GA 055 | Being a Visible Leader with Philip Holt

You're listening to episode 55 with Philip Holt.

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 with Genva Academy, and I'd like to welcome you to another edition of the Genva Academy podcast. As always, thank you so much for taking time out of your day and your week to listen to the show and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over@gembacademy.com now, today, I'm excited to welcome Philip Holt to the show. Now, Philip is the head of partnership development and accounting operations at Philips, and he's currently based out of the Netherlands. And as you'll hear, Philip has quite the lean thinking background. Now, during the show, Philip and I explore the topic of the visible leader. Now, we talk about what a visible leader leader is and how taking a morning Gemba walk doesn't necessarily make you a visible leader. Now, Philip also shares some personal stories of times when he's actually failed at being a strong visible leader, which obviously takes a lot of courage to admit on a podcast like this. Now, show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com 5 5. And that's 55 for 55. So gembapodcast.com 55. All right, enough for me. Let's get to the show. All right, Philip, thank you so much for coming onto the show. Where are you calling in from today?

Hey. Hi, Ron. Thanks for having me on the show. I'm here in Amsterdam. I'm talking to you from the headquarters of Philips Royal Philips in the Netherlands. And, yeah, looking forward to our chat.

All right. You know, I actually recently spoke to gentlemen in Spain, so we're hitting Europe hard the last few weeks. So that's pretty, pretty fun.

Yeah, absolutely. Great.

All right, well, I tell you what, why don't you just start by telling us a little bit about your background, Philip, maybe how you first came to learn about continuous improvement. And then why don't you tell us what you're up to these days?

Yeah, well, Ron, I've been involved in continuous improvement for a long time because I'm a real believer that, you know, you just don't do continuous improvement because that's the job title that you have. It's got to be about what we all do every day. And from an early part in my career, which is More years than I would like to remember. I was basically getting out the books on what was called Just In Time, you know, trying to learn about Toyota, actually, you know, looking at how we could improve our processes in what at the time was a plastics company. I was working for, I'm actually, for my sins, I've got an undergraduate degree in polymer engineering, so I was working with plastics in operations and design and development and just trying to make things better every day. So throughout my career it's something I've been doing. But I would say in the last six years here in Philips, I've had the opportunity to really do it the right way, really work on a people based lean system. And that to me has been really a great way of working for the last six years. A great outlet for my real passion towards continuous improvement. I'm now actually in a role that again isn't about continuous improvement in the job title. I'm heading up our partnership development with actually our outsourced accounting operations partner. But again, applying very much that lean thinking, that continuous improvement approach to the way that we work.

Yeah. Now, how long has Philips been on the journey?

Yeah, I mean, it's a very interesting question because we were very early on using Six Sigma and the kind of the Toyota production system tools back in the 1990s. So it's not something, the toolkit isn't something that's new to Philips. But what we've been doing for the last six years is applying it, I would say, properly. We've learned the lessons from the Toyota way, from companies like Toyota, but of course companies like Danaher, Nissan and some of those other great companies that have really applied lean thinking in the right way. And we've now got a people based system that really is principle driven rather than tool based driven. And I think that's the key part and that's why I'm a big believer in this visible leadership and really thinking about people first and the tools as an enabler rather than the end in themselves.

I love it. All right, well, we're going to really tap into the whole visible leader thing here in a bit, but before that, Philip, we'd like to start all of our shows with our guests sharing a leadership or continuous improvement slanted quotation that inspires them. So do you have a quotation that inspires you?

Absolutely. I mean, it's from the, you know, the guru himself, Taiichi Ono, he said famously, toyota managers should be sufficiently engaged on the factory floor that they have to wash their hands at least three times a day. I think that just says it all. You've got to, as a leader, as a manager, be at the Gemba all the time or a high proportion of your time. It's where the value is created, it's where the problems occur, and it's where your leadership can really make the difference. So that quotation, and I think you can modernize it by not talking about the factory floor, talking about anywhere where the value is added, whether that be a hospital, whether that be a factory, whether that be a process office, you know, wherever it is, you've got to be at that Gemba.

