Articles by: Ankit Patel
02/13/14 by Ankit Patel | daily management, lean culture | No Comments »
Most people seem to have a love hate relationship with meetings. Not many people seem to like them and sometimes they seem to be a waste of time. That’s usually because meetings are done wrong. Daily meetings are meetings that happen 3x a week to 10x a week and are really more focused on the day to day running of a business. There are a slew of types of meetings and I want to focus on the 7 things you didn’t know about running a daily meeting.
#1 The main purpose of a meeting is to understand a situation in the same way
No matter how you run your daily meetings the main purpose is to make sense of what is going on the same way. Working with a pediatric MRI scan team we found that there were 6-7 different groups there were all interacting with each other to get an MRI completed. What we found was that these groups never coordinated with each other to optimize the flow and so creating a daily meeting for them was critical to be able to see a complete picture of everyone’s challenges. Once everyone has the same understanding of a situation it’s much easier to move forward together in a coordinated way. The pediatric MRI team reduced the wait time for the kids from about 1 hour to under 10 minutes with in a 1.5 month span. This also applies to smaller teams. It helps set a managers expectation with how to run the operations.
#2 Focus your meetings on one or two keystone metrics
Daily meetings should have a purpose however many times managers will focus on too much. Be sure to focus on one to two key items that are the most important to you at the time. From our pediatric MRI unit their key stone metric was patient wait time. They had other metrics as well but the primary focus was on improving the wait time. Once it was fixed then the focused moved to on schedule adherence (percentage of scans that start on time). Another example would be a sales team that has daily meetings might track progress on potential customers. Keep it simple and remember that too much information can overwhelm a team.
#3 Keep it 70% positive
Most daily meetings tend of focus on what is wrong and over time it can really disengage a staff. Focusing on mostly negatives actually put people into a stress response and people tend to disengage. Many times people describe the angst they feel going to the meetings. Research indicates that have a 3:1 ratio of positive to negative comments (or better impacts the team’s performance. There will be days where the meetings will be focused on problems but the majority of the time try to build on what’s working well. A way to practice this is to do an intro roundtable that asks everyone what is going well with them or their work. Afterwards then review your key stone metrics and talk about what is going well with them. Spend the remainder of the meeting talking about what could be better and next steps.
#4 Create a safe learning space
Daily meetings are there for you to improve what you are doing and part of improving is to learn. To create a safe space you need to listen to the inputs from your people, praise publicly, discipline privately, and be a coach. Fear should not be associated with the daily meetings. Mistakes may happen and remember that mistakes are part of the learning process.
#5 Stay standing
To keep focused the meetings should be held in a relevant place and standing. This way you are focused and don’t waste time. It also helps with keeping people engaged and awake during those early morning meetings. Usually having a visual board with key stone metrics is a great place to do your daily meetings.
#6 Accept people’s comments no matter how uncomfortable it makes you as a manager
This is important because it ties into several of the other items. As a manger it’s difficult to take feedback but it can build a large amount of trust with your team. Trust tends to be a key factor in improving your culture and you can help with leverage the most from people. If there are comments that are disrespectful or out of line then addressing it outside of the meeting is usually the appropriate way to deal with insubordination. As a manager be careful to know the difference between insubordination and your own insecurities.
#7 Meeting times should be variable with a cap of 30 minutes
When you schedule your daily meetings realize that you may finish quicker some day’s vs others. Shoot for a 10-15 minute meeting but allow for some overage on the days where you need more conversation.
Daily meetings are a great tool for organizations to use to help run the business and when done properly they can change the course of your organization. You can create a powerful culture and meet your expectations when you do daily meetings properly.
01/30/14 by Ankit Patel | continuous improvement | No Comments »
In The Continuous Improvement (Lean) Paradox Part I we talked about how only 2% of companies that start Lean get the results they expected. In part II we’ll talk about bridging the gap between expectations and results. We talked about the reasons why Lean efforts fail and not a single reason was around the fact that there wasn’t enough technical training or knowledge. Every reason was a behavioral reason. Weather it was senior management not supporting the effort or the current culture rejected the new culture. The common theme is that there is an “immune” response with the organization that prevents the organization from changing. The immune responses are actions that individuals and/or groups are taking that go directly against what is needed for change to happen. These are usually not intentional and do not have bad intent they are however very powerful reactions.
