Lean: From Thinking to Action

It can be a tough task to deliver a complete Lean workplace. There are some key actions and dependencies that must be in place to succeed.

Management buy-in

Senior Leaders must be fully prepared to embrace Lean in its entirety and must resist the urge to intervene and introduce inefficiencies into processes. All managers must be prepared to listen to their staff, and be prepared to cede some control to allow the experts – the ones that actually do the work – find the most efficient way of doing it.

Lean Everything

You cannot simply pick and choose which tasks to make Lean – all activities of the business should be looked at. This means everything from the layout in the tea-room (Sink, kettle, teabags, spoons, sugar, fridge, bin) to the overall corporate strategy – preferably by adding a commitment to being Lean into the organisation’s Mission Statement.

Make time for lean

Managers often claim they cannot embrace Lean because they or their teams are too busy. You do have time for Lean, because when the work becomes more efficient the time will free up then – you just need to speculate to accumulate. I always recommend assigning at least an hour a week with the whole team to do nothing but work on Leaning your processes – and sticking to it. Diarise it, and make sure others in the business are aware that this is protected time. Senior leaders have already bought-into the process so there should be no excuse not to…

Lean is a cycle

Lean is not a ‘fire and forget’ system – remember the differences between Japanese and Western management? Western management tends to wait for something to go wrong and then fix it, and then wait till it goes wrong again, then fix it again. Lean works as a cycle. Come back to every process regularly and make sure that any deviation from the standard is either accepted as the new standard (because it is more efficient) or changed back.

Lean will fundamentally change a business for the better once it takes hold, and once its staff are completely engaged in making their work tasks Leaner, they will come up with more and more ideas, and they will work more and more efficiently. All the better boss has to do is to be brave enough to give them direction, then sit back and let them take control.

Once your processes are Lean, there is no need for supervisors to constantly check peoples’ work, and the door is opened to manage in a more adult way – by focussing on results and not on activity.

Read more: Thinking Leaner at Amazon – ￡1.99 or free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.