Critical Thinking Exercises for Leadership – Volume 10 – Exercises 46-50 By Mark Preston
Mark Preston
Lean Six Sigma Master, Author, Keynote Speaker, and Southern Sensei - Passionate about improving People, Processes, and Products. Continue: "Living Engaged Attitude Now"
Wisdom - See Failure as Opportunity!
I have a list of 75 critical thinking exercises, and I will be discussing 5 every 2 weeks.
If you missed the first 45 exercises, please review my previous Lean Applications newsletters.
The First 45 Exercises:
1. Shadow / Emulate Lean Thinkers
2. What’s on Your Daily Leadership To-Do List?
3. Your Company Standards Should Be documented and clear to all team members.
4. Read Across (Yokoten)
5. See Flow
6. Seeing Waste
7. Distinguishing Normal
8. Who-What–When-Where-Why-How
9. Quick Response
10. The 4-step training process.
11. Audit Always
12. Standardize Solutions
13. Designate Early Warning Signals
14. Distinguish Between Human and Machine Work
15. Adopt JIT (Just in Time)
16. Know What’s Value Added
17. Don’t Let Problems Hide Behind Inventory
18. Respond to Reality
19. Flow Materials and Information in a pull processing system
20. Give Your Process a Heartbeat
21. Have a Flexible Worksite
22. Invest in Team Members
23. Never Implement Temporary Solutions
24. Mirror Single Piece Flow
25. Cost Shadows Motion
26. Time is a Powerful Measure
27. Make Problems Visible Immediately
28. Step Back from the Screens
29. Never Fear Failure
30. Delegate Authority to the Worksite
31. Strive for Elegantly Simple
32. Develop People for Trustworthiness
33. Set Standards
34. Recognize and Resolve
35. Foster a “Trusty” Group.
36. Establish Improvement Processes
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37. Don’t Allow Dropouts
38. Awaken Motivation
39. Recognize the Benefits of Kaizen
40. Provide Goals
41. Produce only Quality
42. Bury “Not Invented Here”
43. Ask the right questions
44. Standardize Work
45. Leaders are Teachers
Let’s continue to understand Critical Thinking Exercises 46-50.
46. Push Away Success
Leaders should reinforce successful activities (“push away” success). I believe that leaders are only as good as the team that they lead. Their goal should be to build a solid team that outshines all other teams in the organization through their problem-solving abilities and actions. It should never be about your success but about your team’s success. Most people are remembered after death, not by their success, but by how they helped their team grow and succeed. Many times, we focus on what went wrong versus what the team did right. There must be a balance, or the team will see you as a bad policeman that only wants to find fault. Good Policemen (Leaders), realize that in most cases, it is not the team members fault but rather the process was broken, the communication was not clear, and or the team was not given the right tools or environment to succeed. ????
What are you doing as a leader to set your team up for success?
47. Understand Failure
Failure is a normal and a temporary condition that will occur again and again in your organization. There are many lean tools that are structured to understand failure and eliminate failure. All of these tools start with Data collection. In God I trust, all others bring Data! Assumptions often lead to band aids and not elimination of root causes. Some of these tools include
These are just a few of the lean tools used to understand failure and to eliminate it. ?
What lean tools is your team using to understand failure?
48. Reframe Your Concept of Failure
The only true and permanent failure is when your organization ceases to improve. A characteristic of a true leader is a leader that sees failure as opportunity. We all want to be winners but if we always won, what drive would we have to reach our potential? If you walk around a company and see that the metrics are all green, or achieving goals, then that should be a bigger concern to you. Without stretch goals, we are not forced to improve. Motivating, celebrating, and cheerleading your team must be a critical part of a leader’s job but challenging and setting goals to succeed from failure makes your team stronger. If you start achieving your goals on a regular basis, then consider changing them to make your team stronger. ?
Where is your team failing, or taking advantage of opportunities to become stronger?
?49. Work Toward Excellence
Never settle or become satisfied with good. One of my favorite books is by Jim Collins, “Good to Great”. Jim discusses how the best companies that become bigger and more profitable never settle for good enough. It is very difficult to reach that next plateau of great because changes continue, and teams move on. Many companies do not see the investments they make in becoming great as a competitive advantage. They only see the current or “Now” return on investment. Change never stops and this is a main reason that we should continually work towards Excellence or in becoming great. If you do not change, your competitor will, and they will reap the rewards of your market share. An example of how changes in technology can take you to excellence was a project that I worked on that used Augmented Reality to teach lean and to do Kaizen events in a virtual world with people in countries all over the world. We held Kaizen events with team members in multiple countries, all in a virtual classroom. We were able to write on virtual sticky notes and create a process map together in a virtual classroom. The company is called Gemba out of London. Link: thegemba.com. Also, the Association of Manufacturing Excellence - AME Lean Sensei will help you achieve excellence and give you resources to achieve the AME Excellence Award. (Recognition of Excellence) ?
What are you doing to invest in Excellence?
50. Level Your Flow
If your flow of products, designs, services or people isn’t level, you’re likely experiencing preventable wastes. Bottlenecks are constraints that limit flow. Make sure when you design visual or virtual systems, to see current and future state flow, that you can see the visuals in a flow orientation. Having a Process Flow map first is critical when designing and seeing flow. As mentioned before, if you take a chain and place it on a table and you push the chain, the chain bunches up in different places. If you pull the chain on the table, there is no bunching up. Flow must be associated with pull, not push. Kanban helps level flow by eliminating gaps in the chain when pulled. When you realize that you have capacity constraints within the chain, you can use kanban as extra chain links to keep the flow level. Kanban is the Japanese word for card, a calculated visual signal that authorizes the next material or product to be produced. It allows for flexibility in keeping things flowing through pull triggers. Kanban is a calculated system that often fails because teams think that you only calculate Kanban quantities once. They wonder why Kanban has failed over time without realizing that customer demand or pull has changed over time. Kanban calculations must be routine and systematic to keep the flow level and to prevent build ups of inventory or shortages in the chain. ?
Is your flow bunched up because of “Push”, or is your flow leveled out with “Pull” systems in place?
I hope these critical thinking exercises have helped you exercise your mind as a leader. In the next article, I will be discussing the next 5 Critical Thinking Exercises of the 75. These include – 51. Rotate within the Production Cell, 52. Rotate Leaders, 53. Leaders are like Pool Sharks, 54. Never Have Mediocre People, 55. Input + Method = Output.?
How can I help you?
I hope you enjoyed the article, and it brought a smile to your face. Please comment and share, I would like to hear your thoughts. Have a great week! Please reach out if you need help developing leadership and engagement at your company.
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Mark Preston