Why Questioning is Critical to Lean Leadership

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One of the most critical but underappreciated skills required to successfully transform an organization toward lean thinking is the ability of leaders to use questioning to coach and develop team members. As important as coaching is to leadership, however, it is also one of the most challenging for people to understand and apply in their daily interactions with others. Like much of lean thinking, using questions to develop people is simple and logical but difficult to put into practice.

Learning to use questioning usually requires understanding why it works and how it helps the leader and the person being coached. It is not an attempt to portray the leader as a wise or deep-thinking philosopher who has all the answers. It is a way to help understand what a person is thinking and how to tailor the conversation toward helping them see a situation in a different way. When a leader begins to understand why questioning is important, he or she starts to see how to apply it to a variety of interactions throughout the day.

Why We Question 

There are some basic reasons why questioning is an effective way to teach and learn. Understanding and applying questioning effectively requires considering these reasons during conversations with team members and reflecting afterwards to continually improve your ability to coach and develop others.

The most basic reasons to question rather than tell in conversations with people includes the following:

1. To know what the person is thinking.  You can't help correct incorrect assumptions if you don't know what those assumptions are and why the person is making them. Use questions to better understand the assumptions behind actions and where they are coming from. 
2. To help the person see things the way you do.  When you see a situation differently than the person you are coaching, you want to help the person to see the situation from your perspective. He or she is likely missing something, so you need to question to find out what it is and to help them understand. 
3. To help you understand the facts.  It is possible that the person you are coaching knows more about what's going on at gemba than you do. If you believe in lean thinking, you must respect this and be open to the idea that you could be wrong and can learn something from the person you are coaching. Questioning is the only way to help you understand what you may be missing. 
4. To help the person understand the value of thinking slowly and deeply.  I have found that one of the most beneficial ways to help someone develop is to get them to slow down and deeply think through a situation before acting. Most people feel overloaded, and when faced with a problem, just want to get it off their desks as quickly as possible and move on. Especially for the big problems, though, jumping to countermeasures without thinking deeply about the situation rarely eliminates the cause of the problem and, even when it does, does not tend to make life easier. It often ends up creating extra work or just buries the problem until the next time it comes around. Using creativity and innovation to address root causes and truly make things easier generally requires reflection and deep thinking to understand which pieces of information are fact and which are assumptions. 
5. To get the person actively involved in the learning process.  Studies show that passive listening – sitting and listening to someone lecture – is a far less effective way to learn than active participation. Active participation involves engaging the mind when attempting to learn, and answering questions about a situation provides a good way to engage a person's mind. On the other hand, listening to someone lecture does not require engagement and allows the listener's mind to wander to other things going on at the time. 

Although it depends on the circumstances and the person being coached, some questions that can help provide clarity about the process and help develop the ability to coach include:  What do/did you expect to happen? What do you think is causing the problem? Did you learn anything that you didn't know when you started investigating the problem? I have also found that asking why is the most effective way to get someone to clarify their thinking and start to see what they may be missing.

Mixed Messages 

One of the reasons that people have difficulty with coaching is that those of us who teach and write about lean are likely sending mixed messages regarding the why and how of the process. On the one hand, we tell leaders that they don't need to be experts in everything and that it is okay to admit that they don't have all the answers. On the other hand, we talk about people like Taiichi Ohno and Hajime Oba and the ability these people had to see problems quickly and clearly, and coach others to the answers.  I believe that this turns people off of the process because most will never measure up to these legendary leaders. In actuality, these two and other legendary lean figures didn't know the answers but they did know how to use questioning to gather facts (or identify when the facts are not yet gathered) and help the person being coached to arrive at an answer.

Start Small

When I work with leaders to develop coaching skills, I recommend starting small with a few key conversations each day or week.  Teaching the ability to question – which, by the way, also requires questioning – is easier when connected to the overall philosophy of lean thinking. Decisions should never be made without understanding the facts, and understanding the facts often requires going to gemba and asking questions to those who are closer than you are to the processes involved. When people understand and believe this, questioning starts to become a normal part of leading teams. 

Lean Leadership: A Direction . . . Not a Destination

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One of the problems with some of the books and articles on lean leadership is the tendency to oversimplify the concept in terms of a dictator versus coach.  It is too easy for people to read about the characteristics of a traditional manager and, because they aren't that bad, surmise that they are therefore a lean leader.  What many do not understand, though, is that the difference between a traditional manager and a lean leader is not binary . . . it's a continuum and very few, if any, are completely at one end or the other. 

There are many characteristics that separate a traditional leader from a coach and most of us tend to drift to one side or another under any given circumstance.  Moving toward a lean leader, however, requires the application of the PDSA cycle guided by regular and honest personal reflection, along with a sincere desire to help others develop. 

The key to becoming more of a lean leader on a consistent basis is to understand the characteristics that separate the two ends of the spectrum and work to improve the areas where one shows the biggest gaps.  Although it is a humbling and sometimes painful exercise, it is one that can reap huge rewards if done consistently and effectively. 

The Dictator-Coach Spectrum 

Some of the characteristics that separate a controlling manager from a lean leader are included in the questions below.  Understanding how often and effectively you apply these characteristics can be a good starting point for reflection and eventual movement toward the positive side of the spectrum.   

