Series: Executing a Kaizen Event

If you read this title and were immediately reminded of that ONE miserable project with a bad team (or team member), then you will probably be responding to this post. But, this post isn’t about bad team members or how to avoid them. Instead, it is about how to select a group of people that can fill the roles required by a project’s scope (be sure you read the post: Kaizen is not Japanese for Free Lunch) effectively and increase the probability of success.

For the sake of discussion, the selection of a Kaizen team will form the foundation for my thoughts. After the project scope has been defined and the project charter has been developed, the next step to leading a successful Kaizen Event is team selection. Thinking through all of the tasks that may be required to achieve the goals of the project and making a list of the skills that will be needed to accomplish those goals is a great way to start. Listing the skills first will allow you to keep your mind open and may lead to selecting a team member that you never would have considered otherwise.

Once the necessary skills have been identified, it’s time to start thinking of individuals that may have a desire to be involved with the team. Remember, you can’t force someone to participate passionately and you can’t fake desire, so it is rarely beneficial to force someone to be involved. Match the individuals that have the needed skills with those that have the desire, and the selection of the team will usually be easy.

An often overlooked team member is the “ringer”. I use this term to refer to the individual that comes from a completely unrelated part of the organization and knows very little of the processes that the team will be working to improve. It might seem strange that I recommend including one or two of these individuals, but these folks often turn into the real gems of the group. They ask the most important question of all… WHY? They are not encumbered by knowledge so they ask questions that no one else on the team would even think to ask. They see those forms of waste that others have grown to accept as part of the process and they challenge the rest of the team. Be sure to encourage them. The idea they bring to the table may seem crazy, but the idea that surfaces because of their off the wall suggestion may be the next “BIG ONE”.

A quick note on team size: my magic number is 6-8 team members and 1 team leader for Kaizen Events. If you have a co leader, be sure to count them as a team member. Any more and the team becomes less nimble; any less and you lose the critical mass needed to generate creativity. I realize that project scope and organizational culture is going to impact this significantly, but in a perfect world, 6-8 is an ideal team size.

If I could only pick one thing to represent the largest mistake a change agent can make when implementing Lean or any other significant organizational change, it would probably be failing to manage the cultural change.

All too often, we fail to consider the impact that a change that will have on the culture of an organization prior to launch.  Culture is essentially the sum of all core beliefs, convictions, principles, habits, history and social norms that drive organizational behavior; and every organization has a unique one.  If we carefully consider the culture and how a change will be received within the context of it, we can implement countermeasures to address any foreseen issues and tailor our launch plan based on our assessment and observations.

For instance, if an organizational and cultural assessment identifies a strong resistance to ideas that come from outside the organization or from non tenured employees, we may need to include employees with more seniority in each improvement activity and may even need to limit the number of employees with less experience in the initial events/projects.  Additionally, if our plan called for the use of outside consultants, we may need to lengthen our implementation timeline to allow internal champions and leaders be indentified and more extensively trained.  This approach would allow us to reduce our dependence on outside consultants and resulting pushback.

Alternately, if the assessment reveals a culture that thrives on highly energetic leadership, these same employees may be the wrong individuals to include in our initial events because they may be less likely to try new things. 

For another scenario, consider a cultural assessment that reveals a failed change within the past 5 years (such as a false start at a lean implementation).  Employees of this organization will likely have a difficult time accepting that the proposed change will be reinforced by management (flavor of the month syndrome).  After all, if the last change was allowed to die, what reason do we have to believe that this effort will be any different?  In this case, the pre launch communication plan will need to address the history directly and honestly and small wins early on will be needed to gain employee support.  Significant effort should be devoted to sustaining early changes as well to prove commitment.  Advertising these small wins will also be helpful.

Whatever the history and cultural of an organization holds, the change agent must be careful to study it and develop a culture plan that helps employees understand and embrace the change.