Leaders determine how far, how fast, and how sustained a Lean transformation is.

While it is generally understood that leadership is a key ingredient, few leaders know what they need to do to make it happen.  Below are three critical roles of the leader in a transformation:

1. Create focus on the organization’s “critical few” priorities and say “no” to the trivial many.
2. Eliminate wastes that only Leaders can eliminate to create flow in the work.
3. Create the conditions and systems for continuous improvement.

Create focus on the organization’s “critical few” priorities, and say “no” to the “trivial many” using Lean Strategic Planning principles:

• If we take on too many priorities, we lose the year before we begin it – everyone is too busy, and little gets accomplished.  Identify with your team your handful of “must-do, can’t fail” and “breakthrough” priorities and put them ahead of all your other potential priorities. Carve out dedicated, uninterrupted, time and capacity to address these, so that they don’t get crowded out by other “nice-to-have” activities.  Even create a “don’t do” list to make sure that low-value activities do not sneak back into your workload.
• Say “no, not yet” to shiny objects (flavours of the month) and interesting, but less important, activities to avoid overwhelm and loss of focus.  Reserve some capacity for inevitable surprises during the year.
• Create a direct line of sight so each level sees its own contribution to the organization’s larger purpose and priorities. Make this visible and revisit it at a regular tempo.
• Go and see – get out of your office, talk to people and see for yourself what is happening in the work, instead of relying on reports and hearsay.
• Apply Lean thinking to your own work.  Many leaders have freed up 10-12 hours a week by applying the principles of Lean Time Management to their own work.  How can you support your team if you can’t keep up, yourself?

Eliminate wastes that only Leaders can eliminate to create flow in the work:

• To avoid under- or over-delivering, conduct Voice of Client exercises to learn what your clients really need instead of what you think they need.  Stay connected to them to adjust when necessary.
• To avoid false starts, create better clarity when you make requests – next time you make a request, state the desired output, and most importantly, the desired outcome of the task, in case there is an easier, faster way to reach it.  “I need you to update the TPS report by close of business tomorrow SO THAT we have fresh data to decide if we are on track to meet our quarterly target.”  When receiving a request for your team, make sure that the desired output and outcome are clear before investing effort.
• Provide feedback on documents/products in development in quick huddle meetings (physical or virtual) of several reviewers at the same time instead of individually by email.  Email feels faster in the moment, but results in more back and forth.  A five-minute huddle can save days of time and hours of effort.
• Most processes traverse multiple silos or functional islands. Ensure that you have created strong and effective “bridges” to these other islands so that information and work flows smoothly across them. 
• Build trust across the islands to reduce the amount of effort and time spent in over-documenting and CYA, ultimately making it comfortable and expected to work face-to-face with them to make things flow better and to learn and improve together.
• Identify and solve the causes of the top types of failure demand consuming your team’s capacity (many teams spend 20 to 50% of their capacity on this).
• Apply Lean thinking to spend less time in meetings but get more value out of them. Some leadership groups have reduced the number of items in their meetings by 50%.   

Creating the Conditions and Systems for Continuous Improvement:

• Build psychological safety and trust so that problems are not punished, but learned from, and people are willing to identify and solve problems instead of hiding them.
• Use visual management for your own work, and ensure that your unit’s core processes are visible so that everyone can learn and adjust instead of working in the dark.
• Create a regular tempo of improvement huddles to make improvement part of how we do the work, developing new habits, and preventing small problems from becoming big problems.

In this content area, we cover:

How to:

• Free up your own capacity to lead transformation. Target: free up 10-12 hours of your time every week.
• Understand the role of the leader in a Lean transformation, and create your own “Leader Standard Work”, or a set of routine, simple behaviours to create and sustain continuous improvement in your organization.
• Understand the critical success factors of successful Lean transformations and learn to tangibly apply many of these principles to make continuous improvement a natural part of life in your areas of responsibility.
• Create trust and psychological safety.
• Apply the High Performing Teams Model.
• Create and maintain accountability in a Lean Environment and manage skeptics.
• Understand the “wastes” or non-value activities that leaders can control directly, and how to free up capacity by eliminating these wastes.
• Create continuous improvement routines, habits and systems.
• What does the day of a Lean Leader look like?  Both for Leaders of teams and Leaders of Leaders.
• Create improved alignment and free up the team’s capacity to make improvements by applying the principles of Lean Strategic Planning.  
• Identify and solve the causes of the top types of failure demand consuming your team’s capacity (many teams spend 20 to 50% of their capacity on this).
• Apply Lean thinking to spend less time in meetings but get more value out of them. 
• Create a tangible, specific, and practical plan to immediately start implementing these workshop topics directly into your own work and the work of your teams.