I’ll share with you a story from my own personal experiences. The director of engineering (Ed) and the director of operations (Bill) were working together to redo the returns process for a large multinational computer company. The director of engineering wanted to do a traditional design approach based on existing equipment and traditional design constraints. The Vice President (Sandy) who was Ed’s and Bill’s boss decided that the teams should use a Lean process to design the new facilities. Bill was bought into the process and brought in consultants to help with the transformation. Ed pretended to go along with the process however he had his team keep pursing the traditional designs with the assumption that the new process would fail. Ed made this decision to mitigate the risks just in case the Lean process didn’t work. By doing this the engineering team would have been spread thin and would have really hurt the Lean design efforts. This is an example of an immune response. Ed unintentionally was sabotaging the Lean process because of his concerns and wanting to mitigate risks. If the new process didn’t work as planned or if timeline wasn’t meet then Ed felt he would have been blamed. So you can see it is very easy to trigger one’s immune response. We ended up having a conversation with Sandy, Ed, and Bill all in the room and once we found out what Ed was doing. He was assured that he wouldn’t be blamed and to trust the process. After this conversation Ed was did not impede the progress of the team and eventually became a champion of Lean once he saw the results.
The immune response can happen at any level from the line employee to the CEO and board of directors. So if it’s something that occurs at all levels of the organization then how do we overcome it to have a successful Lean transformation? Here are a list of tools to help and in later parts of this series we’ll go into detail about each of these tools.
- Co-create the future together with as many people as possible involved so they feel that they have a voice.
- Create a common vision or burning platform to help align everyone. A common vision is much more sustainable in the long run.
- Robert Kegan’s book Immunity to Change has a fantastic protocol on how to address these changes and is great form an individual level.
- Base progress on actions and results vs. rhetoric and procedures.
- The faster you can implement with a large group of people the higher the probability of success.
- Kaizen events will have the highest rate of success for you when implementing.
- Use our tool on where to start a Lean initiative and rate several areas to find where you should start your projects to gain momentum.
- Have an outsider presence to help with the process of change. It is very difficult to change things are very close to us so having some outside influence helps with objectivity.
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01/23/14 by Ankit Patel | continuous improvement, Uncategorized | No Comments »
The goal for many companies is the always improve their business. So naturally this mean some sort of continuous improvement program being launched. Let’s take a look at some statistics on Lean or other Continuous Improvement methods and how they actually look in companies.
This means there are several reasons why we can’t sustain a continuous improvement culture. Anecdotally you can see this in action when you go to a company that has a continuous improvement “flavor of the month.” Eventually teams realize that this too shall pass and they will hurt your chances form making improvement in the future. Another example is when you have a portion of the organization that is excited but a Lean effort only to have it stopped by a senior manager or a special circumstance that stops the culture in its tracks. While a company might say they are committed to continuous improvement they are really expressing behaviors that are keep them from changing anything at all. The paradox is that we can generally agree continuous improvement is good but our behaviors don’t demonstrate that.
An analogy to think about is your immune system. Your immune system is designed to keep you healthy and attack any foreign body that enters your blood stream to maintain homeostasis. Similarly a company will have an “immune response” to a new Lean or continuous improvement effort and there will be people who will consciously or unconsciously try to keep the company where it currently is for any multitude of reasons. This is a natural reaction to change and should be viewed as just part of the process. Some of the common reasons why Lean efforts fail include:
- Lack of execution
- No support form senior leadership
- The culture didn’t change and rejected a Lean culture
- Lack of Support
- The “immune response” can manifest as appearing that you don’t have the right people on board
So here you have an organization that has fine-tuned to do exactly what it does in its current state and then you introduce Lean and all of the sudden your organization has an immune response (unintentionally) to bring it back to homeostasis. This helps to get a better idea of why a Lean or contentious improvement culture is hard to create. You have a willingness to do things differently but you have this entire machine and natural response that exists to keep things the same. In the next article we will talk about how you can diagnose what your immune response might be.
For a more in depth discussion of this and other topics be sure to sign up for our conference calls
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01/01/14 by Ankit Patel | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Happy new year! This is the time of the year where you might ask yourself what can I do differently? How Can I make the change that I want from my business, my life, my health? What ever it is you are trying to accomplish, keep positive and surround yourself with people who will support you.
12/18/13 by Ankit Patel | Transformation | No Comments »
In recent posts we talked about blockages people get and how to get them through those blockages when doing a Lean transformation – Getting People to See Opportunity for Improvement Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. We dove deep into how to minimize blockages and the common archetypes you might see during a transformation effort. One thing we didn’t talk about as much is how quickly to move through a transformation and how do you know if you need to slow down or speed up? First off let’s define speed of implementation.
Speed of Change = (% [Unique Participants/Total People in the Department/Organization involved in projects] per Month * Average % [Time per each Unique Person] per Month)*100
This will give you a score from 0-100 and here is how you read the results
- 0- <5 You are not going to be doing enough to make a significant change in your culture and have a high chance of the Lean transformation failing in the long run
- 5- <10 You are doing well but might be moving a bit slow and depending on your turnover rate you may never get full momentum during your Lean Transformation.
