Daily Kaizen

This week I got a great learning lesson from an operations manager about creating an environment receptive to change.  As I transition into my new role of supporting our Delivery System I am taking the time to go to the gemba and spend time in several of our medical clinics.  This is part of my own development plan where I am trying to spend more time understanding the current situation before I jump into action.  Lets just say my high levels of energy can often create a negative first impression so I am trying to be intentional about how I approach new work so I don’t frustrate those I work with.

So back to my learning lesson.  I ran into a manager I have known since I was an intern who I have great deal of respect for and I asked him if he would mind me spending some time with him.  This would not be the first time, I spent a couple of days shadowing him a couple of years back prior to knowing anything about Lean.  I walked away from that experience very impressed with his leadership style.  He reminded me a lot of my father.  One of those managers that knew how to perform every process he asked others to perform.  A managers that walked the operation every day, knew all his people really well and it was clear they loved him for it. 

Walking the clinic this last week it was clear that my impressions a few years back were still valid.  Here was a natural Lean manager without the training.  Over the last couple of years this manager had been promoted and now oversee six clinics, but what was clear is that he still has been able to hold the connection with the frontline even though he is now higher up in the organization.  Every person we ran into during the visit had a huge smile on their face when they saw him coming down the hallway.  As we walked down the clinic hallways he stopped to straighten up the physical environment, chat with frontline leaders and to point out the improvements teams had made.  Half of these actions I am not even shore he was aware that he was taking.  It was just part of who he is as a leader. 

We had a chance to sit down and talk about his philosophy of leadership and he shared his approach to bringing about effective change.  I would sum this approach up as being focused on “the small things” that add up to big change.  He told story after story about how he turned around frustrated teams and employees and got them re-focused and re-engaged through many small actions that added up over time.  A humbleness, an attention to detail, showing real interest in people’s work and people’s lives, making sure that celebration takes place everyday, etc.  These are the things that have made him successful as a leader.  He told a story about spending two days learning a front line teams process so that he could help them problem solve after they were beat up by other teams.  He told another story about buying Christmas trees for a clinic and sneaking them in and setting them up during the weekend after they were told by the organization that Christmas trees were not allowed. 

I have reflected a lot over the last few days about what I learned.  This manager practices a type of leadership I most respect, but in many ways I am far from.  I get bored with the details, forget to recongize the good work people do on my behalf and am often over zealous, inpatient and forget about the small things that go a long way.  The people stuff.  While it is my job to teach others I am sure grateful there are others like this manager I can learn from.

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We are far enough now along our Lean journey that throughout the organization managers and teams are in the process of experimenting with Visual systems.  A year ago a relatively small number of teams were actively in the process of standardizing their work and making it visual.  Now I would be willing to guess that more teams in the organization are participating then are not.  The exciting news is that most of this work is being driven through self initiation and bottom up.  Managers have seen their peers getting attention and having success and have decided to jump in themselves.  Additionally, many teams have begun to organize “share fairs” and other network/learning events in order to share learnings.  The benefits of which are far greater then just learning about the tools as a higher level of cross-functionality is being created. 

As you can imagine there is a high level of variation in how these systems are being used.  Many systems are being used to simply collect data or share communications while others are transforming the way that a team works and gets results.  This level of variation is quite acceptable and is just part of the learning process.  Over time the organization will need to provide a greater level of education and support so that all teams have some formal training and coaching, but in the mean time, most managers are doing a great job of figuring it out with just support from internal benchmarking or a senior leader that has had some training.  The spirit of learning that is currently in process should not be underestimated.

Being one of the few Lean consultants in the organization I get a lot of pull from managers to help coach them on their visual systems.  I thought it might be useful to share some of the points I often make in the gemba:

• The visual system should always help the team that is using it improve their work.  Whether it is a frontline team or a management team the information provide by the system should drive improvement action or it is simply waste.  I often find managers that are asking teams to fill data into a visual management board, but no action is every taken from the data.  This will lead to dis-engagement of the team and action needs to be taken to improve the system.
• Visual systems should be used to display standards and variation from standards so actions can be taken.  Often when I work with teams they struggle with this, because they don’t have standards in place or if they do there is no adherence to those standards.  When this happens I think its a great opportunity to help the team identify and put standards in place. 
• Teams need to be given time to PDCA their systems.  The first system put in place is always wrong and it takes time to get it right. 
• Early in the process teams often try to make visual systems comprehensive to reflect all of the work that they do.  This leads to a high level of complexity and the team ends up getting frustrated with the process.  I think it is better for teams to start small and keep it simple.  Pick one process and make it visible.  PDCA the visual system a couple of times until it works and then add another process.  The best visual systems have gone through dozens of iterations of improvement. 
• At first, having a cadence for checking is essential.  If the manager and the manager of the manager don’t take the time to come often to check the visuals and to provide feedback to the team it is unlikely that the visual system will be effective.  Teams will get caught up in the problems of the day and the visual will be put aside.  Often it takes months of reinforcement before a team will begin to own the visual as their own. 
• Finally, visuals need to be built bottom up to be effective.  I have seen many examples of senior leaders trying to build visual systems and then trying to cascade them down to the front line level.  While I think it is great that senior leaders put together their own systems and learn the process of visual management it is essential that over time they adjust their systems to support the teams where value added work is taking place as opposed to the other way around.   

If some of you readers have other suggestions please jump in and share.  I hope this was helpful.

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