Embark on a Journey to Servant Leadership

In 2008 I joined the newly formed Lean team at Royal Philips, which was tasked with deploying the ‘Simply Philips Operating System’, and the team started its formation phase with a two-week-long ‘Kaikaku experience’ to Japan. It was an eye-opening visit in which we spent the first week establishing the fundamentals of the operating system and our team values, and the second week visiting world-class Lean organisations. It was during this visit that I had the first realisation that my 20 years of experience in industry, with more than 15 years of practising Lean, had been based upon a considerable misunderstanding of what Lean really is.

As an engineer, I’d enthusiastically embraced the Lean and Six Sigma toolkit and had experienced great results in the projects that I’d run, which had been enthusiastically received by senior management, and the teams that I’d been part of had been considered to have been highly successful in solving some of our largest problems. However, I’d always wondered why the dramatic improvements in the focus area of the project had not always translated into overall improvements in the value stream, or why the results of the improvements had diminished over time. As I saw more of how those best practice companies had embedded Lean into the very fabric of their organisation, the proverbial scales started to fall from my eyes.

This would become even clearer over the next few years, as I gathered more evidence of how the?behavioural and system elements of Lean were far more important than the tools themselves.

Studies by Womack, Jones and others resulted in the transfer of the Toyota Production System (TPS) into the Western world through the many books, articles and other publications released since the late 1980s and, as an outcome of this, the term Lean was coined by John Krafcik, who was a graduate student at MIT working for Lean Enterprise Institute founder Jim Womack on the research into The Machine That Changed the World.

The scientific approaches of the West, developed by the likes of Taylor, Shewhart, Deming et al, were adopted by the Japanese but merged with their culture, developing into an operating system built around a philosophy of people-centric problem solving. Unfortunately, as Lean was welcomed into Western practices, it was the toolkit that was readily embraced, whilst the philosophy behind its success was mostly ignored.

This isn’t surprising, as the philosophical elements of Lean and its implications for leadership are subtle and much less obvious than the explicit engineer-friendly toolkit, and it took me many years to fully understand what Living Lean really means, and the importance of the intangible behavioural aspects of a Lean operating system, as opposed to the concrete tools that can be used with a misleading sense of confidence.

While we were on the Japanese Kaikaku experience, the team coined the slogan for Simply Philips:

Simple systems; Smart behaviours

Those ‘smart behaviours’ are the foundation of the Next Generation Lean Leader training course, which I am running in conjunction with True North Excellence (19th and 20th November in Coventry, UK) in which I share how being a Lean Leader is about developing the right behaviours to ensure that we remove the barriers to our success, those things that cause delays, frustration and excessive working hours, and ultimately make the difference between world-class performance for our customers and the mediocre outcomes that the leadership practices of many organisations deliver.

The training acts as a guide to taking control of both your professional and personal lives, providing you with an alternative to the?status quo and a means by which you can rise above the daily grind of fire-fighting.

In the spirit of my third book, it's about:

Changing how you lead, not who you are.

The training is designed to guide Leaders through the application of the 5 foundations of People-Centric Lean Leadership:

1. Leadership Philosophy & Culture

A leader has an obligation to enable the vision, mission, objectives and values of the organisation. To do this they must role model the expected behaviours and drive the execution of the business strategy, delivering:

• A long-term, purposeful, vision.
• Hoshin Kanri to drive focussed execution.
• An effective Kaizen Event Planning Process.
• An organisational structure properly designed and executed upon.

2. Activist Leadership

Creating and maintaining the habits of successful Lean leadership requires a leader who generates a level of stability that enables the freedom to innovate. It's essentially a dichotomy between utilising standards to provide predictability and consistency, which in turn frees up time for people to be creative.

The leader must enable and empower their people, coaching them to become autonomous in how they deliver their results, and to do so they need to have in place:

• Leader Standard Work driving the right behaviours and support to the team members.
• Kamishibai (layered process audits) ensuring that problems are uncovered and solved.
• Kata coaching to develop the problem solving skills of the team members.

3. Workplace Excellence

A visual workplace, that immediately displays the performance status, is crucial and this must be created by having both the right measures of performance and high visuality.

To achieve this, the leader must ensure that:

• 5S is making the workplace highly effective and visual.
• There is a visual environment, with the right metrics, ensuring that performance is immediately clear.

4. Daily Management & Problem Solving

One of the core responsibilities of a Leader is to ensure that the business is operating effectively and delivering its customers' requirements on-time, at the right quality and cost. They must also ensure, first and foremost, that their people are safe and engaged. When there are problems, they must ensure that the teams can solve those problems rapidly and sustainably, and to make this happen requires:

• Daily Management driving performance.
• Using data and metrics to manage the performance.
• Rapid Problem Solving in place, with the right support and escalation in place to quickly respond.
• Teams that are ‘making the news’, not reporting it.

5. Creating the Kaizen Culture

A Kaizen Culture is something that one will observe in any excellent organisation. It is a culture in which everyone has the authority and the expectation to solve problems and improve their processes every day.

The Leader must therefore promote the following:

• A Kaizen culture involving everyone in solving everyday problems and implementing improvements.
• Both safety and process issues are rapidly resolved.
• Knowledge sharing drives rapid adoption.
• Leading an army of problem solvers.

If this is of interest, please join us at the Next Generation Lean Leader training course, which I'll be teaching and coaching on the 19th and 20th November in Coventry, UK.

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