When it comes to starting a Lean journey for a business, one of the questions I hear the most is where do I begin? Like building anything, you have to start with a solid foundation. For a Lean journey, the foundation is built on an environment and culture that embraces change. Here are some important points to remember when starting your Lean journey.
Support from Leadership - The most important piece of the puzzle to embarking on a Lean journey is support from top leadership. The President, CEO, CFO and everyone at the top of the organization MUST embrace, practice and lead by example when it comes to the core fundamentals and principles of Lean. If employees don't see that a company's leaders support Lean this will tell employees that it's not important and don't need to practice it either. If a Lean journey does not have support from leadership then the Lean journey is doomed to fail.
What leaders need to do... Embody the belief of go see, ask why and show respect. Encourage employees to get involved and sincerely ask for their feedback. Help to break down walls between departments to eliminate the silo effect. Most importantly, allow and encourage employees to take on improvement projects then give them recognition for doing so. Leaders have to walk the walk and talk the talk.
No Blame Environment - My personal belief is that people come to work to do a good job, yes there are some bad seeds out there but hopefully you have a good hiring/employment practice that can weed these people out. A no blame environment works under the impression that people don't intend to make mistakes and that when a mistake or problem does happen it is the result of something deeper. By blaming people for mistakes we turn them away from having them help to uncover the root cause to why the mistake happened. You want people to feel that despite being part of an error, with their help we can fix the root so that the problem won't happen to anyone else. The obvious result of this is making the company as a whole better.
Trust - Allow people to try new ideas. Lean is defined as continuous improvement and if new ideas aren't embraced, no matter who they come from, then the tap of innovation will be turned off. In a business, if you continue to do the same you will continue to get the same results. With this message passed to everyone at Ideon Packaging from day-one, I recently had one of the newest and youngest members of my production team come to me with an idea to increase capacity by 10-20%. The ideas are there and the people who are doing the work have them, so trust them to run with it. What's the worst that could happen? You go back to the old way? Not a big deal in my books. All I know, is that if you don't try, you'll never know.
Don't let failure stop you - Do you remember the Nike commercial with Michael Jordan about how has failed over and over again in his career, and that's why he succeeds? I do, it's part of my Lean/FITT 101 presentation I give to new employees. Or how about the Honda video on how they failed when they brought their engines to the racing world, only to become the sole engine supplier to the IRL. Check both of these out on Youtube. Even if you haven't seen these videos the message is the same, don't let failure stop you or slow you down. Rather, learn and reflect on your mistakes, use them to get better and try again.
Make it part of your everyday - Lean can not be something you dabble in, it needs to become part of your everyday work. The entire company needs to be aware and understand what Lean is. Regular training and communication to all employees is a must. Constantly update staff on your Lean strategy, completed projects, savings achieved and new projects on the go. Don't hide anything.
Make Lean your own - One of the first things we did at Ideon Packaging was to give our Lean Journey a name, we call it FITT. FITT stand for Finding Innovation Through Teamwork. We had a company wide naming contest where everyone could submit as many names as they could come up with, then at one of our Town Hall meetings (whole company attends) we voted on all the names and FITT won. Lean as a term has been misused by many companies, and if not explained well enough people will think that Lean equals losing their jobs, which is not what Lean is fundamentally about at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment