GA 041 | FedEx Office’s Lean Journey with Jamie Parker

You're listening to episode 41 with Jamie Parker. Welcome to the Gemba Academy Podcast, the show that's focused on helping individuals and companies achieve breakthrough results using the same continuous improvement principles leveraged by companies such as Toyota Del Monte and the U.S. department of Defense. And now, here's your host, Ron Pereira. Hey there. This is Ron Pereira, and I'd like to welcome you to another edition of the Gemba Academy Podcast. Now, I hope 2015 is off to an amazing start for you, your family and friends, and your organization. Now, I was blessed to be able to disconnect for a bit over the holidays, which was incredible. But man, I was so excited to get back to work. In fact, I Woke up at 4am the morning of January 5th and had so many things racing through my mind, I decided to get up and head into our studio. Now, my Gemba Academy colleagues and I have some big plans for 2015. We have lots of new content planned, and we're also planning to make some major improvements to our website in the very near future. And I'm also extremely excited for this podcast. To be completely honest, we started this show as an experiment. Now, we're always trying to find new ways to add value to the continuous improvement community, and I know I'd have always loved to listen to podcasts and audiobooks. So we decided to give this podcast thing a try last year and the positive feedback we've gotten has been overwhelming. So obviously I do want to thank everyone that listens to this show and watches our Lean and Six Sigma training videos. Over at Gembaacademy.com we appreciate you all more than you can imagine. Now, with all this said, I'm really pumped up for today's episode since we get to visit with one of my all time favorite Lean thinkers, Jamie Parker. Now, Jamie is a district manager for FedEx office and as you'll hear, she's doing some incredible continuous improvement work with her colleagues. Now, during the show, Jamie tells us about their continuous improvement journey, including some success stories and also some learning experiences. Now, I know I learned a lot and I'm confident you will too. Now, show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com 41 and that's 41 for 41. So again, gembapodcast.com 41. Okay, well, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Jamie, well, thank you so much for coming onto the show. So where are you calling in from?

I'm in sunny Denver, Colorado today.

Is it sunny and snowy or just Sunny.

Just sunny and beautiful.

Yeah. Nice. Nice. All right, well, we're nasty and rainy here in Texas, so I wish I was there right now.

So, so, absolutely.

Jamie, let's go ahead and start with. First of all, tell us a little bit about your background and then, and then what you're up to these days.

Yeah, absolutely. I actually started working with FedEx office 13 years ago and have always been in operations management. First I was managing individual FedEx office and print center stor in a cluster of stores in a district of stores. Currently I'm in the FedEx office manufacturing network. So I'm responsible for five commercial print manufacturing plants.

Wow. Okay. How did you first get introduced to Lean?

Well, quality and on time delivery are of course very important to FedEx. And I had actually unknowingly been exposed to some Lean tools in my career. But my first formal introduction to lean was in 2011 when I joined the Manufacturing Manufacturing network, which had actually just started a Lean journey of its own.

Okay, very good. And so what's your role today and kind of what do you do on a day to day basis?

Sure. So I'm still in operations management. So our manufacturing network provides narrow format and large format commercial print solutions across the United States and Canada. I'm a district manager for the western part of the United States. So there are five plant managers who report to me and, and together we have responsibility for the P and L quality, on time, delivery, business compliance, people, development, talent acquisition, really everything except sales. And it falls within our scope for those five plants.

Nice. So you have an unfair advantage for our last quick fire question then. You know, hired as the GM and all that. So we're going to go for it anyhow. Okay. But before we get there, Jamie, as you know, I know you're a longtime listener of our podcast, so why don't you go ahead and share a quotation that inspires you.

Well, there are a lot of inspirational quotes that I love, but I'm actually going to offer a Lean implementation quote that was meaningful for us on our journey. Shigeo Shingo is quoted as saying there are four purposes of improvement. Easier, better, faster, and cheaper. These four appear in the order of priority.

What does that mean to you?

I think that the impact of that quote is really in the last sentence that these four appear in the order of priority. Part of the frontline struggle with Lean is the fear that goes with the term lean. It can really seem like it's all about cutting costs and that creates fear in an organization. Unfortunately, I think a lot of companies misapply lean as a cost slashing initiative. But what this really says is that to prioritize making things easier and better and not just going after the cost cutting initiatives. For us, this was really kind of a changing point in how we interacted with our teams and getting them involved. We introduced this in June and didn't just share the quote, but really used it as a catalyst to change how we interacted with our teams and what we were asking for their help with and said, look, we're really just asking for your help in making your jobs easier and making your work environment better. By doing that, it created a much safer environment for team members to want to get involved. So if they were a little hesitant and not quite sure, you know, this gave them kind of that permission to say, look, we're not looking for you to cut a bunch of costs out of our operation. We just want to make your jobs a little easier. Help us do that.

Yeah, yeah. Love it. Okay, so. Well, let's. I don't want to get into a little bit more about your journey. Tell me about, about your lean journey, how you really got started and what did you find when you first got started?

Well, our lean journey in the manufacturing network started really at the middle management level. Just before I joined the network, there were a couple of plant managers and a district manager who had heard of this thing called Lean and they started working on applying some of the basic tools, things like 5s and kanban poles and andon lights and different tools. And I'd say the first couple of years our lean efforts were really secondary to our daily operations. We worked on implement lean tools but even that was really kind of on a part time basis, if you will. So about a year ago, our leadership team got together and we re evaluated where we were and we didn't really like what we saw. Don't get me wrong, we actually had a lot of significant improvements. Our quality was much better than it had ever been. Our costs were reduced and we were getting accolades for these results. But if we really held up the mirror and took an honest look at what was going on, we saw that the effort efforts were really top down, driven by management. Kind of felt like we were trying to drag our team members along with us. And so when we talked about where are we and what are we learning and what do we want to do differently, we knew that we wanted a culture change. We didn't want this to be top down. We really wanted this culture of continuous improvement that involved all of our team members and to do that, we had to change our focus from being lean tool oriented to really being people oriented and to start thinking about how are we going to shift our leadership to enable a shift in culture.

So how would you describe the lean culture then that you guys really want to achieve? I mean, is it, I mean, I guess, is it about. It's more about the people than the tools? Is that what you're trying to say?

Yeah, absolutely. I think that the tools of course are important from a tactical standpoint and what they enable you to do. But the tools can't be sustained if you don't have, you know, really put a priority on our, on your people. And so when we think about, you know, what is a, what should a plant look like and feel like and sound like and how would we want to describe the environments that we have? We really think that we want to demonstrate respect for people. We want to learn to find and eliminate waste. We want to engage all team members in making daily improvements, to develop our team members to be problem solvers. And I think a really important piece is to adopt a process plus results approach, which was a little bit of a shift for us.

Let's dig into that process plus results. Tell me more about that.

Yeah, I think the process plus results is really an alternative to a results only approach to leadership. And we of course can look at our results and results are very important. But how we react to the red is really what we're talking about here. When we see red, are we seeking to blame someone or we seeking to find out who was responsible, or are we immediately going to that process and seeking to understand what is the root cause, what's happening in the process and in the environment that's enabling this red, whether it's a metric or a failure, so that we can then close the gap by focusing on our processes and not close the gap by looking at team members and who's doing something wrong? So that's really what I mean by a process plus results approach.

Got it, got it. So how did you go about this kind of teaching or learning was involved to support this culture change?

Well, when you think about organizational culture, of course, it's really driven from the core beliefs of the people. And so we don't take lightly the idea of culture change. It's not something that we say, therefore it is. It's really what we're after is we're after changing our leadership beliefs and behaviors to enable this shift and to make it so that our team members beliefs start to change and they begin to Trust us as well. So when it comes to teaching and coaching our leaders, we actually started with a kickoff meeting with all of our managers and we worked together to create this shared vision. And these five concepts that I just walked through, they were still in their emphasis stage. I wouldn't say that they were worded quite the same way, but those concepts, we started developing those concepts of what does this look and feel like? And then of course, we had ongoing training and coaching through conference calls and during our one on ones and our plant visits. And we also actually just started a learning series with our plant managers that really drives to the core beliefs of lean leaders. We're using resources from people like Simon Sinek, Bob Chapman, David Marquet, you know, those types of authors and leaders to do some really introspective, thought provoking work.

Yeah, I know. You were at ame. Wasn't Simon Sinek awesome?

Absolutely. It was fantastic.

Yeah. Well, where would you say you guys are now and maybe what have you learned as you reflect back? We're here at the end of 2014. What have you learned?