Yes, yes. Love it. Love it. All right, well, let's dive right into it, Philip. So today we're going to be talking about the visible leader. So let's just start at a very high level. What is a visible leader?

Well, to me, a visible leader, it's about people seeing that you're living and breathing, what you're extolling. And what I mean by that is that there's a lot of visible leaders in the sense that people know who they are, they see them around. But what I'm talking about is about leaders that don't just advocate something that should be done. They actually are the everyday living and breathing what they tell others to do. So it's really about walking the walk as well as talking the talk. And that's ultimately what a visible leader is, something that people see as a role model, not just as somebody who tells them how it should be.

So, I mean, is it enough to take your morning Gembo walk and be done with it, or is there something deeper?

Oh, it's much deeper than that. I mean, you know, if you think about the lean principles that come from Toyota, where, I mean, being a visible leader is about being at the Gemba, but also helping to stop and fix, to get problems solved, to get the quality right first time. So it's about being involved in Kaizen, it's about being involved in Kaizen events. It's about doing practical problem solving yourself, not just telling people that that's what they should do, but actually going there, learning by doing, making mistakes, showing that you can make mistakes, you can learn from them, and helping to grow people into leaders themselves and being a leader who thoroughly understands the work, lives, the philosophy and teaches it to others. So it's really about living those Toyota Way principles, those lean principles.

Yes, got it. Now, what about visible leadership and Lean? Obviously, they work together. Let's explore that a little bit more.

Yeah, well, as I just mentioned with the lean principles, I Mean, leadership is really, to me, the core of what lean is all about, because leadership is at every level in the organization. But let's really talk about what people traditionally think about leaders, the managers of departments, the group heads, etc. We've got, in most organizations, once they get to a certain size, we get a command and control type of environment. And that to me, starts to disable people. It starts to give people a certain fear of making mistakes and we start to almost punish mistakes. So people, you know, conversely, actually the kind of, the really sad part about it is people start to build their careers and gain respect by firefighting, by solving problems in a firefighting mode. What we need to do is encourage more people who actually prevent those fires from happening in the first place and actually solve problems early on whilst they're still small and build that continuous improvement culture. And we can only do that when the leaders, the people in those managerial positions really are down at the Gemba. So that Principle 12 of the Lean principles, go and see for yourself to thoroughly understand the situation. Don't sit behind a dashboard and really develop those exceptional people and teams who follow your company's philosophy by being at the Gamba, by being visible, by working with your people, that's how you can really make that lean thinking incumbent in the way that people work.

Got it? All right, so I have a two part question here for you and I'm curious if you're open to kind of sharing some of your sins and some of your successes of the past, but can you think of a time or a situation where you personally failed at being a good visible leader?

Oh, absolutely. I've done it a few times, Ron, to be honest with you. Got to be honest, I mean, you know, I see myself just as everybody else on a continuous learning journey and I've made a number of mistakes. Actually, one of my early managerial roles, I was the head of a department and I kind of got bought into the paradigm of, okay, I'm now a manager, I now need to tell people what to do, I now need to direct them. And the insecurity I had as a manager where I felt that I was expected to know everything, meant that I was then telling people how to do the job, I was disabling them. And it was an early part of my managerial career, as I say, but it meant that I didn't use the brain power of the kind of close to 20 people that I actually had in that group. Instead, I was trying to use just my one brain to solve all of the problems and they were just expected to follow the orders. And that was a massive learning experience for me because we made a lot of mistakes, we failed a few times, and it was only once I solved that that we actually started to prosper. So that's one of my biggest failures, I would say, as a manager.

So how did you come out of that?

