Corporate Lean business practices come in many shapes and sizes but a few truths are vital to its real success. One key area is aligning your lean activities not as a focus but as a supporting role. Integrate it with safety, innovation, staff meetings and with your customers too. Driving lean progress is not about bean counting and project completion but continuous incremental improvement over the long term. Lean is not a shiny new toy but a holistic approach with proven tools to guide your teams beyond quick fixes into sustainable results.
Resistance to change is a common human characteristic; typically once something new is adopted everyone becomes very comfortable with it. With lean, stamping out complacency is critical. Three things to help reduce and eliminate complacency is first to ensure information is accessible and inspirational. Albert Einstein said, “If I can’t picture it, I can’t understand it.” Keep activities visible and share success stories. Next provide everyone with lean tools and training to succeed. If someone is disengaged encourage the team to find ways to help them understand the lean process. And finally ensuring the open-door policy drives communication so employees truly feel comfortable discussing tough topics with management. Develop systems that not only encourage lean communication but link the learning with two way dialogues.Across the entire organization everyone has a role and in lean as with all operational tasks engagement is not voluntary. The lean systems one puts in place require engagement from all levels. Senior managers must not only embrace it but live lean through engaging the teams during the gemba as they share their successes and failures. Middle managers have the vital role of coach, mentor and lean leader by empowering their teams to find and own their solutions and ensuring they ‘dug deep’ during the root cause phase. Lean tools become part of the successful leaders’ skills that they use as development tools and leadership development.
Lean is a journey that requires everyone be actively engaged. Taking the necessary steps during the lean journey may seem time consuming, but lean cannot be done halfway, you need everyone engaged and over time everyone learning the using all of the lean tools. As Jim Collins likes to say “Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.” Great companies know that talented people are their greatest resource, and these same people know they are responsible to achieve results. With lean tools everyone can blaze a new trail and if they choose to continue to follow the old trail maybe it’s time for them to go home.
Click here to read more about MAU’s lean business practices.
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