and issues they are faced with then they will respond and to a certain extent motivate themselves to stick with what they learn.

Lean Tip #912 – Encourage Employees By Acting on Great Ideas

An idea box is useless if nothing ever happens. If an employee's tip leads to a change, publicize the change. Recognize the employee and show the whole company the benefit of her idea. People respect leaders who have the humility to give a subordinate credit for a job well done. When the team sees that its ideas matter, that encourages members to become serious about sharing their tips.

Lean Tip #913 - Establish a Positive Culture.

Establish an organizational culture that encourages the employees to take acceptable risks in pursuing creative ventures and innovative projects. Whatever the outcome – be it positive or negative – let all their decisions serve as learning opportunities for everyone in the company.

Lean Tip #914 - Encourage Teamwork to Achieve Company Goals.

A lot of businesspersons used to make different departments compete with each other in order to make them perform at their best. Instead of making different teams compete, try to encourage them to work together in order to achieve your company’s goals. Conduct meetings that have representatives from all departments and allow them to share knowledge and information with each other.

Lean Tip #915 - Help Employees Succeed to Motivate Others

People go to work to succeed, not fail.  It is your job to understand your employee’s strengths and weaknesses so that you can put them in the best position to succeed.  If, for example, you find out that an employee is lacking in a certain skill set to succeed during a change then provide the coaching and training to make them and your organization successful.  The best managers minimize or eliminate their employees weaknesses and while building on their strengths.  Remove any and all barriers to success.

Overcoming Employee Resistance to Change Is All About The 4 C's

Change doesn't just happen. It needs to be driven with purpose and intent. Change management requires planning for acceptance. If you want employees to accept change, invest some time in planning and communication. Too often, managers throw a change out there and expect others to say, “Well, that’s just fine.” That’s not likely.

To start, you must first understand why people are so quick to resist change. By knowing this, you can make intelligent decisions about how to introduce changes.

Change equals loss. One main reason for the negativity: When things change, you lose something. You may gain something as well, but a loss is usually involved.

To get people to accept change, the first step is to understand what, from their perspective; they feel that they’re losing. If you can empathize with their feelings—and possibly compensate for the loss—you’ve taken a giant first step toward acceptance.

Here are four more factors—the four C’s—to promoting acceptance of change:

1. Caring. Listening and responding to people’s reactions is just as important as explaining the reasons for change.

2. Control. People want input into how change will be implemented. But never ask for input unless you plan to consider it.

3. Choice. Employees feel better if they are given options as part of the change process. The more choices they have, the more they feel in control.

4. Competence. Workers are happier about change if they feel they have the skills and abilities to succeed after the change. The faster you can help someone move through the learning curve, the faster they will accept the change.

Managing change means managing people's fear. Change is natural and good, but people's reaction to change is unpredictable and irrational. It can be managed if done right.

So before you begin to implement any important change with employees, take time to develop a plan that incorporates those four features.

Lean Quote: Create a Bias for Action

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.

"Plans are one thing, action is another." — Murgatroyd and Morgan

Often managers spot a chance to do something valuable for their company, but for some reason, they cannot get started. Even if they begin the project, they give up when they see the first big hurdle. The inability to take purposeful action seems to be pervasive across companies. Managers tend to ignore or postpone dealing with crucial issues which require reflection, systematic planning, creative thinking, and above all, time.

If you do nothing, nothing changes. Things at rest have a tendency to remain at rest. Be aware of items that stall your action. It's better to have a 50-percent improvement right away than it is to take no action and hope for a 100-percent improvement sometime in the future.

The only cure for inactivity is action. That’s why the first step in creating a successful culture of execution is creating a bias toward action. People who make things happen need to be praised and rewarded. People who don’t should be coached to change, or weeded out. Failure cannot be unduly punished. Unless people feel free to make mistakes, they will not feel free to take bold actions.

A key to creating a bias for action is to encourage relentless experimentation. Rather than analyze a new product or service to death, look for ways to test it at relatively low cost. Learn from your tries.

 

Learning from Your Mistakes

http://onefte.com/2011/06/14/learning-from-your-mistakes/

Nobody likes making mistakes. It is human nature to make mistakes. If you go through life afraid to make a mistake, you’ll spend most of your life doing absolutely nothing. There is no harm in making mistakes, it is an essential part of learning. If you feel the need to avoid mistakes at all costs, it becomes a psychological barrier to taking risks.