• Do you stop and reflect regularly on your performance as a leader?   Effective leaders take time to reflect on the performance of their teams and how their own performance could have improved results.  Sincere reflection can help determine where to focus development efforts for the team as well as well as yourself. 
• During conversations with team members, do you listen more than you talk?   Perhaps the most common behavior that drives leaders toward the traditional side of the continuum is the propensity to talk too much.  Besides the fact that development does not generally occur when people are lectured to or talked at, they tend to turn off when they do not feel listened to.  If, after a conversation, you can't clearly understand the other person's opinion by recalling specific examples of what they said, you most likely did too much talking. 
• How often do you realize that you don't know something?   One characteristic of great leaders is that they continually develop themselves.  One way to effectively self-develop is to have the courage to regularly question your own knowledge and performance.  Kaizen thinking is personal and happens when someone deals with a situation by questioning the status quo and challenging what they and others believe to be true.  
• Do you spend more time worrying about your own image than developing your team?   A clear red flag that someone leans toward the traditional side of the spectrum is spending more time with those above him or her in the organization than team members.  It is an unfortunate but it is common for leaders all the way up the organization to be disconnected with those on the team. Performance reviews, promotion systems, and overflowing in-boxes are just a few things that distract leaders from their main responsibility to support and develop people on their teams, and although these things can explain the reasons for becoming self-centered, they do not excuse one from ignoring one of the most important responsibilities of leading a team. 
• Do you continually develop your own skills?   An important trait of successful leaders is that they never stop developing themselves.  When it comes down to it, it is not possible to continue to develop others unless you continually develop yourself.  I have known many leaders over the years who stagnated and stopped learning and developing.  Whether resulting from too much to do or thinking they already know everything they need to, stagnation really means atrophy.  When it comes to development, you either go forward or backward . . . there is no standing still. 
• Do you go see your team or make them come to see you?   Although a basic element of lean thinking, going to gemba to see and learn firsthand is something that still has not made it into everyday leadership.  Leaders who refer to an "open door policy," do not understand how intimidating it is for some people to walk into their office.  By making team members come to them instead of going to the team members, they also do not understand the importance and value of seeing for themselves. Relying on spreadsheets, meetings, and the opinions of others to know what is happening in the workplace misses a critical dimension in truly understanding the facts. 
• Do you help your team understand how they contribute to the purpose of the larger organization?  To become engaged in their work, people need to understand how it fits into the bigger picture for the organization.  Through regular conversations, coaching, and effective dashboards, the team can gain a much better idea about how important their work is, and why it is critical to continue to improve.  Leaders can also become more effective when they gain a better understanding the larger system.  Handoffs between teams improve and more attention is focused on improving the value stream rather than attempting to optimize individual team performance.  

Moving toward lean leadership involves a system approach that requires attention to and development of numerous factors.  There are obviously more than the seven listed above, but these are the issues I see most often.  The key is to understand how you, as a leader, fit into the performance equation of the team and to continually improve the areas where you can positively affect the outcome. 

One of the most common reasons organizations fail with lean is that they attempt to deploy it in the operation without changing the system of leadership.  Lean is about shifting the way people throughout the organization think and approach work and if leaders expect it to happen without transforming themselves, the probability of sustaining improvements is pretty much zero. 

Kaizen & Changing the Way People Think

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"If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself." - Albert Einstein

For most people, structured problem-solving is not a natural process.  After years of being rewarded for quick answers and telling people what to do, along with the fact that most of us are overloaded, the ability to approach a problem without a preconceived solution is counter to the way people work.  Many see structured problem-solving as cumbersome and requiring more time than is necessary to address a problem - especially when they think they think they know the answer.

Because of this, coaching is critical to help a person move from jumping to countermeasures to following the process and actually learn about the problem before arriving at answers.  Even using a problem-solving A3 tends to result in filling in the boxes in a way that supports what we already know needs to be done.

Coaching is critical to changing the way people think about and approach problems. The advantage of using a tool like an A3 for this is that the coach can see what the person is thinking as he or she follows the process. An effective coach can review an A3 and, even without a deep understanding of the problem or related processes, ask a series of questions to help the person understand where they went wrong and how to improve the effort.

An A3 should provide a simple and clear overview of the issue, and the story describing how it was addressed. In fact, the simpler and more clear the A3, the better handle the team has on the problem, what caused it, and what to do to address it.

THE QUESTIONS 

There are a series of questions that can help someone learn to follow the process.  There is much more to problem-solving than following the steps listed on an A3.  The key is to help a person change the way he or she thinks. It's a tall order, but it can be done if the person is open to learning and the coach is experienced and patient (it also helps if the coach is also open to learning).

The questions below, along with a good deal of practice, can help to start the change in thinking that will lead to more effective learning and better problem-solving.

1) Why should I care? 

Right up front, the A3 should objectively demonstrate context for the problem and the benefit(s) of addressing it now.  An excellent way to do this is to connect it to the vision or high-level objectives for the business.  Getting the person to do this will help others agree with the importance of the issue in case support or help is needed to implement a countermeasure, and help to keep the team from straying away from the original objective.

2) Explain the logic? 

The steps in the process are not meant to be done independently; they must connect and build on each other. Going over the A3 backwards is a good way to get the person to see where the logic breaks down. A good check on the logic is to make sure that the units of measure throughout the effort don't conflict. Although it is possible that the units may change as the problem is broken down, there must be a logical relationship between them and, once the selected problem and target are defined (step 3 in the 8-step process), it remains consistent throughout the remainder of the effort.

3) What did you learn? 

A key objective of the structured problem-solving process is to learn. Besides making the problem smaller and easier to attack, the reason for breaking it down is for the team or person to learn something that was not previously known. Looking at data from a variety of perspectives (what happened, who was involved, when did the problem occur, etc.) should lead to discovery about the issue. By asking what the person learned during this step, it becomes easy to see if they began the process with the countermeasure already in mind and backfilled the steps to justify their idea.

