by The HLH Team
“Lean is a way of thinking, not a list of things to do.”
-Shigeo Shingo
Working on a big project can waste resources in so many ways. Endless email chains, departments that don’t know how to work with each other, and a general inability to focus on a project over and above the daily whirlwind all cost us dearly.
Toyota’s Answer:
Developing a new car isn’t easy. In fact, it’s one of the most complex tasks a car company undertakes and can be a project-management nightmare of manufacturing, engineering, and safety issues. It’s a process that takes most car companies 36 months; Toyota does it in 20.
A pioneering champion of Lean, Toyota employs Obeya as one of the pillars of its production system. It’s a simple project-management method that saves time and money by adding one crucial element: dedicated space.
Room for Collaboration:
In Japanese, Obeya translates to “large room” or “war room.” It’s exactly that. An Obeya is a room dedicated to a project. It’s where important meetings happen, progress is posted, and all key decisions are made.
If you’re a Star Trek fan, think of it as the bridge. If you like military history, it’s your war room. Toyota calls in their brain, the center of the nervous system that is the Toyota Production System. It’s a space dedicated to focused communication about the project: information pours in, gets synthesized and digested, and then decisions are made and priorities selected from there.
Project over Silos:
Companies specialize in different things. Whether you want them to or not, silos emerge around those specialities so that each department can function at its best.
Silos function well when each is designed to contribute autonomously from the others. But when a project emerges that requires them to work together towards a common goal, the system can easily break down. Departmental priorities conflict with the project’s priorities and inefficiency runs rampant.
In the Obeya, the project rules. Silo politics are checked at the door, and in that space every stakeholder contributes their expertise to the overarching goal. It’s a simple, elegant, and difficult goal.
The Power of Visuals:
Visual aids like Kanban boards play a key role in Lean. When walking into the Obeya, you’ll get an instant idea, via the graphs and boards around you, of where the project is at. Plaster your walls with everything that shows your team what’s happening.
Obeyas eliminate the need for constant email updates, or hunting for status updates, or trying to get hold of other departments to find out where they’re at. Hours of time-waste get eliminated by making it visual for all.
Emerging Trend:
Obeyas have started to catch on, with big companies like Nike now employing it successfully. Business blogs and pinterest boards are full of ideas on how to assemble agendas and build visual walls to create the perfect collaborative space.
The kind of non-siloed communication fostered in an Obeya can be the gateway and driving force to implementing Process Improvement across your business. Keep it collaborative, set the silos and egos aside, and your Obeya can be what you need to get high-level buy-in for your Lean ambitions.
by The HLH Team
“A great coach tells you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear.”
-Sagi Kalev
Here’s what the trap looks like:
You’re in charge, and the future of the company is on your shoulders. Your employees can’t understand that; they don’t know the pressure. You think that needing to focus on your job is more important than helping them with theirs. You save time by giving orders and not listening to their ideas. This is the authority-trap, and it’s easy to fall into. Barking orders is quick; engaging in dialogue takes time. Time that could be spent on other parts of your job.
Being a Boss:
Bosses give orders. Bosses make sure that everyone is exactly where they place them, doing what they want them to do, so they can focus on making the big decisions.
The boss thinks that their time is more important because they’re the one in charge.
Here are a few signs that you’ve fallen into the authority-trap:
- You talk more than you listen. A lot more.
- You like to work away from your employees, and are often inaccessible. They slow you down.
- Your employees work for you because they’re scared of what will happen if they don’t.
- You need to be Cc’d, kept in all loops, and control everything that’s happening.
Being a Coach:
When a boss climbs out of the authority-trap, they become a coach. And here’s the difference:
- A coach listens more than they talk. They know their employees hold the key to growing their business, and that their perspectives matter.
- Coaches inspire trust. People want to excel for them because it makes them feel like part of the team.
- A coach likes to work where the action is, and has an open door policy so employees can run ideas by them, and give honest feedback.
- Coaches challenge their employees to do better. They delegate, give real responsibility and demand accountability, and push their team to grow the company.
The Road to being a Coach:
Coaches grow companies, and quality employees would rather work for a coach than a boss. But that doesn’t mean that a coach is a pushover. Far from it. A coach challenges and pushes employees to be their best and encourages them to find their strengths and hidden talents.
Here are some steps to becoming a coach:
- Practice aggressive listening – Become an Aggressive Listener
- Don’t lead by email. Get out there with your team and have the informal, face-to-face conversations that really matter.
- Reward your most engaged, energized staff with more of your time. Help them nurture their ideas, develop quarterly rocks with them (What Are Your Rocks?), and push them towards growing themselves and the business.
