Last Wednesday, Dr. Greg Jacobson and I gave a webinar for Gemba Academy titled Leadership Behaviors that Create a Culture of Continuous Improvement.
You can view the recording via GembaAcademy.com.
Greg and I came up with a list of 25 leader behaviors that are important for CEOs and senior leaders, middle managers, and front-line supervisors alike. There are probably more than 25, but this was our starting point. Leave a comment if you have one to add to the list or if you have a story about one of these key behaviors.
25 Leadership Behaviors
- State your belief in Kaizen
- Explain why Kaizen is important
- Empower, but be a servant leader
- Participate in Kaizen yourself
- Ask for Kaizen ideas (and opportunities)
- Don't require everything to be an event or a project
- Emphasize small ideas
- Ask for more than just cost savings
- Look at the process instead of blaming people
- Keep asking for Kaizen
- Don't hide ideas (be transparent)
- Quickly respond to every idea
- Work to find something to implement
- Turn “bad ideas” into better ideas
- Coach, but don't nitpick
- Help people see the bigger picture (don't suboptimize)
- Turn complaints into ideas
- Help create time for people to take action
- Help share and spread ideas
- Don't forget the “SA” in PDSA
- Don't overdo the “P” in PDSA
- Be prepared to fail (and learn from failure)
- Be careful with rewards and quotas
- Give people recognition for ideas (effort, not just results)
- Compile the results and celebrate them
Our slides:
On the topics of leadership and continuous improvement, please check out more about KaiNexus and learn more about the new companion edition to my Shingo Research-Award winning book Healthcare Kaizen:
- The Executive Guide to Healthcare Kaizen (coming later this month in paperback and Kindle).
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Strong list!
I’d suggest tweaking #24 to “Recognize people for their efforts, ideas, participation and results” or just plain “Recognize people.”
The brain science shows that acknowledging people for any actions in the right direction help them stay focused. The acknowledgement also puts them in a quieter, more positive brain state. See “Give an ‘A’ for Effort”–which is my latest blog post.
It’s also important for leaders to role model. However, your list is already long and robust so it may not be worth adding. If the list is too long, it may be too overwhelming.
Liz – Yes, that’s the intent behind the list… something got lost in making the list items really brief.
A list of 25 is probably already overwhelming. We don’t expect people to remember all 25, of course… I had a good suggestion to group them up into a list of 4 or 5 categories perhaps, or max 7, that people could actually remember.
But I think the list did the job for the webinar, at least.
Skills vs behaviors vs principles. We need to paint a complete picture.
For example: Principle: I respect people
Behavior: I spend regular time each day (week) developing the skills and abilities of subordinates
Skill: I know how to coach for increased performance The Shingo Prize people talk about this a lot.
My angle on this is that for the typical CEO, what are the vital few skills and behaviors needed to be a successful Lean leader? As you well know, many healthcare organizations doing Lean have delegates running a Lean “program” and after a good start reach a roadblock because the CEO, although supportive, can’t give up certain things like board and community relations, corporate meetings, and the like. So for folks like this, what are the minimum behaviors and skills needed to sustain a successful Lean transformation?
hi Mark,
Its good to see lots of “Kaizen” words. Standardization is the foundation needed for Kaizen. We need to have some points to make the list almost complete..
Turning complaints into ideas is especially powerful – it takes your team from feeling helpless to making them the leader of something they clearly care about. These behaviours are all great things to keep in mind while improving your business processes.
This blog post is arguably a better summary of the webinar than I did!
See link
Thanks to lean-news.com.
A great presentation and a very full list I will use with my leadership team. One addition, and probably woven in the subtext of your presentation, “servant leadership”.
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Great list Mark! I’m going to use it as a pre-flight checklist. I may be late in the game commenting on this post, but never too late I suppose.
On #23 I’m in the midst of rolling out a CI suggestion system here. I totally agree with your opinion on reward systems and the potential for many issues to crop up as identified in your webinar with Greg.
I have decided to go with a reward system. The suggestion system designed here is around these pillars :
1) The suggestion creator will be a part of the implementation team
2) PDSA overview will be conducted with the implementation team prior to implementation (and during)
3) Rewards will be honoured on a monthly basis. All suggestion creator’s will be entered into a draw only after idea is successfully implemented with metrics and monitoring in place
It is the hopes with these 3 pillars that the suggestion system will help counter the negative aspects of a reward system.