The Joy of Lean
Steven Daniel Bonacorsi ??
Steven Bonacorsi ?? President of the International Standard for Lean Six Sigma (ISLSS)?, ?? Certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, ?? Lean Six Sigma Group, Owner PMP, MBA, ???? MS-CIS, Agilest, Management Consultant
Introducing a short excerpt from The Joy of Lean.
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Has your organization tried Lean already? If so, you surely see and feel the Joy of Lean in your workplace now, right?
Don’t worry. If you’re not quite to joy yet, you’re not alone.
As it attracts more and more attention as a successful business philosophy that can improve results in any type of organization, Lean has still sometimes been misunderstood as a method for just cutting expenses. The useful ideas of eliminating waste and driving greater efficiency can pick up a negative spin associated with perceptions of job cuts, employees doing more with less, and managers squeezing more productivity from each person. None of that sounds very joyful.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. This book will show leaders how to cultivate a positive Lean Culture of excellence that creates value for customers, profitable growth for businesses, sustainable cost reduction, and fulfilling jobs for employees. As we proceed, we’ll continually demonstrate how leadership plays a critical role in establishing and sustaining a Lean Culture.
Lean Culture means empowerment.
Lean Culture means better value for the customer.
Lean Culture means better performance for the organization.
Lean Culture means a more engaging, rewarding, and yes, even joyful role for each employee.
And Lean Culture provides the competitive advantages that a team needs to survive and grow.
When you implement Lean to create a purposeful culture of engagement, your Lean Culture will become a sustainable source of exceptional results.
We call the approach Lean Engaged Team Performance (Lean ETP), and it’s about much more than just streamlining processes. It’s a purposeful combination of value innovation, process excellence, performance measures, team goals, collaborative norms, organizational structure, enabling technology, and most of all, visionary leadership. It’s hard to achieve and even harder to sustain, but it’s worth the journey!
As we’ll see as we proceed, culture change comes from purposefully changing everything together—processes, customer focus, collaborative norms, measures, organization, goals, technology, skill, capabilities, and again most of all, leadership. That greater strategy is illustrated below:
A Lean Culture of Engaged Team Performance aligns processes, measures, goals, norms, standards, and organization with customer needs. In order to attain and sustain that alignment, you have to be willing to purposefully change all of those things in concert.
But is employee engagement at the end of the rainbow for you? Or are you trying to get to “joy”?
Rachelle Gagnon of Assumption Life in Canada says, “You won’t treat your customers any better than you treat your employees.” Her vision doesn’t stop at engagement, either. She explains, “Engaging your employees is the buzzword now, but engagement won’t be enough in the future. We’re already working on inspiring our employees.”
Recognized as one of the top small and medium sized employers in Canada by Progress 101 and Aon Hewitt, Assumption Life compares the spectrum of employee engagement to the pyramid of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, with an Engagement Continuum that begins at satisfaction and aspires to inspiration.
Like Gagnon, I believe that simply getting engagement by meeting esteem needs, for example through recognition, won’t be enough in the future, and I foresee that self-actualized employees will provide a deep and sustainable competitive advantage for their companies in the long term.
I also believe that the self-actualization at the top of Maslow’s pyramid could also be called joy! I hope that you, too, can experience the joy of a Lean Culture of Engaged Team Performance, but you should also recognize that it’s a journey, not a destination. You’re either improving or you’re getting worse, so the work of transforming and sustaining a Lean Culture is never completely done.
Enjoy the journey!
Managing Partner
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About the Author:
As the Managing Partner for Implementation Partners LLC, Dodd Starbird leads change efforts that consistently achieve exceptional results for clients. Implementation Partners exists to inspire and enable every leader to transform their organizations by giving every employee a chance to contribute their best work on an engaged, sustainable, winning team. Dodd is the author of two business books, The Joy of Lean (ASQ Quality Press, 2016) and Building Engaged Team Performance (McGraw-Hill, 2010).
Join the Lean Six Sigma Group Discussion: Feel “The Joy of Lean” This Holiday Season
Customer Experience Rockstar ?? | CX Evangelist @ PEGA ?? | Self appointed 'Chief Content Officer' ?? | International Keynote Speaker ?? |
7 年Merry Christmas Steven Bonacorsi
Experienced large enterprise CFO with Public and Private Equity experience | Lean Mindset | Significant Value Creation
7 年Perfect stocking stuffer for that Lean loved one!
Dodd Starbird, Managing Partner at Implementation Partners, Thought Leader in Lean Engaged Team Performance
7 年Thanks, Ray Martineau - hope you enjoy the book.
Dodd Starbird, Managing Partner at Implementation Partners, Thought Leader in Lean Engaged Team Performance
7 年Thanks, Ben Marguglio - it's been a great journey, and it's been fun to write about experiences with our great clients. Hope you enjoy the book.