- Don’t embarrass people in front of their peers. Praise them in public and go behind closed doors to correct them in a constructive way.
- Don’t be everyone’s friend. A coach is not a friend, he’s a coach.
- Confront poor performances and/or bad attitudes quickly. Defend your team, and take decisive action if you must.
by The HLH Team
“The essense of the Kaizen strategy is that not a day should go by without some kind of improvement being made somewhere in the company.”
-Masaaki Imai
The majority of business leaders who try to embrace Lean will fail. They won’t fail because they aren’t motivated or committed, but because they weren’t able to change the culture of the workplace.
Process Improvement can’t come from the corner office, and it can’t be driven via email. It needs to percolate into how your team thinks and feels about their daily routines. That culture is a unique combination of philosophy and action called Kaizen.
What is Kaizen:
Kaizen is Japanese for “change for the better.” As a Lean tool, it focuses on creating a workplace culture wherein everyone, from Janitor to CEO, is empowered to think about small changes that they can make to eliminate waste and simplify overly complex processes.
It’s not about big changes. It’s about making sure everyone knows where the stapler is (and puts it back after). It’s about re-delegating so that a file passes across one less desk on its way to being finalized. It’s about changes so small you wouldn’t notice them, until they accumulate and become real profitability.
Philosophy from Action:
There are 2 elements to Kaizen – the goal oriented actions and the culture-building philosophy. You can’t implement a cultural shift, but you can get everyone involved in its daily actions. Those actions, over time, build the culture.
Kaizen isn’t abstract theory. It’s an apparatus of actions, each designed to make one small change. Here’s what a specific Kaizen action looks like:
- Set a goal to make a small improvement in one department
- Bring in people familiar with that department’s processes and access what improvement can be made
- Implement the improvements
- Review anything that’s working with the change
- Have a plan to make sure the improvement is long term sustainable
Repeat this action, department after department. Give ownership to the departmental team for identifying and fixing, and provide them them the resources to do it.
Don’t go for the giant complex changes. Improve slowly, step by step. 50 small improvements, made consistently over time, will make a larger cultural change than 5 big ones.
The actions will build the culture. People will start to look for improvements in their departments, and as the improvements accumulate and they start seeing real progress they’ll feel proud of what they’ve done. With that pride, they’ll want more, and that is the heart of the cultural shift you need.
The Power of a Collective:
It’s impossible for you, as leader, to identify, eliminate and protect against the waste that’s engrained into everyday processes across your company. It won’t work unless everyone has bought in, and a culture of Kaizen, developed from the actions you’re taking, becomes the true driving force.
The key to building the culture is consistency of action. If it’s sporadic, exhausting, forced, or half-ass, it won’t build culture. But once a culture of Kaizen has taken hold in your business, every team member will come to you with ideas to improve.
Further Reading (our first introduction to Kaizen): 3 Qualities of A Leader
by The HLH Team
“Start with good rules, lay out the rules, communicate with your employees, motivate them and reward them. If you do all these things effectively, you can’t miss.”
-Lee Iacocca
As we learn to be brutal with wastes like over-inventory and sending half empty trucks on deliveries, we need to remember that some of the worst kinds of waste happen right in front of us, day after day. Unhealthy and stress filled workplaces inevitably waste countless hours in lost productivity, sick days, and low morale.
Here are a few ways that you can both reduce waste and make happier employees at the same time:
Encourage Exercise:
The modern world seems built to condone sedentary lifestyles. Diabetes, obesity, smoking, and stress cost governments and businesses billions of dollars a year and cost the people afflicted with them much more.
The best solutions are also the simplest, and even a minimum of effort can help combat these patterns. You don’t need to be punitive; the best results come from positive encouragement and gentle nudging. As a good leader, you can help your team break out of unhealthy lifestyles for everyone’s benefit.
It’s as simple as encouraging everyone on your team to exercise 30 minutes a day. Whether that’s allowing a walk at lunch or recognizing people who choose the stairs over the elevator, it can go a long way in decreasing stress and increasing overall focus and productivity.
Work/Life Balance:
In the frenzied pace of the past 30 years, employees have often left their home life behind as they struggled to climb the ladder. Now, the results of that relentless unbalance are becoming clear. Stress reigns as a key detriment to health and wellness.
Younger employees are increasingly wanting to keep a balance. People are searching for a way to balance goals and priorities in and out of the workplace, and parents are wanting to spend more time with their growing kids.
Savvy employers are actively on-board. A healthy work-life balance makes us more creative, productive, and keeps us physically healthier. The broad array of benefits stem from the right mindset in the workplace.