Learning from your mistakes is one of the greatest personal achievements you can make. From your own mistakes you can gain wisdom and accelerate self-improvement. Mistakes, because of their relationship with risk taking, are essential to success. The important thing is to view mistakes as a useful stepping stone to a higher confidence and a broader perspective.

No amount of analysis can replace your confidence in yourself. When you've made a mistake, especially a visible one that impacts other people, it's natural to question your ability to perform next time. But you must get past your doubts. The best you can do is study the past, practice for the situations you expect, and get back in the game. Your studying of the past should help broaden your perspective.

Learning from mistakes requires three things:

• Putting yourself in situations where you can make mistakes
• Having the self-confidence to recognize and admit to them
• Being courageous about making improvements

Scott Berkun, the author of three bestselling books, Making Things Happen; The Myths of Innovation; and Confessions of a Public Speaker, suggests the following checklist for learning from your mistakes.

The Learning from Mistakes Checklist

1. Accepting responsibility makes learning possible.
2. Don't equate making mistakes with being a mistake.
3. You can't change mistakes, but you can choose how to respond to them.
4. Growth starts when you can see room for improvement.
5. Work to understand why it happened and what the factors were.
6. What information could have avoided the mistake?
7. What small mistakes, in sequence, contributed to the bigger mistake?
8. Are there alternatives you should have considered but did not?
9. What kinds of changes are required to avoid making this mistake again?What kinds of change are difficult for you?
10. How do you think your behavior should/would change in you were in a similar situation again?
11. Work to understand the mistake until you can make fun of it (or not want to kill others that make fun).
12. Don't over-compensate: the next situation won't be the same as the last.

The most important lesson in making mistakes is to trust that while mistakes are inevitable and you can learn from them. No matter what happens tomorrow you'll be able to get value from it, and apply it to the day after that. Progress won't be a straight line but if you keep learning you will have more successes than failures, and the mistakes you make along the way will help you get to where you want to go.

Five Lean Lessons from Playing Ice Hockey

When I am not at work (as a Quality Manager) and not writing articles for this blog I spend a great deal of time coaching youth ice hockey. This past weekend our season came to an end with the completion of playoffs. As a Lean leader often does I took some time to reflect on this past season.

As a coach you can’t help but feel a sense of instilling good behaviors in your players. While you might be teaching specific skills and helping them understand the strategies of the game I think the opportunities to teach life lessons are the most important. In my experience I liken this to the way a Lean Sensei (champion, mentor, teacher) coaches continuous improvement thinking. They don’t focus on the tools necessarily but rather the approach or method of problem solving. It is this that provides a valuable foundation of Lean thinking from which you can address any situation.

As I looked back over the season I started thinking about the lessons I hope my players learned. Many of these lessons are the same that I and others try to instill in the organizations we work with. So in no particular order here are five lessons that apply to sports and Lean:

1. Never give up. Sports have lots of highs and lows throughout the game. Perseverance is necessary to turn a bad situation into a good situation. When your team is behind never give up or you will be defeated. Lots of teams come from behind to win.

Lean also needs perseverance to get you through the difficult bumps in the road along the way to improvement.

2. Practice. Practice. Practice. All sports teams practice in order to improve. The key to their practices is to focus on basic skills for game situations. This high speed sport is much about reading and reacting so you must practice with intensity if you want to play with intensity.

In your organization you may not necessarily call it practice but you certainly experiment. This experimentation is what prepares us to solve more and more complex problems.

3. The power of teamwork. Hockey is not an individual sport it requires every member of the team to play their part to win. It also requires everyone to be at their best. Open communication and chemistry are an essential part of teamwork.

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

4. The value of hard work and sacrifice. Undoubtedly it takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice along the way to get to the elite levels of the game. But this makes winning so much sweeter in the end.

Lean takes lots of hard work as well but it makes wins you get much more pleasurable. It is this hard work that creates customer value and makes your organization competitive in the market place.

5. Winning requires a positive attitude. There are a lot of things out of our control and adversity is part of the challenge but how we react is up to us. The right attitude can keep you moving forward. Never dwell on what you did wrong but what you need to do better for the next game.

Lean requires a willingness to try something new to improve our workplace. Fix what bugs us. Make work easier.

Even if you’re not a hockey fan like me, I hope you’re able to take some of these life lessons from ice hockey and apply them to your experiences. I think these are lessons we can all use especially in a continuous improvement environment. What do you think?