We learned that initially we thought we were getting our team members involved and learned that maybe we hadn't done enough. That because we have multiple plants across the country in search for standardization, we kind of took that a little too far. And we were starting to take autonomy away from our team members at the local level. And so we're making adjustments now to give that control back and understand that standards are very important. But some of the specifics of how we're doing things or giving them the ability to come up with better ways to do things or to implement lean tools is really something that we needed to do and that was a learning for us. I would say that where we are is we've had a lot of success. Our team members are getting more and more involved. Every time I go out on plant visits, we're hearing about the things they're learning. In addition to all of the leadership learning that we're doing, we do have a formal training program for our team members. Two or three weeks of every month they sit down in a facilitator led class that includes videos, it includes experiential learning, includes on the floor activities afterwards, all of those kinds of things that really help them to understand and become more knowledgeable. So we're finding that what we're doing is working, that this focus on people first and tools second is having a big impact and that our team members are becoming involved. And by giving them more autonomy, we get them involved even more.

Now, one thing just popped in my mind as you were saying that I just got back visiting a company and, and we actually did a gimbalive episode there. And so this company is doing very well and they've been on a journey for about eight years and they've gone through kind of ebbs and flows and they've had tremendous results. But what they found now is this particular facility had kind of a, I would say a lead lean practitioner, if you will, kind of one person kind of driving most of the improvements throughout the organization. And they're getting tremendous results and the employees are involved for the most part. But what they found is by having this person kind of in that role, that the autonomy that you're talking about within the workplace, they're actually losing it a little bit. And so one of their things that they want to kind of get back to in 2015 is making sure that all the associates have that autonomy and that they have that freedom, if you will, to make changes and to not wait for the, you know, so called lean expert over here to kind of drive the improvements. How have you guys, have you done that or do you have like, does each facility kind of have a person who is more of a practitioner and that's really what they focus on, or is it more everyone's doing it. Do you know what I'm saying?

Yeah, we, we purposefully did not create positions that are specifically focused on our lean implementation or continuous improvement efforts. I'm certainly one of the champions, but it's not anything more than what everybody else is doing. We look at this as, hey, this is just how we're working. And so we're all involved in it. I think what we did is we looked and said, hey, we've got all of these plants across the country and let's say that we're going to standardize our shift huddles or daily standup meetings. And here's the format and here's the specific agenda and here are the metrics that you're going to do and here's what it's going to look like and here's how long you're going to talk about it. We would go to that level and we said, wait a minute, then all we're doing is teaching them to follow our checklist. Right? All we're doing is teaching them to follow something that we created using five or six managers. Kind of the shift is saying, hey, you know what? We're going to teach you about daily meetings and we're going to teach you the importance of them and how they're supposed to be done and what the benefits are. And then we're going to provide some guidelines, which is you have to have them, and here are three things you have to talk about in them. But the rest of it, it's up to you. You guys figure out what works, and you figure out how you want to display the information and what your daily meeting visual board looks like. And that was a shift for us. It was difficult at first, but that was something that we really started to lear over the last few months.

Yeah, yeah. So I've got two new questions here that you and I haven't even talked about ahead of time. It's something that I plan to roll out in 2015 here, as we're in December 2014 right now. So I'm just gonna drop them on you. I think you can handle them. Okay.

All right.

The first one that I have it, and it's related to really looking back on 2014, and you can feel free to go back even before that if you want. But what would you say? Do you guys have, like, a biggest failure that you've come across this year? Or maybe it's in your own personal situation, something that you feel didn't go as well as you'd like it to have gone? And maybe what did you do about it?

Yeah, I would say our biggest failure, particularly from a lean perspective, is we made an attempt in the same style. I just described the same old style, to launch a leader standard work program. To have say, hey, here are the activities that our leaders at different levels should be doing on X frequency, and here's how you're going to display this information. We put together this program, and it was all very well intended at the time. I was very, very proud of it. So look at this great thing that we created, and it launched, and it was a big old flop for several reasons. Partly what I just talked about was the fact that we were giving them a program instead of teaching them to use their minds and come up with things themselves. Another part being that we didn't have the discipline of daily meetings. We tried to use this to create discipline. We didn't have the discipline yet. On top of it, we're still creating standard work. So it's hard to have your leader standard work when your standard work isn't fully defined. So it was a little bit of an egg on my face situation because I had led the project team and, like I said, was really proud of what we had come up with. And. And it was a big Eye opener on the importance of this people piece and the importance of involvement, engagement, and not being a push oriented launch. Basically, yeah.

All right, so on the flip side, what is your proudest accomplishment in 2014? Maybe a biggest success that you're happy about.

