Hi everybody,

Welcome to the latest Lean FSL blog. We’ve had a tantalising glimpse or two of Summer here in the UK over the past couple of weeks. It’s always difficult to predict if these early spells of warmth are a foretaste of a long English Summer to come, or that they were the Summer!

My topic for this blog (and the next one) draws from one of my favourite business self-help improvement books, ‘The Seven Habits of Highly-Effective People’ by Dr. Stephen Covey. I can hardly believe that this seminal work is over 25 years old; but as I was an undergraduate when I first came into contact with it (via bootleg cassette tapes I’m now able to confess), it clearly was a long time ago! Stephen Covey sadly died in 2012, through complications following a cycling accident, but his work goes on through both his business ventures and his family. He certainly has left a tremendous legacy of thought-leadership.

The 7 Habits was written primarily as an approach for individual effectiveness; a series of ‘habits’ which when practiced regularly would align behaviours to an individuals ‘true north’. In other words, enabling a person to be the best  they could be by breaking old paradigms and shifting to new habits of independence, effective interdependence and continuous improvement.

I’ve revisited Covey’s teachings many times over the years, and have always taken something from the simplicity and wisdom of the approach. I can’t say I’ve always practiced the 7 Habits all of the time, but hey, we’re all human! However, what has struck me on a few occasions is that the basis for many of the leadership traits that Covey’s work suggests are the recipes for successful leadership have close parallels to the behaviours you’d expect to see in successful Lean organisations (not only at the most senior levels – but across the whole organisation).

So, I thought that it’d be interesting to see just what those Habits look like when viewed through the Lean lens as it were. So here goes…..

1. Be Proactive

In its original context, Covey calls on people to take responsibility for their lives, and not to look for causes to which to place blame, such as outside circumstances or the actions of other people.

My suggested Lean equivalent would be to ensure that leaders don’t waste time and effort defending the status quo. Great organisations don’t do this, they know that the journey they are on is a long one, perhaps a never-ending one. But they relentlessly set the bar higher and higher, driving out waste and increasing customer value. Only by embracing the reality of where a business is today can we start the process of improving the situation.

Another great example of pro-activity in terms of lean leadership, is making sure that you don’t ‘wait until its raining before you fix the roof’! Many Lean text books talk about the need to define a ‘Burning Platform’, that is an abiding reason to change that galvanises the whole organisation. But what if you are doing well, and the threat isn’t really that strong? Is it credible to really over-emphasise a perceived threat. Will people really buy into that if they don’t really believe that this is a threat? Great Lean organisations don’t wait for the crisis before they do improvement, they proactively seek out waste and better processes, in the good and bad times. Maybe this is perhaps because they are truly, long-term Lean thinkers; who have realised that people will, given time and security, be willing to help improve their work without an impending disaster hanging over them?

2. Begin With the End in Mind

In the 2nd Habit, Covey talks about spending time envisioning what exactly it is that you want the future to look like, so that you can focus your efforts more closely on achieving your goal.

This Habit has always struck me as being analogous to creating a Future State Map in a VSM activity. Not just a ‘tweaked’ version of what we have today, but a radical vision of the future that exceeds the customer’s expectations, providing levels of service and cost competitiveness that can only be dreamed of! The challenge then, is to develop a roadmap of kaizen activities to take you towards that goal. My previous post on Kata also has relevance here. We know where we need to get to, but right now we don’t know the exact route we will take, but everything we do is based on getting nearer to our objective.

A Value Stream Mapping activity, involving the senior team in a business, is a great way to challenge the conventions and paradigms in an organisation, to specify what the customer values and develop a bold vision for the future. It can really help galvanise the efforts of teams towards a common goal.

3. Put First Things First

In the original book, Covey uses this Habit to explain the requirement to spend time as much time as possible on Important rather than Urgent tasks. The 4 quadrant matrix he suggests is a classic tool of effective time-management. And, if you’ve never seen it or used it, I recommend you buy the book and try it for yourself!

Improvement – including kaizen  – is clearly a 2nd quadrant activity, that is that its Important, but not always immediately Urgent. It can be deferred, and often is when the next wave of Urgent tasks hits a leaders desk! Making time for kaizen is key to breaking the downward cycle of fire-fighting and crisis management. But (as Covey also recommends) you need to plan, and commit to spending time on improvement in your business. Successful lean organisations do this really well through a combination of daily kaizen activity, Rapid improvement events or more transformational initiatives .Time for improvement is given and respected, and leaders are visible in their support and encouragement for this work.

Many people, in many businesses. will say that they ‘have no time’ or ‘no additional resources’ to do improvement work. Covey has a couple of great suggestions to counter this ‘push back’. ‘What are you doing right now that you could stop doing straight away?’, ‘What could you delegate to allow time to at least, start doing more work in quadrant 2?’.

It might take a bit of imagination to translate this to a team environment where they are saying that there’s no time for improvement, but successful Lean organisations will constantly challenge the necessity to do work with no perceived value, and organise themselves to ‘free up’ resource to work on improvement activity.

 

I hope you agree with me, that so far Covey’s 7 Habits aligns really well to the Habits of Successful Lean Organisations.  I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences. Join me in a couple of weeks for Part 2 of this blog, where I’ll look at the remaining 4 Habits from a Lean perspective.

In the meantime, stay lean!

Graham

 http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Habits-Highly-Effective-People-x/dp/1455892823