Fixing Team Issues With Continuous Improvement

Welcome to Lean Agile Management Podcast - a place where we talk with the thought leaders and top-tier management consultants about Lean Agile transformation, answer manager’s questions and discuss the hottest topics in management & productivity. Welcome to the LAMP! Are you tired of putting out the fires of your team issues just to see them cycle back? If so, you might be extinguishing the symptoms instead of eliminating the root cause of your problems. Today we will shine the light on building and sustaining the culture of the continuous improvement process and how this key concept of Lean philosophy can help you solve the team management issues. We are joined today by a professional Lean coach, developer of Kanban foundation courses, and a certified service management consultant, Robert Falkowitz. Today he is tuning in from Switzerland to talk with us about continuous improvement in the context of team management. Skip to Comments > Video Transcript: D: Hi Robert, welcome to the show! R: Hi Dima, thanks for inviting me. How are you today? D: I’m doing great, how are you? R: Good, very well. D: I’m glad you could make it, thanks for tuning in today. R: It’s my pleasure. D: So I know you have really serious experience helping teams understand and implement Lean and Kanban, you’ve worked with countless teams in different industries but why did you decide to coach Lean in the first place? Could we start there? R: Before I got involved in Lean and Kanban in a very serious way, I did a lot of work in Service Management. What I’ve found and what most people in the field find is that it’s very difficult to justify the effort that you put into the improving the way in which you manage services. And I found that the reason for this was that most organizations have problems in the way in which they deliver and manage services; not because of the Service Management aspect but because of something much more fundamental: how their teams are organized and how they manage their work, how they manage the flow of work or don’t manage the flow of work, for that matter. R: And so, I said, in order to be able to help my customers better, it was important to help them improve where you could make most noticeable improvements and then afterward we can come back and fine-tune it with Service Management improvements. And that’s how I got started with Lean and Kanban. D: Would you say there are some general patterns or issues in the way we think about team management that the teams you’ve been working with could share? R: You know, there are a lot of differences from one sector to another sector, especially in terms of regulatory requirements. There will be differences in terms of the size of the organization, whether they are located at one site or multiple sites. There are differences in terms of the background, the culture of the organization and how it works. So every case is somewhat different and you have to be agile in adapting to services that you provide in order to help organizations do a better job at doing their work. D: Would you say that there are some biggest ultimate roadblocks or productivity myths that specifically prevent teams from becoming a high performing team? Well, what I’ve found is when organizations try to improve the way in which they work by layering on more controls, what they’re doing is fact, very frequently, exactly the opposite of what they intend to do. Now, it is difficult because people have grown up in believing that the best way to improve the way in which they work is to manage better, to check up more, to control more, to have better reports and to be able to act better on those reports in order to make decisions. And very frequently this is exactly the opposite of what the organizations need to do. So you’ve got this big change in the mentality of people, trying to get them to think in terms of doing less in order to improve the way in which they perform, rather than doing more.