Here are a few easy ways to encourage this:
- Stop emailing them at night, and ask all employees to do the same. Leave that time for them, and encourage them to put their smart phone away during those hours
- Be flexible with work hours. Be the boss who makes exceptions for piano recitals and birthday parties.
- If someone isn’t taking their holiday time, encourage them to. They may not think they need to, but they need to rest. Workaholism doesn’t help anyone in the long run.
Smoking as Waste:
It’s a personal decision to smoke, but a 2013 Ohio State Study quantified its real cost to private US businesses. The 2013 study concluded that, on average, smokers cost employers $5,816 a year. Based on business and industry, it ranges dramatically from $2,800 to over $10,000 a year.
Time is the biggest, and most obvious, waste directly from smoking. While other employees take scheduled 15 or 30 minute breaks, smokers will often either “tack on” an additional 10 minutes to existing breaks or take extra breaks just to go outside.
While this isn’t all smokers, it’s a strong enough majority to be quantified in the study. The average was just over $3,000 of cost annually per smoker just in wasted time, with an average of 4 extra 10 minute breaks per day.
Talk to your smokers honestly, and encourage them to quit. Don’t threaten them, work with them. If you crunch some numbers and determine that a monetary reward is worth it, then do that. But often just knowing you’re on their side will give them the will to quit on their own.
Studies Cited:
http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/23/5/428
by The HLH Team
Talent is the most mysterious of the wastes of business. It’s impossible to measure because unlike the others, it’s not about having too much of something. It’s about not having enough ideas and enthusiasm because the wrong person was hired or the right person wasn’t listened to.
The root of talent waste happens during the hiring process. Hiring the right person opens up new ideas and opportunities, while the wrong hire can waste time and effort while squandering much needed potential.
At hiring time, you get a stack of resumes and they all blur together. Some stick out, for better or worse. But how to tell the others apart? And how to find what you actually need? Some interview questions reveal more than others. The right questions can cut down on wasted talent by finding the right person to hire in the first place:
“You work for this company. I’m a big Lead, and I give you 20 seconds to pitch me. Go.”
This not only puts the pressure on, but shows how much homework they’ve done. How keen are they? How well can they improvise? Pay attention to the details of their response; do they recite your slogans back to you or have they shown the initiative to learn the nuances of your brand?
“Tell me about the best relationship you’ve had with a co-worker. What about the worst?”
Team dynamics are as important as employee skill sets. You’re looking for people who will forge productive and meaningful professional relationships. A synergistic team builds each other up and brings out the best in each other, while talent waste can stem from feeling unsupported or unvalued at work, halting ideas in their tracks.
It’s also illuminating to hear about their worst. Almost everyone has had a negative experience at one point, but the illuminating part is hearing how honest they are about it and how they speak of the other party.
“Let’s find something complex which you’re passionate about but I don’t know at all. In 2 minutes or less I need you to explain it to me so I understand.”
The topic is immaterial: the key here is that they can break it down quickly so that you understand it, and in an engaging way that draws you in. This is critical for evaluating communication and people skills. We all have passions, but those of us who can communicate and connect spread them to others.
If they’re working for you on complex problems you want them to be able to break it down quickly, but also communicate the value of it in a way that gets other people excited.
“I give you $50,000 to make your own business from scratch. What do you do with it?”
This question gives you the best insight if you give them some time. Let them think on it, perhaps even jot some notes. The best answers here are specific, so try not to cut them off.
You’re testing their creativity, their interests, and their entrepreneurial spirit. You’ll also get a taste of their business IQ by thinking about how successful their venture could be.
“I hire you, and a year from now you’re thinking that taking this job was the best thing you ever did. What happened in that year to make you think that?”
Ideally, you’re looking for someone who has already thought through what they want to contribute for the company. The more specific their answer is, the more ambitions they probably have.
This question will also inform you about their values and goals. A year from now, do they want to be focused on closing big commissions, or are they excited about developing an exciting new product? Consider if their answer team oriented or personal, and how it fits with your existing dynamic.
“Would you have asked any different questions, or done anything differently, in this interview?”
This may be uncomfortable, so be gentle. You’re trying to get at a number of things here. How assertive are they in speaking their mind to authority? Action-focused people with strong voices push achievement to the next level better than “yes men.”
You’re also giving them the chance to tell you the thing about themselves that they wished you asked about. It’s a bit like asking a cook his favourite recipe; you’re opening the conversation to a lot of things, but expect it to be a little rehearsed.
An anecdote as the last word. I interviewed someone years ago, and it was a good interview but she was up against very stiff competition. As we concluded I asked her if she had any questions for me, and she did: “Could you please tell me what I could have done better, so that if I don’t get it I can learn for next time?” I hired her on the spot.
