During our consulting engagements and training we’re often asked:
How do I convince my leaders and associates to practice lean?
The challenge is often a large mountain to climb. Perhaps the best way to start is to ask a different question. “What does it take for lean to become part of your company’s culture?” The answer begins with a matter of perspective. How do you enable a mass of constituents, hiring managers, recruiters, and business leaders, to see the value lean can bring to the organization?
Lean is a totally different perspective which enables people to solve a problem regardless of how the problem’s been defined. Let’s look at hiring 100 people as a common problem that a recruiter and a hiring manager would share. As a recruiter I might define the problem of meeting my hiring goal as an issue of not having enough quality candidates. From the hiring manager’s perspective, they could care less about my volume of candidates. They just want the one right candidate who’ll continue to generate revenue for the business and help their department achieve the business goals, times 100 of course. So while the two stakeholders have the same problem, they have different perspectives on what the root cause of that problem is.
So, not surprisingly, the solution starts with communication and knowledge sharing for each stakeholder to see the problem through a “lean lens.” We do this in our process optimization and design workshops, as well as when we develop training programs. Utilizing a “voice of the customer” approach, the various stakeholders are gathered to share their common views of the problem, and to discuss potential solutions for the problem through their respective “lenses” or their perceptions.
The other aspect of adopting this method is communication of the value add of going lean. As we have consistently discussed, we, as an HR function, are not as adept at communicating the value of what we contribute through the lens of the businesses we support (money, $, revenue, and $). As we’ll reveal soon with the results of our current healthcare benchmarking study, there are thousands of hours of waste in existence within many healthcare systems’ recruitment practices, but until we begin to equate that waste into dollar amounts, our businesses will not understand our value, or support initiatives such as lean. Our recent webinars have exposed many of you to the concepts of ‘cost of vacancy’ and other techniques to display potential ROI from lean initiatives. There will be more of that to come with the results of the study.
So consider:
- Exercises and events to promote communication of common problems from the lens of all stakeholders
- Communication of the value add of going lean from a business perspective that’s tied to financials.
More on this soon, but in the meantime contact me if you have questions or would like to discuss this further.
. While my first reaction was OMG . . . I quickly diverted my attention to miscellaneous projects that I have had on my 
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