14 Leadership Lessons from Veterans

I dedicate this blog to the veterans in our reading audience. You have my utmost respect and appreciation for your service to our country.

This is Veterans’ Day here in America, and as I think of leadership, I can think of no better examples than our military men and women. Here are some of the lessons they’ve taught me…lessons we ALL need in our lives as leaders.

1.    Good leaders are disciplined.
They get up early and hit the ground running. They serve when they feel like it…and when they don’t. They establish solid habits.

2.    Good leaders are trained.
They are teachable and purposely train for every possible scenario – drilling lessons so much that the actions become automatic.

3.    Good leaders are conditioned.
They are strong mentally and physically. Lives depend on their strength.

4.    Good leaders are insightful.
They have wisdom beyond their years.

5.    Good leaders are prepared.
Our military folks are prime examples of this. Not only are they personally prepared. They also have a team that is prepared, and they have their equipment prepared.

6.    Good leaders care…deeply.
It’s a “band of brothers” kind of care. Show me a leader who truly cares about his or her people, and I’ll show you a successful leader.

7.    Good leaders sacrifice for others.
Being a leader is not about being served – it is about serving.

8.    Good leaders get out of their comfort zones.
Neither the barracks nor the battlefield is comfortable. But good leaders live outside their comfort zones.

9.    Good leaders do what it takes to preserve legacy.
They have strong principles and protect them fiercely.

10.  Good leaders strategize.
They think, plan, and act. All three parts are critical to success.

11.  Good leaders value their teams.
They know that battles are not won alone.

12.  Good leaders recognize individual strengths.
They know that a team composed of diverse strengths is a strong team.

13.  Good leaders quickly gather intelligence and make informed decisions.

14.  Good leaders focus on a cause bigger than themselves.

I challenge you to do two things today:

·         Thank a veteran for their service.

·         Take the “good leader” assessment above and see how you’re doing as a leader.

Lean Quote: Good Work Days Come From Doing Great Work With Great Coworkers

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"I want to be happy. I realized that being happy isn't necessarily about getting there; it's how you get there."  — Ben Huh (CEO, The Cheezburger Network)

Being happy at work is not just about avoiding bad days – it requires having frequent good days, where we actively enjoy our work. A good day at work is one where you feel great on the job. You’re happy at work and you definitely feel like having more of those days.

In a recent survey, 1 out of 3 respondents love their jobs and have a good work day every day or almost every day. That’s heartening, because being happy at work is not just about the absence of bad days – it’s very much about having many good days at work, characterized by positive emotions about your work.


But at the other end of the scale, 22% experience at most 2-3  good work days a month! This means that 80-90% of their work days are neutral at best and bad at worst. We fear it may be the latter. In our 2015 survey of “bad days at work”, 19% reported having a bad day at work every day or almost every day.

Here are the top 5 single factors that cause good days at work:

1. I did work that I knew was meaningful and made a positive difference for someone else.
2. I had freedom to work my own way
3. I did work I was proud of
4. I had fun with my coworkers
5. I did tasks that I enjoy doing

This clearly shows that it feels good to do good work. This contrasts with the depressingly common view that employees must constantly be externally motivated to perform either by the promise of rewards or the threat of reprisals. On the contrary, we seem to like nothing more than the opportunity to shine at work, especially when that work is meaningful and we have the freedom to work our own way.

Good relationships and fun with coworkers also matters and is one of the top causes of good work days.

Lean Tips #146 (#2401 - #2415)

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 #2401 - Deciding What Not to Do is as Important as Deciding What to Do
Strategy should always have a focus. Without focus, you are stuck with a list of disjointed “to dos.”

Warren Buffet reinforced this thinking when he said;

“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that the really successfully people say ‘no’ to almost everything.”

It’s saying “no” to the things on a haphazard to-do list that starts to shape a strategy.

The graveyard of corporate failures is littered with companies that tried to be all things to all people.

Lean Tip #2402 - Be Sure to Understand Well Parkinson’s Law
Never heard of it?

While it’s meaning has shifted over the years, its early incarnation went something like this: work expands to fill the allotted time.

This law is perhaps more true than many of Newton’s laws of physics!

If you want to ensure something gets done, give it a deadline. And, sometimes, the more ominous the deadline, the better.

Deadlines bring focus and energy. A lack of them lead to ambivalence and scatter-shot activity.

Lean Tip #2403 - Remember How Important it is to Have the Right People in the Right Place
Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, wrote that the first job of a good leader is to;

“get the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) before you figure out where to drive it.”