Yeah, I mean, it was again, I mean, I don't like using too many of the Japanese terms, but I think this one is a really important one and that's hansi. I really started to learn at that time the power of reflection. And at a certain point I stopped and fixed because I knew I was failing. I wasn't getting the results in the department. I knew that I had this dichotomy of a group or team members who actually liked me on a personal level. But I just knew that they knew that I wasn't succeeding as their manager, as their leader. So I took some hansi time. I actually got them involved in that hansi. I took some very painful 360 degree feedback from my, from my manager, from my peers and from my subordinates, my employees, my team members. And then we went into some problem solving and we tried to understand what were the issues. And I know at the heart of it it was the fact that I wasn't empowering and enabling my team members to get the job done. And we had an almost overnight change in the performance of the team and the culture just by me making that realization and starting again to apply some of the lean process principles around leadership.

Love it. All right, so we shared some of the bad stuff, which obviously sounds like it turned into good stuff, but let's talk about a success story where you feel like you did a good job of being a visible leader.

Yeah. So I think over the last six years, certainly in the first parts of our lean transformation model deployment, and over the last couple of years trying to take more a company wide role. I think I did a good job of again, walking the talk, so to speak, instead of putting together a lean transformation model that I then told people to go deploy. We worked with a great team. There was, I would say, around eight or nine pioneers of the lean model. We worked very well together as a team and brought together a transformation model that, that is, I would say, cutting edge. It's not been invented in Philips, but it really very much has been created from best practices externally. Again. So we used our handset time, our reflection to understand what were the problems that we needed to solve and where could we find the best answers. We brought that in. So I think that getting away from that not invented here kind of mindset and bringing in best practices was great part of leadership, but then really being a visible leader by going to the Gemba. So I spent a lot of time on planes, travelling around, going to the different sites across Phillips in the sector that I was responsible for, consumer lifestyle, going to the Gemba, making sure people could see me visibly there, interacting with the people, understanding the problems, the challenges, and then helping them to solve those problems. And I think most importantly, demonstrating that this wasn't a dogmatic approach to the way that we were deploying lean, but that this was very much a flexible but rigid approach. And I know you'll laugh when I say that, but it's rigid in the sense that we have standards based around our lean principles. It's principle based, but we're flexible enough to constantly learn and improve the standard once we realize that that standard isn't good enough. And I think again, that's a big part of being a visible leader is demonstrating your ability to learn, to accept when things aren't right and to make the improvements.

Got it. So what's the biggest change a leader needs to make in order to become a visible leader?

Well, I think, you know, again, it is very much about not being scared of failing. I think being a visible leader, I mean, I mention it in lean terms, but I take a very holistic approach to lean thinking. Again, I've got to emphasize it's not about the lean toolkit. There's many organizations around the world I would consider as lean organizations, lean thinking organizations that don't even use the term because it's a way of acting, it's a way of behaving. What you see in these organizations are that leaders aren't scared of failure and they don't impose that fear of failure onto their people. So to be a visible leader, I think you've got to have the courage to go and make some mistakes, to show your frailty, to show that you're not an expert, but that you will try, you will learn, and you will learn with your people. So I think giving up that fear of failure is probably the single most important part of becoming a visible leader.

Now, what about the role of autonomy with your colleagues? How does that play into the whole visible leadership mindset?

Well, I think that's about trust, isn't it? I mean, you can only truly allow autonomy with your colleagues, with your team members when you have trust. And again, you only can gain that trust if you go into the Gemba, if you go in working with people and understanding that they're highly competent, they've got high capability, and that they trust you, that you will help them when they need it. The opposite of that is that people end up only looking at the performance when we're in meeting rooms, when we're looking at monthly reports, and then asking lots of fast action questions, expecting quick solutions. And that basically gives the. It reduces the trust. So, but once you go into the Gemba, once you're working with people, they build trust in you, you build trust in them. Autonomy can then come out of that trust.

Yeah, got it. All right, so how can people learn more about being a visible leader if they want to dig into this a little bit?