- 10-25 This is a sweet spot. If you can keep at this pace monthly you will have highest probability of success with a Lean Transformation
- >25-35 You are doing well but might be moving too fast and you might be taking too many resources away from running your business
- >35-100 You are dedicated too many resources and while change can be fast you may not have enough resources to run your daily operations.
These are guidelines and a place for you to start to think about how you want to roll out your transformation. You could have once a month 2-3 day event with everyone and just shut down your business and get some work done, or you could decide to involve about 1/4th the staff in projects that take up 3/4 of the weeks of the month, or you could decide to involve 1/2 your people for 2 weeks out of the month in resolving challenges. You can mix it up from month to month and depending on your size you may be closer to the lower green band (large organizations) or to the upper green band (small organizations). The green band will gives you criteria to follow in getting saturation for Lean in your organization. Saturation means that once you have enough people believing in what you are doing then you hit a tipping point where it becomes easier to do Lean and much of your resistance goes away. Where do you currently fall into the chart? How has it been working for you?
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12/04/13 by Ankit Patel | Uncategorized | No Comments »
In the last two parts we talked about what you need for change – Getting to See Opportunities for Improvement Part I and also about the common Archetypes that may be resistant to the change – Getting to See Opportunities for Improvement Part II. In this part we’ll talk what you can do to help get people unstuck and moving forward.
During your implementation of a Lean Six Sigma approach you’ll need to have several vehicles for implementation.
- Projects – Usually 1-12+ months in length, led by a project manager and then implemented by the team.
- Short Burst Events (Kaizen events) – Usually 1-5 days in length and the objective is to build a cross-functional teams that will implement a solution during the event. These have the highest rate of success if done properly.
- Long Burst Events – Usually 4-15 weeks in length. These allow for a cross-functional team with a facilitator and draw out the short burst event over the course of a few weeks. This is great if you don’t have the time to have 6-10 people stop their work for a week.
The second part we’ll take a look at is the ongoing influences that you have to help move the change forward.
- Daily management – You want a minimum of 1x day meeting with your team to review performance. In most of the meetings 70-80% of the conversation should be around strengths and what’s going well. The reason is that if you focus on the negatives it can put people into a stress response and their performance, engagement, and productivity drops.
- Coaching for compassion – Most managers will take the approach of “I’m going to coach them to do what I want.” This may be difficult to buy into but that is a great way to create more of a stress response and shutting down your people. Instead coaching for compassion actually ask the question of what they want. It may or may not be completely focused in the area you work however when you show a caring interest in your employees they become much more productive.
- Coaching for skills – If you start with the coaching for compassion mindset first the coaching for skills portion will become easier. Let your employee tell you what they need development with and go from there.
- Mindfulness training – This is more for the manager but it’s basically a sense of awareness. Part of being a good leader through the change is to be emotionally self-aware and socially aware of the dynamics at play. Doing awareness practices and mindfulness practices daily can help you in this arena and catch potential pitfalls quicker. For instance you might be able to pick up on a political saboteur like Payton quicker if you are aware and notice changes in behavior.
In conjunction with the implementation techniques and ongoing processes there are supplemental tools to help you navigate the change.
- Network analysis – This is a tool that helps you find the nodes of influence in your organization. It’s a survey that is sent out asking the question “who do you go to for help.” From that question you can start to develop a map of where the influence points are. This is critical to know since those are the people you will want bought into the new process.
- Collaborative vs. Directive – Have the understanding that if you want to empower your people you need to give them the tools, resources, and space to solve the challenges. Don’t expect the solution to be 100% what you expect it to be. When you have many people look at a problem there are bound to be things that you didn’t consider so let the team have space and try to create an environment of collaboration instead of being directive when it comes to solving problems.
- Social Capital – This includes but no limited to t-shirts, posters, awards, stories, symbols, and other items that are related to the new culture you are trying to create. The social capital is a critical element to help influence the change.
Let’s take a look at the the different people and how you can influence them through the techniques and tools above.
Pat
Pat is the person who has been at the company for many years and likes it Pat’s way. Pat doesn’t like change and feels uncertain as to what the change might mean for Pat’s job. Here are some things you can do to help Pat through the transition.
- If you don’t know who your Pats are then doing mindfulness/awareness training for yourself will help with finding these people.
- There is a trust issue here so coaching with compassion is very helpful in these situations.
- Get Pat involved with projects maybe as a team member at first to get Pat’s feet wet and to give Pat a voice in the new process.
- Be sure to praise Pat publicly and correct privately so you don’t demotivate Pat.
- Do a network analysis on your organization and see if Pat is a center of influence. Usually the vocal Pat’s are the ones who usually are the center of influence. If Pat is then be sure to include Pat on as many projects as possible. The best events are usually the short burst events where there can be open real time conversation on different ideas and people use facts and data to support their stance vs. feelings.
- If Pat is not a center of influence then find out who might be and make them champions of the new process. They may be able to influence Pat.