Note how precise he is with the order of events.

Strategy and tactical initiatives (i.e., where you are driving) are relatively impotent unless you have a team of people in roles that maximize their skills and ensure alignment throughout the organization.

Not having the right people in the right place guarantees a team that works at cross-purposes, making progress slow at best and non-existent at worst.

Lean Tip #2404 - Great Leaders put Their Teams First.
Great leaders always put their people first. When things go well, their team gets 100 percent of the credit; when they don’t, the leader shoulders the blame. Great leaders recognize accomplishments of all sizes by expressing gratitude, celebrating achievements, and developing recognition programs.

As a leader, you must create an environment where trust is at the center of the team’s value system by always recognizing accomplishments, providing a safe environment to fail, and providing unwavering guidance when times are turbulent. You, as the leader, need to be your team’s greatest cheerleader and not their greatest detractor.

Lean Tip #2405 - Great Leaders Put Their Teams First.
Great leaders always put their people first. When things go well, their team gets 100 percent of the credit; when they don’t, the leader shoulders the blame. Great leaders recognize accomplishments of all sizes by expressing gratitude, celebrating achievements, and developing recognition programs.

As a leader, you must create an environment where trust is at the center of the team’s value system by always recognizing accomplishments, providing a safe environment to fail, and providing unwavering guidance when times are turbulent. You, as the leader, need to be your team’s greatest cheerleader and not their greatest detractor.

Lean Tip #2406 – Allow Employees to be Creative and Innovate.
It is a fact that some of the best product improvements or new product ideas come from the people who know the product best. Give employees some free time to work on new ideas and prototypes. 3M gives their employees up to 15% of their scheduled time to do so with the “15% Rule.” Engineers and scientists can doodle around, as they call it, to play with new ideas for products.

Lean Tip #2407 – Make Sure Employees Feel Valued and Appreciated. 
This is even more important than pay. I have always found it helpful for people to know how their work contributes to the company’s products, services, and overall success. Make sure you take the time to tell people how much you appreciate their efforts, skills, and attitude.  This needs to come from all manufacturing employees, team leaders and the executive team - not just human resources.

Lean Tip #2408 – Allow Employees More Control of Their Work.
In manufacturing, much of the work is predetermined, based on the nature of the day-to-day process. Each day and hour might be prescribed, with the employee having little say over his or her schedule. Not surprisingly, this could dampen engagement. Great manufacturing leaders figure out the amount of control they can give back to the employees, which allows them some choice in potentially rote procedures.

Lean Tip #2409 – Create Accountability Amongst the Team. 
Great managers work with employees to establish how "we can all be" accountable to the work. When done right, accountability creates higher engagement. It is important to make sure underperforming employees and managers are held accountable, even in situations where management structures may not lend themselves to performance accountability.

Lean Tip #2410 – Ensure Your Team has Proper Resources
That’s the very first thing Manuel mentioned. Upper management shouldn’t skimp on resources for support and enhance safety, efficiency and productivity. Often in his career, Manuel would ask for additional resources, or tools he believed were important and needed. The answer he’d always get was a “no”. Sadly, that’s what often made his decision to leave the company that much easier.


Lean Tip #2411 – Provide Ongoing Opportunities for Development
An employee’s development shouldn’t stop after they’ve been trained in their role. Employees need to constantly be challenged and upskilled in the workplace to keep them engaged.

This development doesn’t have to take the role of prescriptive training. Embrace a holistic approach to professional development – from attending conferences to meetups and hackathons, let employees hone their skills in the way they learn best. Instead of offering rigid learning opportunities, the key is to provide employees with the tools and opportunities for self-directed development.

Lean Tip #2412 – Set Constant Challenges
Even though many employees seek out a sense of community in their workplace, it’s still important for individuals to feel like they can celebrate personal successes. In a recent survey that looked to identify the drivers of employee engagement, close to half the respondents said they found meaning in their sense of personal achievement and thrived on personal challenge.

Identify your high-performing employees and set them weekly, monthly or yearly challenges. These can be performance-driven, like raising KPI’s or sales targets, or cultural, like making a new work connection every week.