4) Why did you move on from one step to another? 

Another question that can help a person learn where they didn't necessarily follow the process is to ask why they moved on from one step to the next. As they broke down the problem, for example, they decided that they had enough information to select the problem to attack and move to the next step. Question where they got the data – or if they used data to effectively prioritize the issues, and why they chose not to break down the data any further. Even if the person made a good decision in moving to the next step, asking why can help him or her realize how important it is to think about it during future problem-solving efforts.  Another benefit of asking why is that it helps the coach learn about the issue and ask good questions going forward.

There are many more common questions associated with coaching problem-solving – like who did you involve in the effort and how did you test the countermeasure? Although these are important, they are more procedural and focused on improving the mechanics of following the process, whereas the above questions help to get the person to change his or her thinking. Fundamentally changing the way people think helps them become coaches and can drive lean thinking in all situations rather than only when working on an A3.

Why People Don't Develop

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“If we do not give people accurate feedback based on real behavior they are not growing and we are not respecting them. The job of a leader is not to put them in positions to fail, but to put them in challenging positions where they must work hard to succeed and still see how they could have been even better. “ – Akio Toyoda

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If you are a production manager and one of your machines develops a problem that is resulting in increased costs or poor quality, would you let the problem continue until the next time maintenance is due?  For most of us, the answer would be, “no.”  We would shut down the machine and fix it to stop the problem from continuing.

If you are a manager and one of your team members is having a behavioral or capability problem that is resulting in increased costs, poor quality, or missing commitments, what would you do?  Experience tells me that many would wait until the next performance review to point out the problems and work for improvement (oh, and assign a poor rating in the process).

One of the biggest problems facing organizations today in the drive to improve is the inability of many managers to provide regular and relevant feedback to team members and work with them to improve.  There are a variety of reasons for this but, unless we start to dig into the causes and address them, the problem will continue and our ability to drive and sustain improvements in safety, quality, production, and cost will be severely limited.

The Causes

Over the years, I’ve found many reasons for the lack of ability to provide effective feedback for team member development that occurs in many organizations.  Although most of the reasons are fairly simple to recognize, they are system-level issues and can be difficult to address.  Like any problem facing an organization, however, a focused effort with clear objectives can result in significant improvements.

The reasons many organizations are poor at developing people include the following:

• Leaders Don’t Know How: Coaching and developing people is not something that comes naturally to most people.  When we promote someone into a supervisory position, we need to develop his or her skills in coaching and leading a team.  We must help leaders understand the types of conversations to have with people and how to recognize when improvement is needed and occurring.  They also need to understand how to approach these conversations with respect and utilize questioning, rather than telling, to guide development.
• Inconsistent Leadership Styles: Variation in leadership styles is one of the most unrecognized and destructive problems in business.  Unless we have a clear idea of the competencies we want in the organization’s leaders, the resulting inconsistency will confuse people and lead to demotivation, high turnover, and poor performance.
• It’s Not Valued: Leaders are often not held accountable for development because it is not valued by the organization.  Organizations that take a cream to rises to the top approach to identifying leaders often follow a hands off approach to development creating an environment of competition and silos rather than teamwork and problem-solving.
• Poor Hiring Practices: If we continue to hire people who don’t fit into the organization’s culture, the problem will be overwhelming to those managers who truly want to develop those on their team.  Hiring a new employee is a much more important decision than many people recognize, and unless candidates are carefully screened for fit before they enter the organization, they can do significant damage before we realize we have a problem.
• Overemphasis on the Performance Review: Organizations that do not value development tend to put more pressure on completing performance review on schedule than worrying about whether or not it actually results in improvement.  In this type of environment, managers often feel they are fulfilling their responsibility as a leader by having one or two conversations per year related to development.

It’s a Daily Thing

Avoiding conversations with people related to areas to improvement need to happen every day in real situations.  Besides the effect this can have on the performance of the team and the organization, orienting these conversations toward truly helping someone develop and improve shows a level of respect that people will remember for years afterwards.

Lean Leadership: From Doing to Coaching

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One of the most difficult aspects of transforming an organization toward a lean mindset is getting leaders to understand the importance of using questioning to develop team members.  It is difficult for someone who has been rewarded many years for being a problem-solver to suddenly shift behavior from solving problems to teaching others how to solve problems.  It can be a difficult habit to break that requires patience, perseverance, and a method to help leaders do it.

The Method

The best method I’ve found to teach leaders how to question is to begin with providing a clear and consistent process for problem-solving to be used throughout the organization.  When the steps for problem-solving are clear, leaders can question people about the process to understand how they are thinking and if they are approaching the problem in a way that will lead to improvement.

If, for example, the organization employs the Toyota 8-Step Business Practice for addressing problems, it is important for leaders to clearly understand the process, and commit to following the steps one-by-one to address problems.

Once the process is clearly understood, the leader can help team members approach problems by questioning them through the steps.  The leader should not do any of the problem-solving him- or herself, but learn to use open ended questions to guide the person’s thinking about the issue to be addressed.

Examples of some of the types of questions to use include the following:

• Why did you define the problem in this way?
• What data did you use to break down the problem in this way?
• What is the data telling you?
• Have you gone to where the problem occurs to see it for yourself?
• Have you talked to the people who are affected by the problem?
• Why do you think the countermeasure will actually solve the problem?
• How will you make sure that the improvement will be sustained?

Questioning a team member through the process will take longer than the leader solving the problem but in the long-run, the benefits to the organization of improving team problem-solving abilities is exponential.  In addition to improving the problem-solving skills of team members, the process also improves technical knowledge of the company’s processes, the value of which is immeasurable. 