So I'd say the biggest success. I'm going to share this. It was a conversation that my boss had with a team member. And I have had very similar conversations as some of our other leaders have had very similar conversations. So we know it's not just this one individual, but my boss was on a plant visit recently and he was talking to a team member and the team member said that when we first started this formal lean training program, he thought to himself, oh, great, here we go again. As he learned about the eight waste and understood the ideas of small daily improvements, he started making improvements at work and his peers and his other team members started making improvements. Improvements at work, just small little ones. And their work started becoming easier and they started having fun with it. And then he took what he learned and he applied it at home and he started making improvements at home and things at home were getting better. And the team member said, he said, this has changed my life. And so I think that that right there is kind of why we're doing this. Right.

Reminds me of, you know, you mentioned Bob Chapman earlier talking about how, how they, how they, they measure success is like things like divorce rate and all that. Just because your lives are going to be so much more fulfilled when you, when you have a happy workplace and a fulfilled workplace. Right.

So absolutely.

Yeah. Fantastic. All right, well, so, you know, what's next? So we're going to transition now into the Quickfire section. So what does respect for people mean to you, Jamie?

You know, respect for people to me has actually changed over time, thank goodness. Because now I look back on my old thoughts of what I thought it was and kind of banged my head against the wall. But for me, respect for people is really about valuing the intrinsic characteristics and the intrinsic gifts that our people have, the people who make our organization and our profits possible. It's not just about being respectful in your communication and how you treat people. I think that's kind of a given, but it's more about, you know, kind of valuing that innately human desire to be a part of something bigger and then creating an environment that allows that to happen. It's about allowing your people to take risks and try things that may fail and even being okay if 50% of their ideas fail, but knowing that they're going to learn from those failures, and they're actually going to come up with ideas that could not have even been conceived if they hadn't first failed that first, second, and third time. And then I think it's about being vulnerable and honest, sharing your fears and your mistakes and trusting that being vulnerable doesn't make you weaker, but it, in fact makes you stronger as a team.

So when you say vulnerable, do you mean as a leader or as team members or both?

I think both, really. I think it starts with the leader being vulnerable because there's a certain level of fear that just is natural in most organizations today with a hierarchical structure. Right. I have the authority to fire someone, and so there's some sort of fear that comes with it. So at some point, I have to be open and vulnerable first before others can. But then eventually being open, you know, when there's a. When there is a mistake, you know, are you trying, as a team member, trying to hide that? Are you holding up your hand, say, whoa, wait a minute, I. I was involved with that. Let me. Let me see what happened here. And that takes some level of trust, you know, and being vulnerable to say, this is an area that I'm struggling with. But I do think it definitely starts with leaders. Leaders have set the tone that it's okay and that we're not going to judge and that we're going to help each other when those vulnerabilities are shared.

It builds that trust, right?

Absolutely.

Yeah. All right. What's the best advice you've ever received, Jamie?

You know, I feel like I'm a little bit of a broken record here, because I was at the beginning of this year, I was traveling in LA with my boss. We were in the car driving, no real agenda to the conversation. And for whatever reason, I was in this little funk and was reflecting on, hey, am I having a big enough impact in this world? If you had asked me when I was 22, I was going to tell you that I was going to change the world. Here I was looking and saying, great, we make copies and we print stuff. Am I having enough impact? Should I be doing something more? My boss said, you know what? You're not just responsible for these numbers out of these prep plants, and you're not just responsible for your direct reports or even your indirect reports reports. He said, you're responsible for 200 families. And so that idea that you brought up with Bob Chapman that I've heard since then, this idea that, hey, as a leader, I have a much bigger responsibility than I may think If I read my job description, I have a leader, or as a leader, I have responsibility for 200 families. Not just their well being through the income that they earn, but that. That feeling of fulfillment that they get to take home and have a better family life because of what they achieve at work.

Wow, that's powerful. Yeah, awesome stuff. It sounds like you have a great boss.

Very lucky.

Well, do you have a personal productivity habit that others might benefit from?

So, Ron, I'm going to be transparent for a moment and tell you that I am certainly not the poster child for personal productivity habits.

So you're being vulnerable right now, right?

I am. Absolutely. Absolutely. And if any of the guys that I work with were to hear this, they would laugh and agree wholeheartedly. But it is something that I look to continuously improve. So I do always look to get better at something that I'm not very good at today. And about three weeks ago, I stopped living out of my inbox. Nothing new. You've heard it a dozen times. In fact, a lot of people probably already do this. I'm probably a slow learner here, but yeah, I mean, I act on everything the first time. So whether it's deleting it, acting on it, filing it for future use, whatever that may be. And so my inbox stays empty. And that's something that I did not believe was possible. I thought, oh, with my travel schedule and being on the floor for eight hours at a time and just couldn't do it. But when I sat down and committed myself to doing it, I found out, first of all, it's actually not that hard. That was my fear of change, I guess. But it's not that hard and I actually have more time now to work on important stuff. I had no idea how much my email was ruling my daily activities. Of course you have the excess processing waste, but more than that, my activities were being driven by the emails in my inbox and not by some alignment with strategic goals and objectives.