Lean Tip #2413 – Recognize Your Team and Their Hard Work. 
A manager recognizing and acknowledging a job well done is an essential motivator when developing employee engagement best practices. To be a successful manager, it’s good to understand what form of recognition works best for your staff. Words of encouragement can go a long way in this regard. A ‘good job’ or ‘thank you’ in regards to a task may be just what that employee needed to push forward, or to continue do just as well on the next project. Taking it a step further, consider holding an employee recognition day, or, if the company can, try offering a monetary bonus to those who truly go above and beyond. Recognition helps to foster positive attitudes and healthy behavior in the workplace which is a key factor to elevating the levels of employee engagement.

Lean Tip #2414 – Encourage Teamwork Among Employees. 
There is a reason that people flock to team sports. When a group of people pulls together to win the big game, it often comes an infectious feeling that engulfs everyone around them—from teammates to the fans—the sense of camaraderie and success spreads to the masses. The same can be said for the workplace environment. When a large account or significant client needs your services, developing a strong team of employees gives them a sense of greater purpose. Pulling them together to work towards a big company goal can be incredibly satisfying, and allows them to bounce ideas off each other to ultimately meet the needs of your client. It adds a sense of cooperation, consideration, and confidence in not only each other but in the company, itself.

Lean Tip #2415 – Listen To and Act on Employee Feedback. 
Listening to what your customers have to say is important, but so is listening to your employees. Having regular meetings to determine what areas of your workplace environment need improvement is an important part of keeping the employees engaged with the company. By using a company survey, or even a monthly meeting, giving your staff a voice is vital in making them feel like part of the company. If there is a situation within the internal workings of the company that goes unnoticed or unaddressed by management, it sends an unfavorable message to your staff. If they know that management cares, and hears their concerns, they will continue to maintain a high level of engagement instead of becoming despondent and disengaged.

How to Avoid 5 Top Lean Project Management Mistakes

It’s easy to make mistakes in any line of work. However, when you are a lean project manager, the whole project depends on you and your ability to avoid mistakes. This can be hard as there is a lot of stress involved with managing a project. You have to coordinate people, estimate everything, communicate a lot and all of that with patience and dedication to detail that can help your team be successful. Mistakes are bound to happen. But knowing where you can go wrong with your project and your steps is crucial in recognizing them as you start to make them and doing your best to fix them. This is why we recommend getting to know yourself and your history with projects as well as checking some of these common lean project management mistakes out:

#1 - Not Being Open to Change

Perhaps one of the most important things you’ll want to consider is how open to change you are. It doesn’t matter if you’ve planned everything down to the hour of how you’re going to approach a lean project, these plans will never normally stick.

“You need to make sure you’re open to change in the sense that can embrace it and adapt. Be the kind of person who grows and moves forward with their teams, rather than stagnating” says Kathleen Garcia, a business writer at Oxessays and Academized.

#2 - Not Optimizing Written Communication

Hand in hand with Mistake #1, written communication is such a key part of everyday life, yet it’s usually overlooked dramatically. From writing emails and reports to text messages and marketing content, not optimizing your written communication skills will be your demise as it is for so many lean project managers.

#3 - Settling for an Average Team

A lean project is only ever going to be as successful as the team involved makes it, which automatically displays how important it is to make sure you’ve got the right team and the right people in the right places.

Work together with your team and you’ll be able to enhance your team to produce the best results.

#4 - Not Being Approachable

We see this problem far too often, and it needs to come to a stop. Sometimes there's a gap between the lean project leader and other workers.

“If there’s a problem with construction, you need the team members to feel comfortable in approaching you and telling you about it so it can be addressed rather than trying to hide it. Work on your interpersonal skills and be a proactive and engaged member of the team rather than an outside figure” says Louis Smith, a Project manager at Big Assignments and PaperFellows.

#5 - Not Listening

So, when you are a lean project manager, you often feel like you know everything better than anyone else. You overwork yourself, avoid delegating and tend to every detail of the project yourself. However, this is a huge mistake and it’s very commonly made by lean project managers. You need to let down your guard and listen to your team. You hired them for a reason. They are the experts in their niches and they know what needs to be done the best. Listen to their ideas and their solutions and delegate tasks to skilled team members. Trust your team.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are plenty of common mistakes that lean project managers around the world continue to make, but now you’re aware of them you can be proactive in making sure you don’t make them. The more mindful you can be, the better off the success of your project will be.

About Author:

Ellie Coverdale is a technical writer and project manager at Essay Roo as well as at Australian help. She has been involved in huge tech research projects, which she has taken may valuable learning experiences, and she also teaches writing at Write my essays service.

Lean Quote: 4 Components of Relationship Trust

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.