It should be noted that effectively coaching someone through a problem sometimes requires that you let the person pursue a countermeasure that you feel is incorrect.  Besides improving process knowledge, failed countermeasures can do more to teach effective problem-solving than always being right.

Leaders Need Coaching, Too

Improving the ability to question rather than tell often requires coaching of leaders to help them understand how to do it and to break old habits.  This requires spending a significant amount of time with the leader to help them see when they could have used questioning rather than telling.  Breaking a habit that has been gone on for decades can take a long time, but with consistent coaching can be done.

It is difficult for some leaders to grasp the concept that they need to become teachers rather than doers.  In many instances, they will know what needs to be done to address a problem, and convincing them to do something that will take days or weeks rather than minutes to complete can be difficult.  When done well, though, the benefits to the organization of unleashing the problem-solving abilities of team members can be immense.

The Science of Dashboards

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One of the elements of lean that seems simple but is often misunderstood is the development and use of dashboards.  People are often surprised to learn that there is a science to creating an effective dashboard and that it consists of much more than posting metrics related to the area.

A dashboard should drive development of people and improvement in performance.  If these two things are not happening, then it needs to be changed.  Too often, I find that the metrics on dashboards are oriented toward providing information to management rather than providing the team with the type of feedback that helps drive improvements.  If the team does not find value in the dashboards, then it is waste.

ANATOMY OF A DASHBOARD

I approach the development of dashboards by initially questioning the team about the value it provides and the problems it encounters.  Clarifying the team’s purpose will help it zero in on the value it provides to the process and what it should measure to assure it is helping the organization achieve its objectives.  It also prevents the team from becoming too narrowly focused on one target while ignoring others that are just as important (e.g., a supply chain team focusing on the price of incoming materials rather than the total cost of the material, which includes the effects the material has on production).

One thing to keep in mind with the process is that it requires time to reflect and truly understand what is happening with the process.  Once the team purpose is clear, people can start to develop the metrics that will help drive the type of improvements needed to contribute to the organization’s success through the following steps:

• Define lagging metric targets: Lagging metrics measure of the result of a process.  Defining the targets in terms of key areas like safety, quality, production, cost, etc. help measure what is ultimately important for the team.  The lagging metric connects the team’s work to the larger system and provides feedback regarding the success of improvement efforts;
• Develop leading metrics: The leading metrics are the predictors of the lagging metrics in that they help to identify what is happening now that will eventually affect the lagging metrics. 
• Identify activity-based leading metrics: Since some leading metrics are really lagging metrics, it is critical to work toward activity-based leading metrics, which measure what the team is actually doing to close the gaps in lagging metrics.  The activity metrics are, in effect, the team’s efforts to solve the problems that show up in higher-level lagging metrics.

The figure below presents a very simple example of a safety dashboard for a rotor assembly area of a factory.  The top of the dashboard provides information about the longer-term direction of the company.  Although this may seem obvious to some, it is important to always maintain the connection between the team’s efforts and the company’s vision.

The next level of the dashboard provides what the company determined to be its ultimate measure of safety, followed by the rotor assembly team’s performance and focus for improvement.  In the example, the team determined that it needed to reduce hand injuries in order to improve its safety performance and further decided that it will conduct regular audits and provide ongoing training to team members on a variety of hand safety issues.

The benefit of this dashboard is that the team can use it to identify the gaps in safety performance and actually measure what it is doing to improve.  If safety is not improving, the team can look to the activity measure and figure out why, for example, audits are not being conducted according to plan.  Team members can take action to assure audits are conducted as planned to ultimately determine whether or not they are driving improvement as expected.

The development objective of the dashboard comes from the conversations around the dashboard.  How is the team performing?  What are you doing about the gaps? Why are you focusing on hand injuries? Etc.

The effort takes quite a bit of coaching and reflection by the team to truly understand the process and how to improve to achieve targets.  Once everyone understands that the customer of the team’s dashboard is the team, it becomes much easier to develop one that actually helps drive improvement. 

The Lean Coaching Script

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“No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.” – Peter Drucker

There is little argument that effective coaching is critical to drive lean thinking within an organization or a team.  Believing this and actually doing it, however, are two different things.  The ability to coach does not come naturally to most people, and without a standardized method for coaching, the variation in application can doom the effort to failure.

The Script - 4 Key Questions

Fortunately, there are four basic questions that leaders can apply in a variety of situations that, when done consistently, can drive the type of thinking that leads to improved performance throughout the organization.  The questions are based on teaching and reinforcing a standard way of looking at results to identify problems and make improvements.  The questions can be applied in a variety of situations to develop a lean mindset throughout the organization.  A further benefit of the questions is that they develop the ability of leaders to coach.  And this is all done real-time, using actual data from real processes.

The questions are as follows:

1. What is your objective? This question helps clarify thinking about what exactly the process is expected to achieve.  It helps people understand the value they provide and how their process fits into the bigger picture.  Too often, teams go about their business without a clear or consistent idea of why they are doing what they do.  This question can help the coach guide the person being coached toward a systems thinking approach by assuring the team does not become too narrowly focused on one specific target at the expense of larger organizational objectives.  The discussion around objectives basically becomes a realtime catchball session as it helps clarify expectations and understanding.
2. What is the data telling you? This helps the person develop an ability to use data to guide action.  Asking questions about data can lead to learning about lagging and leading indicators and how each fits into the improvement process. The discussion will naturally lead to questions about which metrics are being reported and why.
3. What are you doing about the gaps? It is important to drive thinking around actions to understand and close gaps between targeted and actual performance.  Regularly questioning a person about gaps helps the person develop a natural inclination to look for problems on a continual basis.  The result is an almost obsessive desire to attack problems and close gaps.  Remember, though, that this is a conversation about improvement.  You are trying to develop the ability to show and address - not hide - problems, so the tone of the conversation, as well as a good deal of patience, is critical to success.
4. What help do you need? Implied in coaching and development is the idea that it is a team effort.  Handing a problem to someone and walking off is not coaching – it is also not leadership.  You’ve got to be involved enough to guide the person through the process with the objective of helping him or her develop the ability to quickly and effectively address problems.  Especially early in the development, you need to understand what the person is thinking and why they are approaching an issue in a certain way.  The problem-solving A3 is perfect for this purpose because it helps the coach see into the mind of the person as they attempt to address a problem.  Remember that you are the coach, rather than the person working the problem, and that your objective is to help him or her develop the ability to address future problems without your help.

Developing successful coaches and leaders throughout the organization requires, at least initially, that everyone follows the script.  If people stray from the questions before they truly understand the process, the result will be variation in the way people identify and address problems, and unfortunately, very little development.

Another reason for sticking to the script is to develop the ability of leaders to question rather than tell.  If development was as easy as telling people what to do, organizations would run much better and transformation would be an easy process.

Can Learning Happen in the Classroom?

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Nobody argues with the value of learning.  Most companies establish training budgets and hold classes on a variety of topics from leadership to lean.  When the organization faces a drop in revenues, however, the training budget is one of the first areas facing cuts.  Does this mean that leaders don’t believe in training, or is it that they don’t feel that the returns to the organization from training are worth the investment?  I believe that it’s the latter.  I also believe that they may be correct . . .

An Incorrect View of Learning

Since the start of my career, I’ve attended a number of internal and external training courses intended to improve my performance in one or more aspects of my job.  Although some of what was taught in these classes was interesting, I’ve generally found that they rarely, if ever, drove permanent changes in my behavior or the quality of my work.  Although it was nice to travel to places like New York City or San Francisco to attend classes, it was actually more of a perk than a true learning experience.  What was interesting, though, is that when I became a leader, I sent people on my team to the same courses because that’s how training was done.

Only after I learned about the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle did I start to question the traditional approach to training and development.  Rather than taking place in a classroom, I came to realize that true and sustainable team learning happens by doing, and that it is driven by regular cycles of doing, reviewing, and renewing.  Furthermore, since it happens real-time as part of the work people and teams are doing, it doesn’t necessarily need to be budgeted or scheduled.  It does, however, need to be consciously applied as part of the PDSA cycle in order to assure that the learning and resulting improvement are sustained.

Team Learning

One big miss in the traditional approach to training and development is that it focuses on the individual more than the team.  After all, teams produce results; not individuals.  It really doesn’t matter how much an individual knows if he or she is unable to use the knowledge to drive improvement.  Alternatively, the more a team learns and develops, the more sustainable the learning becomes.  When one or more people leave, it becomes less of an issue because the knowledge gained stays with the team.

An example of the PDSA cycle driving team learning is listed in the table below.  An important point about this concept is that learning implies action – and the cycle naturally leads to both.  Without action, there is no learning because the team will never know the extent to which an idea actually makes things better.

Another aspect of team learning is the importance of a coach to guide the team’s efforts to understand and address problems.  As a result, the team develops problem-solving skills as well as increased understanding of the processes in which they work.

LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

Much like team learning, leadership development requires a clear understanding of results to clarify the gaps between actual and targeted performance.  Since the focus of leadership performance is much more individualized than team performance, one-on-one coaching is critical to help the person understand the gaps and ideas for improvement more clearly.

The difference between coaching and the classroom for leadership development is that coaching occurs real-time in meetings and at gemba.  A great place to coach a production supervisor, for example, is on the shop floor in front of her team’s dashboard.  Reviewing the board to understand why certain metrics are being reported, how they are being used to drive improvement, how processes are actually operating, what the metrics are telling the team, and what they’re doing about the problems are all part of the conversation that can help develop the supervisor’s abilities to drive improvement.  When done regularly, this type of conversation is far more effective than sending the supervisor to a one-week course on becoming a better leader.

IT COMES DOWN TO EXPECTATIONS

One thing that is rarely considered with an organization’s training strategy is the expectations.  What do you want from the system?  How will you know whether or not your training and development processes are delivering on expectations?  Doing classroom training because that’s the way it’s always been done (like I did earlier in my career) is irresponsible leadership.

Assuming that sending someone to a training course will make him a better leader also shirks the responsibility of developing those on your team by delegating it to someone else.  If you’re not able to do the coaching yourself, you have a gap that needs to be addressed to make you a better leader.

I believe that the major difference between traditional and lean methods of development is the idea that, under a lean mindset, learning implies action.  A PDSA approach drives learning through doing . . . followed by reviewing and renewing.  When applied in this way, learning becomes analogous to real improvement.

Kaizen for Leaders

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One of the most common roadblocks to the successful adoption of lean thinking is the mistaken idea that kaizen applies only to the shop floor.  Some leaders unfortunately consider kaizen as something to be delegated rather than used at all levels to drive improvement.  Unless leaders become actively involved in learning and doing kaizen, however, the level of transformation required to achieve the big gains with lean will never happen.

Kaizen at the Leadership Level

One reason leaders need to use kaizen is to improve the company’s high-level systems, including business planning, hiring, and leadership development.  W. Edwards Deming estimated that more than 90% of an organization’s problems are the result of the system; and improving the system is not something that can be delegated.  Applying a kaizen mindset, based on the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle, is the key to unlocking the 90% and achieving the type of improvement expected from the transformation.