Well, I mean, one of the best ways to learn is try storming. So go actually try to do some of these things that I've talked about. I mean, I wrote an article in LinkedIn about it, but that just touches the surface. But there's lots of. I would say the biggest way of doing this is to really go do it. Go try. I mean, there are books around about this that have looked at the success of some of the best organizations. Of course, the best one around, I would say, is probably Lean Thinking by Womack and Jones. There's also a really interesting one by Album Matt Byrne, who was one of the beginners of the Danaher business system, also had a lot of success in Wyermold, and that's called the Lean Turnaround. And I'll be very clear, I have no personal interest in either of these books being sold, but I just think that the two of the best books, in terms of understanding how to be a visible leader.

Very good. Very good. All right, Philip, let's go ahead and transition now into what we're calling the reflection section. So, as you know, we Lean thinkers spend a lot of time talking about kind of the two pillars of tps, Continuous improvement and respect for people. Continuous improvement, it's pretty easy to kind of put your fingers on. It's the tools, one piece, flow, jidoka, those types of things. What about respect for people? Sometimes that can be harder to kind of define. So what does respect for people mean to you?

Well, respect for people, to me means working on, first of all, on the assumption that everybody comes to work to do a good job, to be successful. And, you know, the corollary to that is that when people, you know, when a process fails, realizing that the process has failed, not the person. So, to me, one of the key elements of respect for People is not having a blame culture. So not blaming people. So we sometimes joke instead of five times why? A lot of companies do five times who. And you know, we've got to avoid that. I mean, five times why is really about understanding why the process is broken. And there can be elements that are the responsibility of people. But ultimately, when we look at the root cause, there's normally a reason why the culture or the process or the leadership are not enabling people to take the ownership or to gain the competence that they need to be successful. So it's very, very rare in my experience that an individual has deliberately failed or deliberately gone against the process or the policy of the company. So that respect for people starts with not blaming people and assuming that they do come with the best intentions.

Yes. Philip, what's the best advice you've ever received?

The best advice I think I've ever received was off, actually was an ex Toyota guy in Japan. I was fortunate enough to go on one of the Kaikaku experiences in Japan. And this guy was an ex Toyota guy and he worked now as kind of a consultant with some of the tier one and tier two suppliers. And he gave me very good approach to change management. And it's the two, six, two principle. So he said, when you're going through major change, major transformation, there'll be 10 people, or for every 10 people, there will be two people who are real enthusiasts, they're your advocates. There'll be six people who are sat on the fence and then there'll be two people who dig the heels in and really don't want that change to happen. And the best advice was he said engage and employ the advocates to bring the other six along who are sat on the fence and ignore the two who are digging the heels in because they'll make, at a certain point, they'll make a decision either to get on board or to leave. If you put your effort in trying to bring those two detractors along with you right from the start, you'll put all your effort into the wrong people. And that to me, has been a really good learning throughout my kind of change management part of my career.

Two, six, two. I love that. That's fantastic. All right. Do you have a personal productivity habit that others might benefit from?

Yeah, I do the personal Kanban approach. So we're all probably older listeners are probably, you know, familiar with Kanban, but I use an online software package. It's free to use and. But it doesn't have to be on a Kanban. Sorry, on a software package. But what I basically do is at the beginning of the week, my week's planned out in terms of my standard work. So I have leader standard work and I basically plan out the activities for the week and then I have the discipline to ensure that once I've planned them that only three items can flow into the to do list or the currently work in progress list at any one time. We've got to be reasonable, reasonable that it can't be one. Because again, in an office leadership managerial situation, you can't always be working on purely just one item at a time. But I have three items, work in progress. I'll only work on one of those three at any one time using a pomodoro timer. So working in 25 minute intervals and that has been one of the biggest productivity improvements I've ever implemented in my career. That really revolutionized and I'm not using that word lightly the way that I work now.

What software is it? Is it the Kanban flow software? Is that the one you're using?