No, I know. Email is evil, man, I'm telling you. I mean, it's so powerful and we have to have it, but goodness gracious, it can take your life over if you're not careful.

Absolutely.

All right, so if you could recommend one book related to continuous improvement or leadership, what would it be and why?

I'm going to break the rules and tell you that there are two books that I think work in tandem. So the first is Creating a Kaizen Culture, and the second is Creating a Lean Culture. And so I'll tell you why. So Creating a Kaizen Culture is really all about the people side of this. And I think that that is such an underlying requirement for a successful and sustainable lean transformation. And then so that's your people side and that's your foundation. And then the second, I think, is creating a lean culture because that really focuses on the TO when it comes to sustainability and talking about creating a lean management system using visual controls, daily meetings, and leader standard work that will then sustain your lean production system, which are whichever lean tools that you decide to implement. So I think that of course the tools are important. There are a lot of great books that talk about implementing different tools, but I think that the natural tendency is to jump to those tools and without these two pieces in place, the tools are only going to get you so far.

Exactly. Exactly. All right, well, last question I've got. And again, you got your unfair advantage here, so I want this better be a good answer, Jamie. So let's just say that you've been hired as a general manager of a company and that their processes are a little bit out of whack and morale's bad, quality is bad, and it's just not a great situation. Good thing is you have a good product and the CEO that hired you is, has given you full access, full complete operational and penal control. So that's the good news. Unfortunately, you've discovered now that many of the senior leaders that you've inherited, they aren't quite as enthused about all this lean stuff as you are. So what would you do, let's say it's your first week on the job. What would you do to approach those leaders and why?

Well, I think I've definitely learned the lesson well that starting with a push of lean isn't going to get me very far. And so really start by seeking to understand. And that's really about listening. And so listening to customers and listening to these executives and listening to team members of all levels in the departments and asking them to show me the obstacles that are in their way, show me the things that are the problems, the things that they hate about their daily work or the problems that they can't figure out how to solve. And here's the important part is to do it without judgment and to do it without. Without jumping in with a solution. Because I think that as you do that first round of listening and understanding and trying to see what's going on, you're going to hear things or see things or I would hear things or see things that I would have ideas to solve right here. Oh, I've Got a great idea. You can do this, this and this. The important part is to not do that, but just first seek to understand. Because by understanding first, then we can work together and understand. I can facilitate those conversations or those activities that will help them come to those on their own. Whether it's to steal a Simon Sinek concept of finding our why and starting with our collective why, or figuring out this burning platform of why we need to change, maybe together facilitating a vision of what we want this to look like. But if I start walking in and solving their problems, then, then I'm just a guy solving their problems, and that's not going to help.

Yeah, fantastic. All right, Jamie, well, thank you so much for, for taking time to, to come on with us today and why don't we wrap this show up with you sharing some final words of wisdom and then tell people how they can connect with you.

Yeah, final words of wisdom, I would say, you know, in addition to the fact that the two pillars of lean, you know, continuous improvement and respect for people, there are pain. You can't just implement continuous improvement efforts without also having this respect for people along with it. But more so is that it's a journey and we have woken up and said, oh my goodness, what are we doing? What are we thinking? And have had to redirect and have had to take steps back, and that's okay. I think that I have a tendency that I want to go fast and I want to get there fast. And sometimes it's really important to go slow so that your team has opportunity to learn themselves and that you actually end up with a much more sustainable culture and a much more sustainable system. When you let people do it at their own pace and that you're just there to help facilitate and not there to do it for them. So don't get frustrated, don't get discouraged. It's okay if you have to take a few steps back and try again. Continuously improving how you're trying to work, lean into your organization, that's okay.

All right. And how can people connect with you?

I am on LinkedIn or people can reach me at jamie parkeredex.com all right, well, fantastic.

Well, it's towards the end of the year, so hopefully you have a great holiday and I look forward to hearing, hearing about all your successes in 2015 and beyond. Jamie.

Great. Thank you, Ron.

All right, take care. Thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast. Now it's time to take a free, no strings attached, fully functional test drive of Gemba Academy's School of Lean and Six Sigma over at Gembaacademy.com gain immediate access to more than 500 Lean and Six Sigma training videos, free of charge at Gembaacademy.Com.