A far less understood – but just as important – benefit of leadership involvement in kaizen is to coach and develop the problem-solving skills of team members.  Success cannot be sustained without developing an army of problem solvers throughout the organization, and limiting problem-solving to a select few experts, as is often the case with initiatives like 6-sigma, prevents creating a culture where everybody improves the work they do every day.

Developing problem-solving skills across the organization starts at the top and cascades downward through coaching and developing the abilities of leaders and team members at all levels.  Leaders need to take responsibility for creating a continual improvement culture by modeling a kaizen mindset and coaching the ability of others – including future leaders – to do the same.

Strategic Initiatives and Kaizen

One thing that is not often understood is that a strategic initiative is really a large-scale kaizen.  The objective of a high-level initiative should identify a business gap that needs to be closed, and that the plan is a hypothesis that (1) it can be implemented as defined, and (2) it will result in achieving the objective.  Regular reviews to measure progress and adjust as needed constitute the STUDY and ACT phases of the PDSA cycle.  For these reasons, approaching an initiative as kaizen greatly increases the probability of success.

Rather than an executive driving the initiative, however, it is best to assign it to someone targeted for development as a future leader.  Facing a tough high-level business problem, along with coaching from a current leader, is an excellent way to develop long-term abilities in problem-solving, coaching, and leadership.

When a leader starts to develop a deep understanding of kaizen, it becomes clear that the process applies to all aspects of work.  Until the transformation occurs however, kaizen – like virtually all aspects of lean thinking – will be seen as something that can be delegated.  As a result, frustration and disappointment with lean grows until the effort is abandoned altogether.

Creating a Continuous Improvement Culture Requires More Than Logic

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There are very few people in business who would argue with the value of continual improvement.  Whether following the principles of lean or not, leaders regularly talk about the importance of improving processes, products, and services.  Why, then, are some organizations significantly better at driving and sustaining continual improvement than others?

It Takes More than Logic

Establishing a culture of improvement should be as simple as encouraging people to look for better ways of doing work.  This is, after all, one area where common sense should prevail and everybody should be aligned, right?  Well . . . not really.  Appealing to common sense and logic by discussing issues like competitive position, rising costs, or falling revenues will only get you so far in sparking an ongoing improvement effort.  Even establishing programs that reward and recognize people for implementing improvements seldom drives the type of behavior that is needed to sustain the change.

Changing a culture to one where improvement happens on a continual basis requires more than appealing to logic because it tends to run counter to common sense – at least when compared to the way most businesses operate.  There are natural organizational and psychological barriers that interfere with the ability to improve on a continual basis.  One of the most significant barriers is related to the way people think and approach work and, without a concerted effort to shift thinking toward a mindset of continual learning, efforts to improve will likely be fragmented, discontinuous, and difficult to sustain.

A shift in thinking means getting everyone – from the CEO to the shop floor – to approach everything they do in terms of scientific method.  Most people know about scientific method but, for a variety of reasons, don’t consider applying it outside of the laboratory.  Creating an improvement-focused culture, however, requires learning; and learning results from continually comparing results to expectations – the basis of scientific method.  The vehicle for this is the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle, and success results from reprogramming people to apply PDSA-thinking in everything they do.

Scientific Method – A Quick Review

As shown in the figure below, scientific method refers to the process of testing an idea – or hypothesis – to determine whether or not it appears to work as intended.  It begins with consciously considering the hypothesis, conducting one or more tests to prove the validity of the hypothesis, studying the results of the test, and accepting, rejecting, or adjusting the hypothesis as a result.  In the end, the cycle drives learning by helping people gain improve their understanding regarding the reasons why a hypothesis is true or not.

Applying the PDSA cycle in a business environment involves consciously understanding that a specific action, decision, process, or standard is intended to achieve a specific outcome.  Testing the hypothesis could be done off-line in a limited area of work, or in the normal course of business, but the key is to always compare outcomes to actions and, as a result, learn what needs to change and why.

Although the concept appears simple, most people don’t generally think or act in terms of the PDSA cycle.  We tend to make a decision or document a process and move on; rarely taking the time to look back and learn whether the results matched expectations.  Often, the only time we do look back and make adjustments is when a problem occurs that is significant enough to warrant attention.  Since we don’t normally think scientifically, however, and we’re not always looking for the gaps, we miss the small issues that prove the hypothesis – the decision, action, or process – is incorrect.  And often, the significant issues start off as small ones that, because we don’t notice or worry about them, grow into big problems.

Reprogramming Thinking

The organizations that are able to successfully change the way people think understand that it cannot happen through occasional coaching or random interactions.  These organizations have, for instance, a new employee orientation and follow-up process that is intensive – especially for leadership positions – and includes much more than showing the new person where the lunchroom is or how to enroll for insurance.  It incorporates a heavy emphasis on developing problem-solving capabilities and adjusting the way the person thinks.  The more pervasive PDSA thinking is throughout the organization, the easier it is to adapt the new person’s mental models because, in addition to formal coaching, learning happens informally through observation and interactions with others.  In those organizations where thinking is not generally guided by scientific method, however, transformation requires a concerted and deliberate effort of coaching and developing key leaders.  In turn, these leaders coach and develop others, eventually changing the organization’s mindset.

The first step is to understand that transformation requires more than desire and support to be successful.  It is a leadership issue that requires commitment, involvement, and an openness to change the way the organization thinks and learns.  Relying solely on logic and common sense to drive the change, on the other hand, will likely result result in little more than frustration, disappointment, and a long wait.