Lean Quote: Create a Positive Work Environment

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.

"You cannot implement quality improvement in a hostile environment." — Donald Stratton

Creating a positive workplace is critical to a company's success. Most people who have experience working in an office have seen firsthand the difference between one that has a positive environment and one that doesn't. A positive work environment has a better productivity rate, happier workers overall, better morale, and a lower turnover rate.

There are a number of things that can contribute to a more positive working environment.

Set the Example

The example you set in the office will have a ripple effect on your employees whether positive or negative. You can make a positive impact daily by remaining in a good mood and keeping a positive, optimistic outlook at all times. Don't blame others or complain about things you don't have any control over, and don't be vocal about your gripes or annoyances. This kind of attitude and example will spread to your employees and soon create a negative atmosphere in the office.

Don't Dwell on the Negatives

Mistakes are inevitable. Deadlines are missed, typos are made, and plans are botched. If these things are happening on a regular basis, then it is important to call attention to the problem and fix it. However, don't dwell on mistakes. Doing so can bring down the overall motivation of the office. Instead, focus on how they can be fixed and how to prevent them in the future. It's important also, when reprimanding or pointing out something negative, to preface and end on a positive note.

Foster Good Communication Skills

You can make a positive impact daily by taking the time to communicate with and recognize your employees. Don't rely solely on email and phone calls to conduct the majority of your business and correspondence with your employees as well as your customers where possible. Instead, drop by offices and cubicles. Face to face interaction can have a more positive, personal effect than just emails or phone calls.

Promote Respectfulness

Job titles may mean that there is a certain order to control and responsibility, but that doesn't mean someone with a lesser job title is any less important. Respect each individual for what they bring to the organization. Success and positive attitudes in the workplace are created when the entire team respects the value of each position and the diversity of thinking, talents, styles and experience each person brings.

Create Team Spirit

One of our basic human needs is to feel we belong to something bigger than ourselves, and for many people that need is met by being part of a supportive work group. Encourage an attitude of cooperation rather than competition. This unity will help your team members feel valued and that they belong. As a result they will want to be at work, your team will function smoothly, and your unit will be better able to carry out the missions and goals of your organization.

These are just a few of many ways you can have a positive impact throughout your office and with your employees. Creating a positive workplace is critical to a company's success. It is important for managers to define a purpose, set clear goals, and use appropriate positive reinforcement to motivate employees. Continuing to do so will make your office a better, more productive place to work for all employees.

 

Three Operational Discipline Techniques That Improves Quality

To ensure the success of your corporation you must ensure that your company is operationally disciplined. Operational discipline must be part of your company's culture.

Operational discipline is defined as the deeply rooted dedication and commitment by every member of an organization to carry out each task, the right way, each time. ‘‘Discipline’’ in this context does not refer to punishment, but to doing things in a way that results in positive benefits. Operational discipline reflects the strength of an organization’s Lean culture in making systems effective and in providing tangible result. In addition, a high level of operational discipline typically contributes to improved business performance through higher productivity, higher quality, reduced waste, and lower costs.

Operational discipline is the willingness to create and follow processes/rules and hold people accountable for performing them. In Lean speak, it includes elements of Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA).  There are 3 operational discipline techniques that you can use to produce higher quality.

Standard Work (Plan-Do)

Standard work is a written description of how a process should be done. It guides consistent execution. It is the most effective combination (method) of manpower, materials and machinery.

Andon (Check-Act)

Andons are audible, or more commonly visual, signals that something has happened.  The aim is that andons quickly alert managerial and technical staff to a problem having arisen so that they can get to the source of the problem and begin to investigate it.

Audit (Check-Act)

The final step in the process is setting up a quick audit process to make certain your rules are being followed and your process is staying in good shape. Use audits to not only sustain the improvements from Kaizen, but also expose new problems and resolve them with your employees' involvement and input. In the beginning, the audits may need to be more frequent to force the discipline to adhere.

In an organization where a strong Operational Discipline culture exists, there will be a “deeply rooted dedication and commitment by every member of an organization to carry out each task – “the right way, every time.” Through standard work, each process is defined and performed the same way every time. Implementation of signals will alert you of problems early which improves quality and provides a foundation for continuous improvement. Auditing ensures you do what you say you will do. Create a culture that is operationally disciplined and you will find improved business results, better quality, and less waste.