"If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween." — Douglas Coupland

Developing courage as a leader boils down to trust: trusting yourself, trusting other people, and developing an ability to trust in the balance of life overall.

Relational trust, a key aspect of courage, comes from our inner perceptions. We often interpret the behavior of others through costly snap judgments. By being aware of the four components of relational trust below, we can recognize what we’re missing and repair our relational trust.

Respect

Respect involves honoring the vital role each person plays in the workplace, and the mutual dependencies among team members. It means making sure all feel their opinions are valued and will be considered. It helps to have meaningful conversations where people get to know each other beyond their job functions.

Personal Regard

In work roles where power dynamics can’t help but exist, people in subordinate positions often feel vulnerable. When the more “powerful” person makes a conscious commitment to relieve uncertainty, the “vulnerable” gain a sense of being cared about. This commitment entails leaders expressing concern about one’s personal life, creating professional development opportunities, or extending themselves beyond what their role requires.

Competence

Leaders often make daily, informal observations—positive and negative—about their team members’ capabilities. Rather than an objective process, we often judge others without knowing the whole story. Sometimes we feel blame or shame, and project our own darkness onto others.

Integrity

In business, integrity is not solely the opposite of immoral and unethical behavior. It requires a shared understanding of your organization’s purpose and values and being committed to living them. 

With the four components of this trust-building framework, you can see where you can take responsibility for ensuring improvement in your own relational trust, and that of your organization.

Courage means trusting yourself to overcome your fears and doing what you are afraid to do. Courage increases conviction and inspires others to confront their fears. 

It takes courage to begin the journey towards our dreams and courage to see them through.

Recap From the 15th Annual Northeast Lean Conference - Total Employee Involvement

Learn more about NE Lean Conference below

This past week I was able to spend a wonderful time at the 15^th Annual Northeast Lean Conference. I always look forward to these opportunities to connect with friends, learn best practices from others, and get re-energized around continuous improvement.

The theme of this conference is one that everyone relates to and tries to create in the Lean community “Total Employee Involvement”. I want a share a couple of key takeaways and thoughts from interesting presentations during this conference.

Jamie Bonini from TSSC talked about the lessons learned from 25 years of spreading, teaching, and implementing The Toyota Production System (TPS or Lean) outside of Toyota:

1. Be Clear: TPS is an organizational culture of highly engaged people solving problems to drive performance. The philosophy underlies the technical tools that require the managerial role to build and sustain the TPS culture.
2. Model lines: Learn by doing by building the culture through model lines to 1) develop leaders to then guide spreading where, how, and who and 2) expose real challenges to address in spreading.
3. TPS must be an organization (not operations) strategy with strong leadership.
4. Build a strong, small, full time, internal TPS team to support spreading.
5. Company values must fit the TPS philosophy (the 4 points).
6. TPS is difficult. Expect successes and setbacks. Learn mostly by doing.
7. Stability is a must. If low, build it first and practice problem solving.
8. Main challenge: Building the managerial role, behaviors, and problem solving.

Alan Robinson, UMASS Professor, took on the task of answering whether Lean is still relevant in a post-industrial economy. Lean has made significant contributions in manufacturing, entrepreneurships (The Lean Startup), Software development (Agile), Project management (Scrum), Agriculture (Lean Farm). However, Lean has not readily caught on in Healthcare, Education, Government, Military, and Financial Services. There are a couple reasons for this: 1) Lean pushes us to dramatically raise the quality of our leadership, thinking, problem-solving, and problem-finding 2) It is one thing to know what full-blown lean looks like but completely different to know how to make it happen in ordinary organizations. Shingo Institute reports that less than 4% of CEOs are serious about lean. As leaders we need to understand that we don’t have all the answers, actually, much less than that. Taiichi Ohno said “Even the best managers are wrong 50% of the time.” Shingo tells us the real driver for TPS is made by significant front-line engagement, “The goal of TPS is to unleash mass creativity.” This requires humility from leaders, Lean is not for you if you have to be the smartest person in the room. Most of an organization’s improvement potential lies in front-line ideas. Roughly 80 percent of an organization’s performance improvement potential lies in front-line ideas, and 20 percent in management-driven initiatives. Our mainstream management tools do not allow us to see the waste.

Lean is a proven methodology for striving for operational excellence, but:

As it works on human beings’ weakest points, it will seem hard to do, without a lot of deep education and discipline; and its real power is not unleashed with full involvement of the front-lines, which given our history is perhaps the hardest thing of all to do.