Growing Deadwood in the Organization

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“Were they dead when you hired them? Or did you kill them?* -  W. Edwards Deming


Who is responsible for the poor performers in an organization? These are the people about whom leaders regularly complain and blame for many of the company’s problems. According to Jack Welch, they are the 10% of the workforce who need to improve or be fired.

In most organizations, there are processes for documenting poor performance and terminating employment of the nonproducers, but very little for developing and helping these people improve. It is fairly uncommon, though, for organizations to hold the leader accountable for hiring poorly or failing to help the poor performers on his or her team.

Leader as Teacher

In his book, Getting the Right Things Done: A Leader’s Guide to Planning and Execution (Lean Enterprise Institute), Pascal Dennis presents his list of Lean Mental Models to describe the methods and behaviors of lean leaders. One of the mental models is Leader as Teacher which describes a lean leader as one who continually develops the ability of team members to identify and solve problems to improve the organization’s performance.

Developing talent is one of those things that most people would agree is a part of effective leadership but how many organizations truly hold their leaders responsible for doing it? When managers complain about a team member, it should be viewed as a reflection on their leadership capabilities and used as a coaching opportunity to improve.

I have found that, in many organizations, the responsibility to coach and develop talent is much lower on the list of priorities than documenting and replacing the poor performers. This is surprising when one considers what it costs the organization to hire, train, and fire employees. In my experience, this type of situation generally results from a lack of knowledge of how to develop people and/or impatience (or short-term thinking).

Instituting Leadership

In Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming wrote, “The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.” One of the areas Deming felt was in need of transformation was the poor track record and lack of personal accountability of leaders to coach and develop team members.

So what do we need to institute leadership within organizations? One step is to address the culture and systems related to team member development. Like much of organizational transformation, it is not easy, but there are five steps that can help jumpstart the process.

1. Make it difficult to fire someone for performance issues.
   When it is easier to coach and develop “poor performers” than to fire them, leaders will begin to find the time to coach rather than just give up and remove the person from the organization. One of the roles of Human Resources should be to help the leader work with the person to develop his or her abilities or find another role in the organization that would be a better fit for the person’s talent and abilities.
    
2. Recognize terminations as a failure of the system.
   A decision is made to hire someone because one or more people feel the candidate is a good fit for the organization and the specific job. When it doesn’t work out, we need to look at the hiring process to understand why it failed and what needs to be done to prevent if from happening next time. Defects within the hiring process are costly to the company and, as with any process, continual improvement is required.
    
3. Establish systems and support for team member development.
   Transformation will not happen by merely telling leaders to start coaching and developing those on their team. Leaders must be taught how to coach, and the proper systems and structure must be available to support the process.
    
4. Make it clear that developing team members is a responsibility of leadership.
   Leaders must be held accountable for developing the people on their team and understand that coaching and mentoring it is a condition of remaining in a leadership position within the organization.
    
5. Promote based on leadership abilities.
   Promotion into a leadership position must be based on the person’s existing or potential leadership capabilities, including the ability to coach and develop the talents of others. Too often, promotions into leadership are based on personal preference or a person’s performance in a current position rather than the ability to lead others.
    

Besides showing respect for people, placing a high priority on coaching and development will help the organization improve performance by reducing turnover, improving morale, and engaging more people in improvement efforts. Like any element of transformation, though, success requires clarity, consistency, and the patience to stay with the effort.
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*I remember hearing Dr. Deming say something like this during one of his 4-day seminars but couldn’t remember the exact quote Thanks to Garold L. Markle (www.energage.com) for the wording.

The Role of the Sensei in Learning

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“This kind of specification is not a case of perverse Taylorism or micromanagement, with smart people telling less-intelligent people what to do.  It is, in fact, an investment.” - Steven J. Spear

When kicking off a lean transformation, organizations often hire specialists or consultants to keep the initiative on-track.  Although this can greatly help with the transformation, it is critical that these people understand that their role is to be coaches rather than players in the process.

If the objective is to achieve sustained transformation, people throughout the organization must learn that lean is a very different way of looking at business.  They must understand how it applies to their jobs, as well as the company’s processes, systems, and culture.  This type of learning occurs when the individual actively participates in the changes by developing new ways to work, including the freedom to experiment with new ideas that may fail.

The role of a specialist, or sensei, is to guide people in the new way of thinking.  The more the experts do things – change systems, redesign processes, etc. – or tell people what they need to be doing, the more they interfere with learning and reduce the chances of sustaining the change.

Conversations, Dialogue, and Questioning to Drive Learning

One critical role of a specialist is to drive the adoption of a Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) mindset throughout the organization.  This involves coaching people how to look at a situation, analyze what is going on, and develop ideas to improve performance in a simple and direct way.  When people identify countermeasures that do not appear to effectively address a problem, the specialist can either let them learn through a failed experiment or engage them in dialogue to help them see for themselves where their thinking went wrong and how to get back on track.

The process requires patience and a great deal of questioning: Why do you think that? Why did you approach the problem/change in that way?  What ideas or approaches did you discard along the way?  How do you know you what is happening in the process?

To be truly effective in the role, the specialist must possess a deep understanding of lean and be adept at Socratic or ORID (Objective-Reflective-Interpretive-Decisional) techniques.  These methods are proven to be effective at facilitating learning by helping people think through facts, feelings, and connections about a situation before making decisions.  Without these types of methods, the specialist will tend to tell people what to do and, although this may result in compliance and some level of improvement, it will not create the type of learning that will enable people to apply the information to other situations.

