Lean Coaching and Lean Transformation

“Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It’s helping them to learn rather than teaching them.” - Tim Gallwey, author of the Inner Game

ICF defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership.

Lean Coaching is about helping people become better lean thinkers and practitioners.

Lean Coaching is helpful for leaders and the workforce. Transformation to a lean management system takes significant time and practice. Accordingly, Lean Coaching consist of regular and timely interactions to develop continuous improvement skills and to enable a lean management system.

The lean coach?encourages?the person being coached to consider if their ideas and impressions are fact-based.?By applying a situational yet consistently respectful and challenging guidance, the lean coach elevates?the knowledge and skill of an organization’s people while ensuring its goals and objectives are met.

The lean coach creates the conditions for people-whether managers or line workers—to learn and develop the capability to do their work more effectively, at ever-higher quality and in a way that's more personally rewarding. By guiding?people?to view their work—to see—as lean thinkers?and take ownership?of improvement—to ask why—as lean practitioners, the coach?inspires?them to?do their best work and?still?strive to do better.?Simultaneously, the coach shares lean tools and techniques that their client can use to?improve their work process

Through coaching,?the learner?gains a significant level of autonomy over how to do and improve their?work.?As such,?lean?coaching is rooted in the Gemba with?Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) at its core.??

Through helping others develop the problem-solving capability required for implementing lean tools and principles and building a company culture of continuous performance improvement.

In a Lean Coaching relationship, the coach will ask questions that stimulate critical thinking skills and reinforce systematic approaches for improving how leaders lead and how work is done.

Lean coaches ask questions that typically follow a sequence of:

1. What is the goal or target condition we are trying to achieve?

2. What is the current level of performance?

3. What is keeping us from achieving the target?

4. What improvement ideas can be tested and what results would we expect?

5. When will we know if the test was successful?

In a lean management system, leaders must learn how to become lean coaches. This is a different way of leading and managing. Lean leaders must transition away from directing people in how to address and fix problems. Instead, leaders must become lean coaches and develop the workforce to become skilled problem solvers following systematic approaches. Thus, leaders need practice and coaching so they can develop into effective Lean Coaches.

Lean coaching may begin with scheduled coaching sessions with one-on-one or group coaching. Over time, it will become integrated into regular daily interactions, both schedule and impromptu.

The coach’s role is to use open questioning to help the coachee become more aware of what he or she knows and needs to know. The coach prompts the person being coached to?consider if his or her ideas and impressions are based on fact.

Techniques that support a lean management approach to coaching include:

1. Applying the scientific method of plan-do-check-act (PDCA) to a coaching cycle.
2. Using questions to help the person being coached grasp the situation around the problem.
3. Assessing the coachee’s problem-solving capability without taking over the responsibility for solving the problem.
4. Observing and providing feedback without interpretation.

How Do People Benefit from Lean Coaching?

With Lean Coaching, leaders develop the leadership skills they need to become effective lean leaders.

Without coaching, leaders struggle to make the behavioral changes and routines necessary for a lean management system to be effective. When Lean Coaching is adopted, leaders get timely support and reinforcement to continue practicing and refining the competencies required to succeed. Leaders learn how to follow a pattern of asking powerful questions that engage and empower employees to systematically eliminate waste and improve customer value.

Lean Coach ensures the people will follow the 5 Principles of Lean.

1. Specify value from the standpoint of the end customer by product family.
2. Identify all the steps in the value stream for each product family, eliminating whenever possible those steps that do not create value.
3. Make the value-creating steps occur in tight sequence so the product will flow smoothly toward the customer.
4. As flow is introduced, let customers pull value from the next upstream activity.
5. As value is specified, value streams are identified, wasted steps are removed, and flow and pull are introduced, repeat this process again and continue it until a state of perfection is reached in which perfect value is created with no waste.

Conclusion: A lean coach is an expert who helps organizations adopt and implement lean methodologies. They typically have a deep understanding of lean principles, such as eliminating waste, optimizing processes and enhancing customer value. Lean coaches work with teams to identify areas for improvement, provide training on lean tools and techniques, and foster a culture of continuous improvement. Their role often includes facilitating workshops, mentoring employees, and guiding leadership in sustaining lean practices.

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