Category: Developing People

  • Coach’s Corner: How To Put People First Using Lean Practices

    Coach’s Corner: How To Put People First Using Lean Practices

    Not only will putting people first lead to better performance, but it will also make your organization a more attractive employer. People want good jobs doing meaningful work where they can thrive, which you can help them achieve when you deliberately put people first using lean practices with supportive leadership behaviors.

  • Why it’s Better to Focus on Value, Not Waste

    Why it’s Better to Focus on Value, Not Waste

    Many organizations primarily focus their lean efforts on eliminating waste. While nobody wants waste in their value stream, it would be better to focus on increasing value. Emphasizing value creation reduces the risk that you will unintentionally remove value-creating activities while searching for waste. Emphasizing value creation also ensures that you deliver more value through…

  • Creating the Conditions for Optimal Learning in the Pursuit of Mastery: Lessons from Hiking

    Creating the Conditions for Optimal Learning in the Pursuit of Mastery: Lessons from Hiking

    Enabling people to develop their skills and capabilities is essential for high performance in organizations. In the short and long term, it can enable people to perform their best through their pursuit of Mastery…. To optimize learning and growth in the pursuit of Mastery, we need to create the conditions for people to be stretched…

  • Enabling People to Strive to Fulfill Their Full Potential Through Lean in Practice

    Enabling People to Strive to Fulfill Their Full Potential Through Lean in Practice

    Organizations should strive to create the conditions for people to meet their full potential. For one, it is the right thing to do – it is the respectful way to treat people. And for any work that requires creativity, which is a significant percentage of the work being done, you get better performance from people…

  • How to Show Respect During a Pandemic

    How to Show Respect During a Pandemic

    If the foundation of showing respect for people is understanding their current situation and readiness for growth, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs offers a framework that can help you assess it… Lean thinking is a system designed to support people who have had their basic and psychological needs met and can focus on their self-fulfillment needs……

  • Leading with Respect by Enabling People to Grow and Be Personally Satisfied with Better Performance Through Lean Thinking

    Leading with Respect by Enabling People to Grow and Be Personally Satisfied with Better Performance Through Lean Thinking

    Lean is a system that develops people while doing and improving the work. Continuous improvement efforts enable people to be creative while they are growing and developing. Lean product and process development it is a system designed to make creative people more productive while effectively working together. People and products are simultaneously developed with people…

  • Better Design Reviews, Better Products

    Design reviews are a common process in product and process development. They can enable knowledge sharing across an organization and prevent the same mistakes from happening across different groups. But not all design reviews are effective and how and when they are conducted varies widely across different companies, and even within a company.

  • What are the key traits I should look for in a potential Chief Engineer?

    The chief engineer as practiced within lean product and process development (LPPD) is a countermeasure to problems that are both inherent to developing products and to the organizational design in which it is used. For example, the fundamental purpose of product development is to develop a product that customers will value, which is likely solving…