Lean Leadership

During my last several columns, I?ve talked about some of the steps leadership must take to establish, communicate and use lean performance measures. During that discussion, I mentioned the need for leadership to meet regularly to discuss the metrics. This month, I want to expand on that concept.

A past client had several plants around the country that I helped in implementing lean and employee involvement methods. As the first step at each plant, I helped them establish a Steering Committee of senior plant leadership (including labor leadership if the plant had a union) to plan and oversee the lean/employee involvement initiative. During subsequent years, I?d return to do an assessment of each plant?s initiative and give them a grade that would be reported to the vice president of operations.

I started each assessment visit with one question: ?How regularly has your Steering Committee been meeting?? If the answer was some variation of ?Not much,? (e.g., ?When we can,? or ?We?ve been too busy but we plan to get back to them,? or ?We?ve been meeting on an ?as needed? basis.?), the plant got an F and we?d schedule another assessment visit.

Simply put, leadership must plan the lean initiative. Then, leadership must meet regularly to oversee and assess the progress of the lean initiative. It doesn?t matter how small the plant is, how good communications are on a day-to-day basis, or how well the lean initiative is going. Leadership shows what it?s interested in by what it measures and what it takes time to talk about. If leadership is unwilling to regularly take the time to talk about the lean initiative, a clear message is sent to all employees that the lean initiative simply doesn?t matter much.

Let?s go back, then, and go over some of the basics of the makeup and activities of an effective lean leadership team, which I?ll refer to as the Steering committee. First, who should be on the steering committee? Essentially, some or all of the senior leadership at the site, including elected labor officials, should be on the steering committee. At the plant level, this means plant manager, and department heads. At the corporate level, this means president, chief executive office, chief financial officer, vice president of operations, etc.

This isn?t to say that all such managers need to be on the committee. In fact, a Steering Committee need only comprise six to eight members. But those six to eight members need to come from top leadership. (Some companies establish a ?diagonal slice? Steering Committee, but my experience with that approach hasn?t been good. Supervisors and operators aren?t accustomed to telling a plant manager that he or she needs to rethink their position.)

The client for whom I conducted the assessments had Steering Committees at the plants that comprised the plant manager, a union officer (where applicable), the manager of human resources, and other department heads and supervisors from among maintenance, quality, tool and die, accounting, etc. A present client that has its ?corporate office? residing at the plant has the president of the company, the plant manager, a union officer, the managers of quality, maintenance, and customer service on its Steering Committee. Another small client?s Steering Committee comprised the chief executive office, the president, the vice president of operations, the plant manager, and the quality manager. You see, then, that the Steering Committee is a high-powered group of the primary influencing agents in the plant or company. It is not a role that can be delegated.

So, what does this Steering Committee do? First, it plans the initiative. We discussed the manner in which it establishes and uses lean performance measures. It also must develop a calendar of activities that support the lean initiative. When should 5S be started? Who should get trained? How will we train them? When? Once they are trained, how and when will we deploy 5S throughout the organization? How will we make sure that 5S ?sticks?, i.e., how will we audit the 5S performance of work crews and supervisors?

Similar questions must be answered for all the lean tools and concepts that the company intends to employ: quick change, error proofing, visual factory, standard work instructions, autonomous maintenance, value stream mapping, development of cells (where appropriate), line balancing, and development of pull systems.

Second, as stated earlier, the Steering Committee meets regularly to discuss the lean initiative, the activities it encompasses, and the results it is providing. During the early stages of a lean implementation, weekly meetings aren?t too frequent, but no less than two a month. In no case ? ever ? should a Steering Committee meet less than monthly. (As I pointed out in ?How Leadership Uses Lean Metrics? (The Skinny On Lean, September 2010), even monthly isn?t good if you must shoehorn a discussion of metrics and an update of lean activities into the same meeting. You?d need to be sure to leave time enough for both.)

How long should Steering Committee meetings last? If it?s meeting weekly, sixty to ninety minutes should do, although, if you?re just starting the lean initiative, you may find that weekly two-hour meetings aren?t overdoing it. If it?s meeting twice a month, ninety minutes to two hours will likely be enough. If it?s meeting monthly (and this is assuming that the lean initiative is mature), leave enough time for metrics and updates on activities. I?ve found that three hours, sometimes four hours, isn?t too much for monthly meetings.

The quality manager of a past client recently got in touch with me on the unhappy news that his company?s lean initiative had suffered a bit of backsliding. He asked my advice. Right up front, I asked him if the Steering Committee had been meeting. He told me it had been several months since the last one (the Steering Committee had originally been meeting twice monthly). I suggested that he work to get the Steering Committee meeting again regularly; everything else that was needed would flow from that.

I stopped by that plant recently. The quality manager told me he had gotten the Steering Committee to start meeting again. Out of those meetings had come a renewed commitment to 5S audits, a visual factory, and the revisiting of some changes to presses that will impact die change time. The moral of the story is . . . there?s simply no substitute for a committed Steering Committee that meets regularly.

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Rick Bohan is the principal of Chagrin River Consulting, LLC, Chagrin Falls, OH, www.chagrinriverconsulting.com. For questions or comments on this column, contact Rick at 216-409-9056 or rbohan@voyager.net.