Lean Initiatives will never work unless you start with a strategy to eliminate wasteful management practices.
Now don’t get scared, I’m not talking about chopping headcount! This is short sighted as a way to get financial gains, yet so many organizations engage in this proactiveness. Lean is about eliminating the waste that was created to serve leaders vs. the value added activities that serve the people that impact your customers.
If I’ve made you feel uncomfortable, I’ve done my job well!
If you’d like to learn more about doing Lean right, read on…
Let’s use a typical production example to explain what I mean.
An operator on the floor can increase their output to improve the workplace organization so a team is deployed to “fix” the symptom.
But why do the conditions exist to create a workplace set up that was not optimal? Was it a legacy set up? Was it set up with certain outcomes in mind?
Did we leave it up to the operator to create their own work standard?
Regardless of the history, the operator was not set up for optimal efficiency hence why we deploy Lean Methodology to “fix” the symptom.
But what are the management practices that allow the conditions of an inefficient workplace to exist for the operator for which we now need to fix him and his workplace?
The reason why this happens is that leadership is more interested in getting the equipment in place with the promise of efficiency and cost savings. They don’t take the time to understand the interactions with the operator..
Had leadership started from a place of how the operator had optimal conditions to leverage the efficiency of the new equipment, might there have been a different result?
Instead, we deploy consultants, hours of training of white, yellow, green and black belts to hurry, scurry and do the work and claim success when we save a few dollars here and there.
I’m not saying I’m anti-Lean, but had we dealt with the management practices at the top when deploying an organizational design, we might have realized the lean efficiency out of the gate?
Lean starts with a leadership strategy at the top:
- What Management practices need to exist to set the organization up for success?
- What Conditions exist to management practices that need to be mitigated to eliminate the opportunity for inefficiency?
- And have we evaluated the Symptoms that exist due to the conditions to assure we identify the possible causes for inefficient performance?
It’s not about throwing more resources to find a solution.
It’s about setting up the right Lean Leadership Strategy so you don’t have to allocate more resources later due to short-sighted decisions.
One client of mine did not have regular leadership meetings to discuss changes in the organization and actions needed to mitigate risk. Then one day, a risk manifested into a crisis and now I have the good fortune to “Drop In” to fix the issue and set up the conditions to mitigate the risk in the future. Had the organization had the Management Practice of a regular leadership cadence, might they have seen the risk and mitigated the condition before the crisis happened?
Given this insight, let’s turn to your situation.
Have you deployed initiatives that fail to gain traction?
Are you now throwing money at bad hoping to get better?
Are you doubting yourself because you didn’t get the results you expected due to a poor execution strategy that should have dealt with management practices?
If this is you or someone you know, could we have a conversation to adopt these insights to your situation and set you up for success?
For the unfiltered, off the cuff discussion about this topic, please listen to my podcast airing on 2/16/24 and view the video so you see how I really feel about this topic!.
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Be well-Deb