WLEI - Lean Enterprise Institute’s Podcast

January 27, 2020

Featuring: Deborah McGee and Bryant Sanders

As this series continues to explore the implications and dynamic of “coaching” in a business environment, Bryant Sanders models the mindset and techniques for coaching work improvement to develop people. Bryant draws on 26 years Toyota experience to facilitate his coaching techniques with a team in the field leading to a dramatic improvement in the work. He walks us through the story from deciding where to focus, to earning the team’s trust, facilitating reflection solidifying the what and the why and then leveraging one another’s strengths to upskill the team and eliminate difficulty and waste in the work. An excellent study in masterful coaching on the floor where the work happens.

We invite your thoughts and experiences about coaching and being coached: email your stories! [email protected]

Related Articles/ content:

·       The Hard Work of Making Hard Work Easier (article)

·       Job Breakdown Sheet (pdf)

·       Making Hard Work Easier (article)

Too often, a change in executive leadership can bring a lean transformation to a grinding halt.  But that has not been the case at Lynn Community Health Center (LCHC).

Within two years of the start of their lean journey, LCHC CEO Lori Abrams Berry announced her intention to retire. The immediate reaction from the LCHC community was concern that her departure would impact the progress made on advancing lean thinking and practice with improved outcomes and engagement of its team members. Instead, the impending CEO transition was embraced as a challenge, a gap to tackle.  Learn how LCHC approached this executive leadership transition to ensure the continuity of their lean transformation. 

• John Shook’s favorite conference keynote of all time

Josh Howell shares his decade-end reflections, focusing on why he left Starbucks in 2013. His reasons may surprise you. He also interrogates the question, “If a company discontinues a formal lean initiative, or lean program, or lean team, does that mean its lean implementation has failed?” 

Pat Greco In 2011, Dr. Pat Greco began as the superintendent of the Menomonee Falls School District in Wisconsin. She faced no shortage of problems: a suspension rate seven times higher than the state average, performance gaps across income and race, cost overruns, and a failure to meet performance goals defined under the No Child Left Behind Act among others. Not to mention a new administration was upending collective bargaining for public sector employees instilling fear within the teachers she was setting out to lead. By the end of her tenure she had led the school district to rank as one of the country’s best. She did so primarily through PDCA cycles in the classroom between teachers and students, as well as between management and the board of education.

December 23, 2019

Featuring: Deborah McGee and Jeff Smith

As this series continues to explore the implications and dynamic of “coaching” in a business environment, Jeff Smith reveals the importance of the learning environment for impactful coaching. Jeff draws on 22 years experience within the Toyota Production System and recalls his coaching experience at New United Motor, and later as a coach in many organizations. We talk about coaching in the front office as well as shop floor, engaging with problems using A3 thinking, and mechanisms to signal abnormal conditions inherently perfect for effective coaching moments.

We invite your thoughts and experiences about coaching and being coached: email your stories! [email protected]

Related Articles/ content:

• Learning to Help Anna Elevate Her Game(article)

In his new book Dying for A Paycheck, Stanford University Graduate School of Business Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer argues that there is an overwhelmingly compelling case to be made that the workplace profoundly affects human health and wellbeing, and that these psychosocial stressors have gotten worse in recent years. His book vividly details how the costs are enormous to both individuals and to companies and to society. He believes that If we're going to address this, we need to see the problem and its enormous scope. In this podcast Pfeffer shares thoughts with LEI editor Tom Ehrenfeld on potential countermeasures to this problem. 

Some key points:

 Good work starts with good job design. “The companies that are really going to solve the problem of unsafe work, just as they've done for physical safety, have to begin by thinking about every aspect of the job and job design. And that's where I think there is a great deal of compatibility between the principles of Lean and what I'm talking about. This begins with basically redesigning the work, and eliminating the stuff that is harmful, unnecessary, and stressful.”

Lean principles can help transform the design of work for more humane practice. “We have to be willing to redesign the psychosocial aspects of work if we're going to make it psychologically healthier and less stressful,” says Pfeffer. “Just as we've redesigned the physical equipment to make work environments safer, we have to be willing to redesign the psychosocial aspects of work if we're going to make it psychologically healthier and less stressful.

Tackling this problem requires acknowledging toxic work as a challenge to address. “I think we need to make human life and human wellbeing at least as important as economic outcomes. What does it profit us to have a fabulously high GDP if life expectancy is diminishing? What does it profit us as a society to have high stock market with a suicide rate that's up 70% in the last eight or nine years with widespread depression? We need a much broader definition of what success looks like.”

Dr. Lynn Kelley was hired by Union Pacific to lead the introduction of the “UP Way” company-wide. The UP Way at that time consisted of a select few lean practices that the company had decided were foundational for their operations. In this conversation, Dr. Kelley shares how her Ph.D in Research and Evaluations informed the unique approach taken for the implementation of the UP Way.

The "Playbook" of Sustaining Change on the Lean Post

CI Sustainment: A Hiding Place for Complexity on the Lean Post

How do we create more Lean Thinkers? That is the problem we address in today’s podcast with Matt Lovejoy, Chairman of Lovejoy Industries and LEI board member. Matt - along with former LEI executive, John O’Donnell – is spearheading a new initiative: the James P Womack Scholarship and Philanthropy Fund.

The fund provides scholarships to students to fund hands-on problem-solving experience at charity organizations under the guidance of an LEI coach. The fund’s first partnership is with Oakland University in Michigan. Two of its star students, Monisha Vasudeva and Sagar Bajaj,  are learning and doing kaizen at Humble Design, a charity that ‘furnishes homes for families transitioning from homelessness.’

The problem they’re helping Humble Design solve is capacity. Currently, Humble Design is able to furnish homes for 3 families every week, but there is demand for 30. That’s a gap of 27 families they can help transition from homelessness every week. There are few more important problems worth solving! 

You can read about the progress the students have already made in a recently published article.

You can learn more about the James P Womack Scholarship and Philanthropy Fund at JPWFund.org, including how to donate and partner.

For more, check out our website.

Join my conversation with Art Smalley as he walks us through two models for situational leadership and coaching. Hersey, Blanchard & Johnson’s examination of leadership (and coaching) styles relative to learner (and performer’s) behavior, from the book Management of Organizational Behavior, and The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition.

Art adds context and color by weaving in stories from parenthood, his years of experience at Toyota, and relates the content to his work with Four Types of Problems. Together, we explore the thresholds of performers at all levels as a way to help assess and engage the right coaching approach for the situation.

Please join our conversation by emailing your thoughts and questions to [email protected]

Related Articles/ content:

• Four Types of Problems (book)

Many lean thinkers find the traditional accounting reporting completely out of alignment with the new lean management system. Part of PDCA is checking outcomes to help identify next steps, but if the financial language of business is not reliable to provide good information for evaluation and decision making, sustainment of good experiments is at risk. Is there a better way? Yes, according to the five panelists on this week’s podcast.

Additional Articles:

• How lean accounting promotes lean in the organization