Jessie
Jessie is a person who isn’t learning as quickly as everyone else and feels very uncomfortable in the situation. Jessie could also be a Pat if Jessie starts to resist the changes. Dealing with Jessie is the easiest but it can be difficult to find Jessie since they aren’t as obvious.
- Mindfulness/Awareness training is important to be able to detect a Jessie.
- Coaching with compassion tends to open people. If you coach properly then people tend to open up and Jessie might tell you they are having challenges.
- If still don’t know who your Jessie’s are then make sure you have a good learning plan in place. Make sure you are tracking people’s involvement with the new processes and projects. If you can also assess their core knowledge and have them demonstrate some of the knowledge. Having your employees participate in projects, short burst events, or long burst events are a great place for learning to happen for Jessie’s as well as other employees.
- Similar to Pat find out if Jessie is a center of influence. If Jessie is make sure you are giving extra attention to Jessie so that you can build skills and confidence.
Payton
Payton isn’t as common as the other two but if you have a Payton in your organization then it can be very difficult to get any change to happen. The best way to overcome a Payton is to have overwhelming support. The nice thing about a Lean Six Sigma initiative is that if done correctly the results speak for themselves. Here are some ways to overcome Payton
- Being aware and mindful is important to notice if you have a Payton in you organization.
- The best way to overcome a Payton is to make sure the CEO is on board with the change initiative and to get support from others by showing results.
- With a Lean Six Sigma effort be sure to start small and in an area you have the highest chance for success. Take The Lean Way Consulting Assessment to find out how likely you are for success in a particular area.
- Most approaches to deal with Payton are a bit more individualized and the three above points will get you started.
For a more in depth discussion of this and other topics be sure to sign up for our conference calls
For questions about anything in this article Contact Us
11/20/13 by Ankit Patel | lean, Strengths based Lean | No Comments »
In the last post (Getting People to See Opportunities for Improvement Part I) we talked about the basic process of getting people to see opportunities. The framework is as follows:
- Big picture and emotional tie – Have a big picture direction in mind and have an emotional tie in by building a common aspirational vision or a burning platform. Burning platforms is effective usually only once or twice where as having an aspirational vision is much more sustainable.
- Explain what you are doing – Be sure to build how the big picture can be realized with the plan to get there
- Awareness training and framing – Before you can start to make changes you have to have awareness by doing training. The training should teach how to frame challenges in a new way then previously.
- Blockages – The highest hardest part about the process is getting people from awareness to implementing.
There are several types of blockages and instead of mentioning all the many types of blockage with each of their nuances. Instead we are going to talk about the themes that you may see as a manager. I’ve put the typical archetypes
Pat
Pat has been on the job for about 15 years and has seen the company grow from being a small operation to being in a national company. Pat first hears about a new initiative called Lean Six Sigma and all sorts of emotions are involved. Pat is concerned about her job changing and she is worried that she may not be as valuable in her new job. On top of that Pat is afraid of the uncertainty because she doesn’t know what will happen to her during this process. Pat has heard about Lean Six Sigma and even though management has said they are safe Pat doesn’t feel safe. Because of the fear and concern she is always pushing back on anything new that comes because of the Lean Six Sigma program. Pat hasn’t been included in any of the projects as of yet and Pat is not that excited in participating.
Jessie
Jessie is new and willing to try new things however Jessie feels stress because Jessie is not learning the material as fast as other people. Jessie went to the training class but doesn’t seem to understand what to do. Jessie wants to learn but there doesn’t seem to be a good avenue to help Jessie learn that fits Jessie’s learning preferences.
Payton
Payton is a person who you won’t find as often in organizations. Payton is someone who feels that they have something to gain by preventing the new Lean Six Sigma imitative to move forward. Payton could be your boss, your employee, or your peer. Payton can be the hardest blockage to release in your organization and you have to really assess what kind of culture you have in place. If you have a political cultural where people play power positioning games than you can probably expect there to be at least one Payton. Incidentally your odds of success for Lean Six Sigma go down if you do have a political culture.
Potential Solutions
During your implementation phase you’ll want to have multiple approaches to change. For our example we’ll use a Lean Six Sigma initiative as an example. Here are all the implementation techniques to consider:
- Project work with PMs and teams (1-12+ months)
- Burst Kaizen events with a group of people working together and dedicated for a short period of time to solve a problem (1-5 days)
- Long Kaizen events which are similar to burst Kaizen events in structure but are spread out over a few weeks (4-13 weeks)
- Daily management meetings to make sure changes are being adopted and that you are coaching your people during the process (ongoing)
- Coaching with compassion vs. coaching for skills (ongoing)
- Mindfulness training (ongoing)
- Influencing the influencer – finding the informal leaders in the organization and getting their buy-in to the process.
We’ll continue with how to use all these tools together in part III.
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