Lean Tip
#3736 – Help Leaders Recognize their Impact
Being a
leader today is high stakes. Managers have a bigger impact on their employees
than many of us even realize, so it’s important to help leaders truly understand
how much they influence their teams. (Managers are responsible for 70% of the
variance in employee engagement, after all!)
When
managers feel like they’re a part of an organization that truly understands
them, they’re more likely to do their best work. In fact, according to Great
Place to Work, people are three
times more likely to look forward to coming to work when they
feel heard.
Lean Tip
#3737 – Turn Employees into High-performing Leaders
Creating
opportunities for people to lead projects, initiatives, and workstreams is a
great way to develop an employee’s leadership mindset before promoting them
into a management position. This gives employees a taste of what it’s like to
be accountable for something that impacts and involves others within the safety
of their current roles.
To
encourage your employees' growth as leaders:
- Give them opportunities to try new things
(and fail).
- Be patient with them when they make
mistakes; this will help develop empathy within your organization as well
as provide valuable lessons learned for future projects/initiatives/etc.
By
creating opportunities for people to lead within your organization and
empowering them to succeed, you can help them build confidence in their
leadership abilities—making them all the more ready to step up into management
roles when the time comes.
Lean Tip
#3738 – Provide Ongoing Feedback
Before
you can correct and teach others in a meaningful way you need to build a
relationship.
The
second way to develop leaders within your team is to provide ongoing feedback.
But don't just deliver feedback; make sure that you are giving feedback in a
way that helps the employee grow and learn from their experiences, while also
making them feel respected.
Feedback
is an important part of growing as an individual, but oftentimes we only offer
feedback when there is a problem.
When we
offer constructive criticism we can come across as harsh or unsympathetic. When
providing feedback, try not to focus on what the person did wrong—instead focus
on their impact and how they could improve.
Lean Tip
#3739 – Give Your Employees the Tools to Make their Own Decisions
Equipping
team members with tools and frameworks is a great way to set them up to win. As
we mentioned above, starting with a mindset adjustment is crucial. But tools
are a great way to ensure employees maintain the momentum and keep applying an
outward mindset at work.
Using
tried and true leadership tools, you can give employees the freedom to make
their own decisions while also ensuring they’re adhering to a framework that’s
proven to be effective. This gives them more flexibility to problem solve on
their own while also evaluating other factors like their impact on others.
The skill
of developing accountable people is the most important skill a leader can
learn. If we have to hold people accountable, then our people are not being
accountable.
Lean Tip
#3740 – Invest in Leadership Development and Training
Training
and development are important for all teams, but it's especially crucial for
leaders. In fact, research
suggests that an investment in leadership mindset development can result in a
25% improvement in business outcomes. If you want your team members to grow
into effective managers that can make a real impact in your organization, they
need to know how to empower others, boost performance, and navigate challenging
situations.
Leadership
requires a unique set of skills that can be sharpened through training and
coaching. Truly effective leadership training will unlock a new level of
self-awareness in your team members, helping them to be more effective and
empathetic managers. This training and coaching prepares them to tackle the
range of challenges and situations they face daily.
Lean Tip
#3741 – Emphasize a Personal Understanding of the Philosophy of Kaizen Across All
Levels of the Organization.
Instilling
an understanding of kaizen as a long-term practice, rather than a management
initiative, is important in order to sustain continuous improvement. Continuous
improvement is as much about mindset as it is about actions.
Making
sure your employees understand the history and philosophy of kaizen will help
sustain a culture of continuous improvement that permeates the company.
Building a company culture with a steady focus on improvement is critical to
maintaining momentum in your kaizen efforts.
Lean Tip #3742 – Document Your Process and Performance Before and After Improvements
Have Been Implemented.
In
kaizen, it’s important to “speak with data and manage with facts.” In order to
evaluate improvements objectively, existing procedures must be standardized and
documented. Mapping the process’s initial state can help you identify wastes
and areas for improvement and provide a benchmark for improvement.
Measuring
performance against existing benchmarks allows you to demonstrate ROI from your
kaizen efforts and keep the company aligned around improvement. It also allows
you to identify areas where your efforts are working–or not–so you can make
strategic decisions about future improvements.
In order
to measure performance objectively, you should identify metrics that quantify
improvements. These may include metrics revolving around quality, cost,
resource utilization, customer satisfaction, space utilization, staff
efficiency, and other KPIs.