Slowing Down to Go Faster

Although coaching may appear to take longer than attempting to drive change by telling people what to do, it greatly increases the chances of sustaining the transformation.  The difficulty the organization's leaders often have with this approach is related to the lack of patience that characterizes western business.  The difficulty faced by the sensei in coaching versus doing comes from the excitement that people tend to have when they learn about lean and what it can do for an organization. It's not easy to hold back opinions when you know what should be done to move the process forward or address a problem.

The only chance of sustaining transformation - and I'm not completely convinced that sustained transformation is ever possible - will occur when people start thinking PDSA and acting lean when the sensei isn't around, which is something that will never happen without effective coaching.

The Significance of Catchball

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“A goal without a method is nonsense!” – W. Edwards Deming


A critically important element of business planning that often gets downplayed or completely ignored is the catchball process.  The books and articles I've read on the subject of hoshin kanri tend to oversimplify the role of catchball and rarely go into the level of depth the subject deserves.

Catchball is a process whereby leaders and team members discuss objectives and plans to make sure everybody understands and is in agreement with expectations.  The conversations go back and forth between levels to assure that the objectives, as well as the plans to achieve the objectives are clearly communicated.

Catchball is often limited to the discussions at the executive level to sort out high level goals.  By not carrying the process through all levels of the organization, however, leaders are missing an important opportunity to communicate expectations and concerns before problems occur.

The objectives of catchball include:

Clarification:  Clarifying expectations to team members upfront rather than waiting until the performance review to criticize them for not meeting objectives that may never have been understood in the first place.  We tend to spend more time evaluating performance than we do making sure expectations are clear, which makes it appear as if we want people to fail more than we want the organization to succeed.

Consistency: Gaining comfort that a person can meet objectives through methods and behaviors that are consistent with the way the organization operates.  When the only concern is whether or not an objective is met (i.e., the "how" is ignored), we can easily create an Enron-type environment that undermines values, breaks down teamwork, and where improvements are not sustainable.

Coaching:  Providing a vehicle for coaching team members on the methods and behaviors required to be successful.  A critical component of development is to provide team members with objectives that stretch thinking and take them out of their comfort zone. Doing this without adequate coaching and direction, however, can be destructive to the person's development.

Communication/Dialogue:  Allowing people to communicate concerns to leaders about meeting objectives and asking help that may be needed to be successful.

Alignment:  Assuring that there is clear alignment between lower level plans or A3s and higher level plans and targets.

When implemented correctly, catchball can make up for many of the problems that companies experienced during the MBO-era.   It forces communication between levels and improves a leader’s understanding of the implications that objectives have on the people to which they are assigned.  Like anything in business, however, catchball requires continual improvement to be successful.  It requires patience and a willingness to listen to concerns, as well as a sincere effort by leaders to coach and mentor team members.

The Value of Thinking

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"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it." - Henry Ford

Do we consider the ability to think critical to business success?  If so, why do companies place such a low value on thinking?  How many organizations today would truly appreciate an employee who takes time regularly to sit in his or her office to think?

I believe if we started to value thinking and took the time to teach our organizations how to think, we could revolutionize the world of business, leading to greatly improved performance, as well as employee satisfaction and quality of life.

Thinking in Business

When I led an organization, I encouraged team members to make decisions. I also encouraged people to think - individually and as a group - before making a decision.  What I found in many cases was that a vast majority of poor decisions were the result of jumping to a solution without thinking.  On the other hand, I have observed that the most creative solutions and innovative idea result from deep reflection and thought before acting.

The U.S. culture is heavily rooted in the Puritan ethic that greatly appreciates doing.  This contributes to the tendency of businesses to value the person who acts quickly much more than the one to takes time to think before acting.  Our organizations are fjull of people who stay very busy doing things, but rarely think about what they are doing.  As a result, we face the same problems day-in and day-out and fail to achieve or sustain significant levels of improvement in productivity or quality.

This general disregard for thinking creates friction that continually pulls even those organizations that value thinking toward a culture of doing.  I believe this is the reason that companies respected for creativity and innovation tend to lose their edge as they become larger and more successful.  Think about how many internet startups have changed from high growth companies with imaginative offerings to stagnant, poor performing organizations.  Companies like Apple
, Toyota and LG, on the other hand, are among the very few that have been able to maintain their creative edge in products, processes, and services.

Thinking Required

Organizations are very complex systems that make it difficult to clearly understand the effects that result from actions taken.  To truly comprehend how a change in one part of the organization will affect another requires thought and reflection.  On many occasions, I have seen a change implemented by one area of the company result in increased costs and headaches for another.

I also believe that the lack of thinking is one of the reasons lean initiatives fail.  Lean requires a level of creativity and systems thinking that are nonexistent in many companies.  solving a problem requires a clear understanding of the underlying causes and the creativity to develop effective solutions.  Without the ability to think and reflect, improvements will tend to be short-lived.

What to Do

Because of the cultural resistance to thinking, encouraging people to reflect on issues before acting is not easy.  Everybody is so busy doing things that it very difficult to get them to take time to think.  Orders need to be entered, reports need to be written, customers need to be called, and deliveries need to be made.  Asking people to stop and think will be seen as adding more to an already full plate of things to do.

The key is to start small.  Leaders can encourage thinking as part of the coaching process to help
team members deal with problems and issues.  In one company, I initiated a policy requiring people to sit and think about their jobs for ten minutes each day.  Some did it and, I'm sure, others just said they did, but eventually the organization began to change because it became clear that I valued thinking.

However it is done, transforming the culture toward thinking before doing will help release the dammed up potential within the company.  Eventually, the change will become evident in productivity improves, more innovative products and services are introduced, and ultimately, the performance of the organization improves.