Marianna Magnusdottir, Chief Happiness Officer (great title) at Manino had powerful presentation about the human side of improvement. Companies who are tools focused and not people focused are often fraught with failure. As many of us know successful lean implementations are 80% people development and 20% tools learning. Using the analogy of rowing a boat where one oar is relationships and one is results in the wavy sea of reality. If you focus only on processes and results you can go in circles. If you only focus on people development you too will find yourself rowing in circles. However, if you are rowing both oars (relationships and results) you navigate through the waves (ups and downs) of business and transform your organization. Your daily management process should include elements of process/results and relationships/people. These should be daily communication boards that build trust and mutual respect by getting to know and learning from each other.

I had the chance to talk about using daily management to engage employees in the gemba. Lean organizations make use of Daily Management systems, a structured process to focus employee’s actions to continuously improve their day-to-day work. Daily Management empowers employees to identify potential process concerns, recommend potential solutions, and learn by implementing process changes. Daily Management, if done right, can be a critical tool in any organization’s toolbox to engage frontline staff in problem-solving and to deliver customer value.

Art Smalley ended the conference with a presentation on the 4 Types of Problems, a book he recently wrote. If you’re in business then it is inevitable there are problems that need to be solved. Not all problems are the same and can’t be solved the same old way. He demonstratesdthat most business problems fall into four main categories, each requiring different thought processes, improvement methods, and management cadences:

Type 1: Troubleshooting - A reactive process of rapidly fixing abnormal conditions by returning things to immediately known standards.

Type 2: Gap-from-standard - A structured problem-solving process that aims more at the root cause through problem definition, goal setting, analysis, countermeasure implementation, checks, standards, and follow-up activities.

Type 3: Target-state - Continuous improvement (kaizen) that goes beyond existing levels of performance to achieve new and better standards or conditions.

Type 4: Open-ended and Innovation - Unrestricted pursuit through creativity and synthesis of a vision or ideal condition that entail radical improvements and unexpected products, processes, systems, or value for the customer beyond current levels. 

As Art beautifully said “Not Every Problem Is a “Nail” But Companies Typically Reach for the Same Old “Hammer”.”

There were a number of great presentations from many great practitioners of Lean. I am already looking forward to next year’s conference which will be around the theme “Lean in 21^st Century”.

Lean Quote: Six Essential Management Functions to Accelerate Lean Transformation

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 essence of management is not techniques and procedures. The essence of management is to make knowledge productive." — Peter Drucker

The Lean principles of continuous improvement, respect for people, and a relentless focus on delivering customer value are making organizations rethink the practices that might have guided them for decades. This new approach to working requires a transformation in leadership, as well. For Lean to be truly effective, it needs effective Lean management — to champion Lean principles, offer guidance, and ensure that Lean is being used to optimize the entire organizational system for value delivery.

Practicing Lean management principles requires a shift in mindset: from that of a supervisor, to that of a teacher and coach. Lean leaders must lead gently, by example, ensuring that Lean principles are being applied with the right goal in mind: To sustainably maximize the delivery of value to the customer.

My friends at GBMP have identified six essential functions of the management process to support and accelerate a Lean conversion:

1. Volition – Unwavering management commitment to and articulation of the need for everybody everyday.
2. Policy – Codification of what we do, how we do it, and how it is measured. 
3. Planning and deployment – Developing, managing, and communicating a plan to redirect the organization in a “True North” direction, balancing improvement time and daily management time.
4. Control and monitoring – Creation of measurements that accurately align daily management practices and performance with organizational strategy.
5. Satisfaction – Fostering the organization and people development through reflection on wins and lessons learned. Feeds back to volition.
6. Idea Systems – Developing a robust system to stimulate, capture, implement, recognize, and share improvement ideas.

Together, these create the infrastructure and shared understanding that run the business, both daily and long-term.

Management’s role in transforming the management system is analogous to every employee’s role in Lean: many small improvements that come from the common sense and experience of the people who do the work.

Just as a Lean transformation cannot happen overnight, a Lean management transformation is not something that can be turned on with a switch. For many leaders, this requires abandoning many of the principles that have gotten them to where they are.

But the purpose of Lean management, and the goal of Lean as a whole, justifies the effort: Making this shift allows leaders to build sustainable, healthy companies built on a foundation of respect, learning, and continuous improvement. A Lean management approach allows leaders to leave a legacy they can be proud of: in careers spent learning, growing, and empowering people to do their best work, in companies that create products and service offerings that provide genuine value to their customers.