It is, yes, yes. Yeah.

No, it's fantastic. I've used that before as well and I really like the timer. It's incredible, isn't it, when you just for those that talk about this a little bit because some people may not know what we're talking about, this pomodoro timer, talk about what that is so people can get an understanding of how powerful that can be.

Yeah, so I mean the concept is actually from the 1970s I believe, so it's not a new technique, but it basically is based upon some studies and multiple studies have come back to say that multitasking doesn't work. Multitasking fails. Some people are better at it than others. Women apparently are better than men at multitasking. But nobody can do it more effectively than if they single task, if we have single piece floor. So the pomodoro technique is literally linked to this. And I think it was developed 70s or 80s, I think the guy was Cyrilaw and he basically used the concept of the kitchen timer. So the.

It was a tomato timer, wasn't it? The story I heard, it was like a little tomato thing.

Yeah. So Pomodoro the Italian for tomato. Yeah. And yeah, he uses this and it's 25 minutes and apparently that is the time that we can focus on as human beings in anyone. So the idea is you work on your task for 25 minutes really focused, then you take a five minute break. You do that multiple times. After four Pomodori you have a 15 to 30 minute break. And again by doing that, that's revolutionized my way of working combined with a Kanban approach of only ever having a maximum of three items in my Kanban. Working in progress at any one time.

Now, how often do you. Do you move, do you revisit your board just when you finish something or you know what I mean? Like if you're working on a to do action for that on a particular day and you finish it, do you then go in and just move it to the completed section or do you wait to the end of the day or how does that work?

Yes, I do it. It's kind of a single piece floor. So as soon as I finished it yet, it moves into the completed section and then I pull in the next one at the bottom of those three and then I start working on the next one in the list on the work in progress based upon the applicability at the time. So it's once a week, full planning of my week on a daily basis. In the morning I do a quick review because of course things can change in life, but generally I try to keep discipline to it across the full week and then yeah, on a case by case basis, as soon as I finish one item, I move it to the right and move a new one in.

Got it? Yeah. That's a wonderful tool. So we'll link to that in the show notes for this episode. So those guys have done a great job too. I remember when they first came out with a beta, it wasn't as nice as it is now.

Absolutely. But yeah, great example of an online tool for helping our productivity. And I'm not always a big fan of automating until. So get your process right and then use that to automate.

Yeah, exactly. All right. What's one thing that surprised you during your last year of practicing and implementing Lean?

Oh, so it's a very good question. I think one thing that surprised me was, and I probably shouldn't admit this, but I really have been a big advocate of the fact that our lean model, we use a phased lean model within Philips. Again, we didn't invent that approach. We. We proudly stole from Best practices externally. But we've got a lean phased model. It's been very successful in supply chain and manufacturing. We also then brought it into our transactional office environment and again, it's been very successful in that environment. And in the last year we brought it into the innovation, the R and D type of environment. So the idea to market so touching our design colleagues, our innovation colleagues, R and D marketing, etc. And I was a big advocate of the fact that this model would work in that environment. So anybody who asked, I strongly advocated it would work. I had faith in it. I really pushed that we should use the same model. We need some different tools in there, but the model, the mindset, the approach. But I still, in my own back of my mind, had some doubts. And the last year, it's been extremely successful. In fact, we've learned a lot and we've actually brought some of those learnings back into the order to cash and the market to order models that we have as well. So that surprised me. And like I said, I probably shouldn't admit it because nobody else would know that I had my doubts. But that was the nice surprise that my faith in the approach was actually proven successful. Proven right.

Great story. Great story. So do you have a routine or ritual that you follow when things aren't going well and. And maybe you need to recharge and refocus?

