Raised by leaders

Part II

Relationships, Experiments, and Challenges

Leadership is about healthy habits, about making sure that you take care of yourself so that you can take care of others. During my professional growth in the early beginnings, I got the chance to meet leaders who were really self-aware with a high focus on their development, consequently being able to overflow and give so much more to others. I received valuable coaching, mentorship, and elements that are still with me today. I received trust and guidance in order to lead our people towards the final result.

I well remember that we had such a strong people culture that no one was afraid to experiment, test new ideas, even if sometimes we were not getting to the result, but for sure we had a lot of learnings.

What I still recall was the level of standardization, 5S, and visual management that we had in place. This supported us in managing day-to-day business, attracting new customers, and influencing footprint decisions, together with creating such a great environment to work and develop. As we were able to implement these fundamental tools from the beginning, it created the momentum and foundation for what would turn into a continuous improvement "machine." Customer visits, audits, or other interactions were always with outstanding results and best practices, and this was attributed to highly effective leaders in the organization who replicated this leadership to each individual contributor.

I remember when we implemented, for the first time, the QRCI method (Quick Reaction to Continuous Improvement). We onboarded many operators from day one who contributed a lot. Daily practice got us on continuous growth and created a strong team spirit; everyone felt part of the game. One day, a colleague from production came to me really upset, as we announced that due to some problems with a transfer, we wanted to change the frequency from daily to once a week. He reminded me and us that when things are getting hard is when we need to work more on improvements and opportunities and that he would expect us to continue our daily practice. Consequently, that is what we did, and it was the best decision that we took as it created even higher engagement than before and got more colleagues onboard.

Major benefits from our program were given in three major directions/areas. One was creating a pull flow by implementing Kanban and Heijunka. This got us 40% free space and reinforced our quality system as quality stability was a must for the system to run within parameters and avoid big disruptions. The second major benefit was in regards to error-proofing, daily challenging ourselves to find better and improved ways to avoid the occurrence of problems. We got better and better at finding simple poka-yoke solutions. The advantage was also the fact that we had really smart and hardworking guys in our maintenance department. The third major achievement, and really outstanding, was the active involvement of the operators in these improvements, which triggered many simple ideas that were easy and effective to implement. All of the above and even more were never possible without strong leadership in place and continuous coaching together with a safe culture of experiment and failure, with always positive consequences.

In the next article and continuation, I will tell you more about how it felt to be back after some years in another company to visit my former colleagues and Gemba!