Lean Tip
#3743 – Standardize Work for Improvement to Last
In order
for improvements to last, they must be standardized and repeatable.
Standardizing work is crucial to kaizen because it creates a baseline for
improvement. When you make improvements to a process, it’s essential to
document the new standard work in order to sustain improvements and create a
new baseline. Standard work also reduces variability in processes and promotes
discipline, which is essential for continuous improvement efforts to take root.
Lean Tip
#3744 – Create Your Own Kaizen Guidelines
While
there are many resources available to guide you through your kaizen efforts,
it’s important to personally understand your company’s kaizen journey.
Reflecting on your kaizen efforts after improvements have been implemented is
an important part of the continuous improvement cycle.
As you
reflect on your efforts, develop your own kaizen guidelines. Start by creating
guidelines based on your own experiences improving the workplace. Keep in mind
that these guidelines should be for your colleagues, your successors, and
yourself to understand the problems you have overcome. These guidelines will
ultimately help you as you approach your next challenge.
Lean Tip
#3745 – Enforce Improvements
It’s easy
for employees to regress to their old ways. Enforcing the changes you’ve made
to your processes is important for the improvements you’ve made to last, and
it’s key to sustaining continuous improvement in the long term.
Documenting
improvements, making sure standard work is up-to-date, and training employees
on new procedures can help sustain the progress you’ve made in your continuous
improvement efforts.
Lean Tip
#3746 – Engage the Full Team to Find Improvement Opportunities
Continuous
improvement in a facility is almost never going to be made by a single person.
This is why you need to have the entire team involved. This starts with the CEO
and leadership team and goes all the way to the front line employees. By
creating a teamwork environment where everyone is working together to ensure
ongoing improvement you will be much more successful in the long run.
Even when
employees propose an unrealistic idea it should still be seen as a positive
step. Taking all ideas seriously and trying to find ways to implement them if
practical can allow employees to have the confidence in the management team
that they need to want to bring new ideas up to the team.
Lean Tip
#3747 – Know Your Processes
You can’t
make improvements on something if you don’t really know what is going on with
it. This is why you should have a clear understanding of everything that is
happening in the facility. A great strategy for this is to employ value stream
mapping. This will help you pinpoint where all the value for your products is
added so that you can eliminate any waste that is involved.
Keeping
your value stream and process maps updated and accurate is important. Every
time a change is made to an area, for example, make sure you know how it is
impacting the value add to that area. This will ensure you are always
evaluating an accurate portrayal of your facility so you can make the needed
improvements on an ongoing basis.
Lean Tip
#3748 – Never Give Up
Whenever
thinking about Kaizen continuous improvement you need to recognize that the
‘continuous’ part of the strategy is extremely important. This is a strategy
that should be implemented as soon as possible and then continued indefinitely
into the future. As soon as one improvement is made, it is time to start
looking at what the next improvement opportunity will be.
It is
also important to remember that there will be failures along the way. Some
ideas will be tried and found to not produce the results that are needed. When
this happens make sure you and your team don’t get discouraged or give up.
Instead, start the process of finding and implementing improvements over and
you’ll soon achieve the results you were hoping for.
Lean Tip
#3749 – Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
The
Kaizen philosophy has been around for quite some time and it has been used by
thousands of companies. Over this period of time there have been many ideas
developed to help facilitate a successful Kaizen environment. If you come up
with an idea on improving your facility, take a moment to see if other
companies have done something similar and had success with it.
You can
learn about what they did and how it worked so you can take these ideas and
implement them in your own facility. Even if the concept is not identical to
your situation, you can build off of proven ideas in order to streamline the
implementation for your facility. Building on the success of others is far more
efficient than trying to come up with everything on your own.
There are
many resources where you can learn about ways that people in your industry have
eliminated waste and improved efficiency. Whether it is trade magazines,
conferences, company websites or any other resource, you can learn a lot from
how other facilities.
Lean Tip
#3750 – Always Think Long Term
In
Kaizen, always thinking long-term means focusing on sustainable, incremental
improvements that build towards significant long-term gains, rather than
seeking quick fixes or short-term gains.
Instead
of trying to fix a bottleneck in a process with a temporary solution, a
long-term Kaizen approach would involve analyzing the root cause of the
bottleneck and implementing a permanent solution that improves the entire
process.