Yeah. So, as I say, I mean, it's very much about Hansi and yeah. About forcing yourself. Again, it's very much about the discipline to stop and fix we all. When I do this, I fail myself many times during the year on this, but I try and pull myself back is, you know, when you're in a. To use the colloquial term from where I grew up, when you're in a hole, stop being digging. And sometimes we fall into the trap of keep digging and things just get worse and worse. So you need to stop yourself. You need to take that handsay time. You need to figure out, do some personal problem solving around the issue, really use the techniques of understanding what's the real problem statement, what am I really struggling with here? And then getting into the possible causes, then getting into. Into the root cause, and then deciding what your countermeasures are. And again, just like Kanban can be applied to our own personal life or personal working life, similarly, that kind of structured problem solving can also be applied to our own individual careers.

Yes. Wonderful. Philip, is there knowledge or skill area that you feel you need to improve in order to become better at practicing lean? And if so, do you have a plan?

Well, actually, the reason I'm in this role is part of that plan. So, you know, I've spent the last six years kind of out of an operational role, you know, and as I say, it was throughout it, I've really endeavoured to be a visible leader to demonstrate that, you know, what I'm preaching, I really believe in and I can do at the Gemba. But what I wanted to do was after that six years kind of away from an operational role is get back into an operational. So my plan was actually, and I'm executing on it now, was to get into a more operational role, working in this role, working with our external BPO supplier or partner. And I'm working to show that you don't just have to have that job title. I mean, everything I do every day is with the lean thinking, it's with the continuous improvement mindset. And I'm just going to demonstrate that that can be done. Whatever role you're in, you don't just have to have that job title.

Fantastic. Well, Philip, it's so encouraging to hear how much Lean is a part of your, of a big company. You know, so many times we hear of these huge companies who really struggle to make this stuff work. But it obviously sounds like Phillips is doing a fantastic job. So well done to you and obviously to the leadership at Phillips, which is, you know, you couldn't do it without, you know, strong leaders. Philip, why don't we just wrap the show up with you sharing some final words of wisdom and then why don't you tell people how they can connect with you?

Yeah, so thanks, Ron. I mean, I'd just like to respond first of all to what you said about the leadership. I mean, yeah, this can only work. I'm a great believer and this links to the words of wisdom. I'm a great believer that you can do a certain amount of Lean transformation bottom up, but it really only works when you've got that top down support. Virginia Mason, a great example there with the CEO in that hospital group up in Washington. And we see a similar kind of approach here in Philips on a global organization like ours. Our CEO Van Van Houten, he's a true believer. He's being a visible leader in what he does. And my words of wisdom would be spend your time as somebody who wants to make that Lean transformation, engaging with the leadership. It will be hard. It will be more difficult than just going out running some Kaizen events and making some bottom up improvements. You have to do some of that, of course, but you really need to engage the leadership. And the key part to this, my key words of wisdom, Ron, would be really focus on the business. What are the business needs, what are the business problems which are driven by the voice of the customer, by understanding what the customer values. Don't go into trying to do a Lean transformation because Lean is good or because you've got a Lean toolkit. Lean is an enabler of superior business performance. It's not the end in itself, it's a means to an end. So you'll only communicate well with the leadership, with managers, with people in the business. When you talk about business problems and then use Lean as a solution, don't talk about Lean is the solution as the way of selling it. So that would be my key words of wisdom.

Fantastic. And how can people connect with you? I know you're big on LinkedIn.

Yeah. So I write quite regularly on LinkedIn, so please come on to LinkedIn and I'm very happy if you want to take a look at some of the writings. I've got about 30, 14 posts at the moment within LinkedIn. If you look at one of my posts, it also shows you how you could follow me on Twitter if you wanted to. I'm leanmaster1 and also I have my own personal website and blog on lean-master.com but again, if you go onto LinkedIn, you can follow me on there. You can take a look at some of my writings and see if anything that I've written has resonated.

Yeah, well, that's how we Connected was on LinkedIn, so I'm so happy that we did.

No, it's great.

All right, well, take care, Philip, and keep up the good fight, my man.

Thank you very much, Ron. It's been great speaking to you.

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