What is Lean Thinking in Leadership?
A concept originating from the Toyota Production System, Lean Thinking refers to optimizing your processes to reduce waste and improve the value you offer to customers. While ‘lean’ is often associated with operational improvements, it is also now commonly referred to in growing businesses – especially in leadership.
Lean Thinking in leadership boils down to effectively strategizing for cutting costs and increasing the efficiency of a business. It’s about building a mindset that focuses on continuous improvement vs perfection, empathy, and strategic alignment of all departments. Lean leaders can often be seen encouraging a culture of building together by developing sustainable processes.
What are the key principles of Lean Thinking in leadership?
Some of the key principles that help leaders develop lean thinking include:
- Value identification – Lean Thinking starts by identifying the value that truly drives the business. This includes looking into both the customer’s and the team’s goals to prioritize work that drives tangible results toward an overarching mission. For example, leaders focus on building product features that customers actually use and want, as compared to those that may have hypothetical use cases or could add complexity to their journeys.
- Waste reduction – The idea of running lean groups waste into categories like overproduction, waiting, and defects. These are all aspects that detract from the value identified above and are often used by leaders to identify inefficiencies in workflows. This also helps businesses with better decision-making to maximize resources. For example, leaders who help their teams streamline their work process instead of introducing not-so-important steps into the workflow that add to administrative time.
- Continuous improvement – Lean Thinking promotes Kaizen, which is all about continuous improvement. Leaders can use the concept to promote a growth mindset in their teams, helping them upskill or re-skill frequently. For example, initiating feedback sessions to identify bottlenecks and find solutions, or hosting workshops frequently to help them learn new skills that add value to the work they do.
- Mutual respect and trust – A big driver of Lean Thinking is being able to respect and trust those around you. Leaders who are able to create environments where individuals feel valued, heard, and empowered, are able to foster stronger team collaboration. This helps bring together the workforce to work more efficiently and effectively.
- Root cause analysis – Lean leaders learn to solve problems more proactively by identifying the root cause instead of simply treating symptoms. This includes the ‘5 whys’ technique where you question a problem multiple times to get to the heart of the issue. The approach helps leaders identify underlying challenges and create lasting solutions. For example, for a project that consistently misses deadlines, the root cause analysis could result in issues like unrealistic timelines, resource shortage, lack of project management tools, inefficient approval workflows, etc.
How to implement Lean Thinking as a Leader?
Changing how you function as an individual or a leader can be difficult. But it’s not impossible if you approach it with more practical steps:
- Map your value stream – Conduct a thorough audit of what you offer to customers and the workflow to deliver it. Analyze each step of the process to visualize value and waste. This helps identify inefficiencies, and opportunity gaps and work with the team to focus on only high-impact practices.
- Set up regular feedback cycles – Continuous improvement is only possible when you schedule periodic reviews with the team and your customers. Assess what went well and what could be improved to create an effective action plan.
- Spend time with the team – To foster trust and respect, leaders need to understand what’s happening on the ground level. This is why scheduling time to meet with the team and work collaboratively with them becomes important. ‘Doing the work’ with the team can often help identify new opportunities and gaps in current thinking, enabling informed decisions.
- Plan short-term projects – Identify a pressing issue with a team or a process. Set up a mini project wherein everyone gets to work alongside to find solutions, implement them, map improvements, and celebrate successes. This creates a growth mindset through collaboration.
- Communicate proactively – Leaders require working ‘on’ the business more often than ‘in’ it. That’s why setting up regular communication amongst team members is important – it could be simple quarterly achievements sent through WooCommerce emails or messages that keep everyone in the loop.
Conclusion
Irrespective of the industry you are in, the markets are rapidly evolving, presenting new challenges for both businesses and their customers.
Leaders who adopt Lean Thinking are able to create companies that can remain more agile and build resilient teams that can embrace changes and turn them into opportunities for growth.
While lean thinking takes time to understand, these are the leaders who inspire their teams to take ownership, be proactive, and become a part of the vision for the company’s success.
It’s not just about following a few practices, but about committing to them and turning them into a lifestyle that focuses on sustainable growth.
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