75 Critical Thought Exercises for Lean Leadership: Part II

Organizational change starts at the top. If your goals are to establish a lean culture in your organization, your job as a leader is to begin thinking critically about affecting change. While you're unlikely to spark a revolution overnight, adopting systemic improvement can revolutionize your company’s customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and product quality.

For your consideration, I want to present 25 additional critical thought exercises every leader should undertake:

26. Time is a Powerful Measure

Time is the most powerful part of the equation when it comes to your company’s costs. What are your customers paying for?

27. Make Problems Visible Immediately

Building in the ability to isolate problems quickly, stop production, and apply a permanent fix is known as “abnormality control.”

28. Step Back from the Screens

While visual management systems are great, Genchi Gebutsu stated that managing by charts and grafts does not respect the operator or importance of management. View the worksite and process through your own eyes.

29. Never Fear Failure

Lexus said it best with their first motto, “the relentless pursuit of perfection.” Build your culture around the idea of trying, failing, and then trying again.

30. Delegate Authority to the Worksite

In a perfect just-in-time (JIT) system, authority is delegated to the worksite. However, you must first cultivate a “nervous system” at the worksite that’s prepared to respond to problems, using well-defined management protocols.

31. Strive for Elegantly Simple

Your processes should maximize operational ability by striving for the perfect blend of elegance and simplicity.

32. Train People for Trustworthiness

Managers should strive to cultivate teams that can be trusted. Trustworthy teams accept responsibility for the management, production, and outputs of a worksite.

33. Set Standards

Managers should not reinforce standards. They should set the bar high, and reinforce junior leadership whose role revolves around maintaining the standards.

34. Recognize and Resolve

Applying permanent resolutions to problems strengthens your organization, while temporary fixes will do nothing but weaken your company.

35. Foster a “Trusty” Group

In my experience, there are five key actions management should take in order to improve their employee’s ownership:

• Ensure everyone understands the direction of “true north,” and how to move toward it.
• Achieve results as a team, and reward efforts as a team.
• Foster each employee’s unique abilities and talents, and ensure these skills are fully applied.
• Create an environment without negativity, which is most conducive to Kaizen.
• Treat the worksite as a laboratory for the pursuit of perfection.

36. Establish Improvement Processes

You should standardize your processes to include the following aspects:

• Set clear targets
• Allow teams to work independently
• Support only when it’s necessary
• Allow your team to succeed with invisible support
• Evaluate and suggest potential improvements

37. Don’t Allow Dropouts

Ensure that every employee in the enterprise is engaged, and establish a culture where every member of the team is an active participant.

38. Awaken Motivation

A true culture of systemic improvement, or kaizen, will awaken your team’s motivation.

39. Recognize the Benefits of Kaizen

A kaizen organization will increase individual associate’s self-worth, and is often associated with feelings of excitement and fulfilment.

40. Provide Goals

You’ll likely find that while individual goals lead to self-serving actions, team goals cause each team member to find motivation to serve their team members.

41. Produce Only Quality

Every employee should shoulder the responsibility of only producing quality, and ensuring production never ceases.

42. Bury “Not Invented Here”

In a kaizen culture, ideas are shared, and the highest goal is to achieve and apply permanent solutions. Train your employees to find systemic roots of problems, and identify possibilities for non-quality products.

43. Ask the Right Questions

One of the most important duties of managers is to ask questions that lead to the right answers and the right types of thinking.

44. Standardize Work

Standardization leads to repeatability and predictability.

45. Leaders are Teachers

Managers should never cease to understand the people they’re charged with leading.

46. Push Away Success

Leaders should reinforce successful activities (“push away” success), and shield the team from failure by “pulling” the failure inside.

47. Understand Failure

Failure is a normal and temporary condition that will occur again in your organization.

48. Reframe Your Concept of Failure

The only true and permanent failure is when your organization ceases to improve.

48. Work Towards TPS

Toyota’s production system yields positive methods, quality, skills, techniques, and a trustworthy group of people.

50. Level Your Flow

If your flow of products, designs, services or people isn’t level, you’re likely experiencing preventable wastes.

Stay tuned for Part 3, which includes 25 more critical thought exercises for lean leaders!