GA 056 | Intentional Leadership with Chris Burnham

You're listening to episode 56 with Chris Burnham.

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, before we get started, I wanted to give an extra, extra big thank you to everyone that's listened to and supported the show. Now, we're releasing this episode on April 30, 2015, which is exactly one year after we released episode one of the show. Now, we released several episodes that first week, which is why we're not on episode 52. But it's been exactly one year, and, man, has this been fun. Now, we started this podcast as an experiment. We're looking for new ways to add value to the lean community. And while I'm obviously a little bit biased, I think the experiment has been a smashing success. So, again, thank you for your active support of the show. Now then, today I'm excited to welcome someone who, as it turns out, recently joined the lean podcasting community. His name is Chris Burnham. Now, Chris's show is called the Lean Leadership Podcast, and he's doing a great job, and I definitely recommend you check it out. Now, during today's show, Chris and I explore the topic of intentional leadership, including what it is, how it relates to lean thinking, and some practical advice for what we can all do to become intentional leaders. Now, show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com 56 and that's 5, 6 for 56. So gembapodcast.com 56. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Hey, Chris, thanks for coming onto the show. Where are you calling in from today?

I am in rainy and drizzly Memphis, Tennessee, today.

Memphis, Tennessee. So we're going to be in Tennessee, I think. I think that ASQ conference is in Tennessee. Isn't it coming up?

You've got me. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it is. I know where. I know I'm going to Tennessee for something here in the next month or two. So I love. I love Tennessee. It's awesome.

State of my birth. My dad went to medical school at Vanderbilt, and I was born in Nashville, and I've lived between here and North Carolina my whole life. So it's a beautiful place, you know, so many trees.

I remember the first time I went there I was like, I didn't realize there's so many trees here. So it's so beautiful.

Absolutely. Thank you. It is a beautiful state.

All right, Chris, so why don't you. Let's start with. Tell us about your background, how you first came to learn about continuous improvement, and then tell us what you're up to these days.

Okay. Well, I started out in kind of a different route from everybody else. My degree is actually in criminal justice. I graduated from Western Carolina University, and I had a job waiting for me with a federal law enforcement agency. And a friend of mine had a job down in Greenville, South Carolina, where a large automotive manufacturer was opening a plant. And he said, hey, I know you've got a job, but why don't you just come down and. And interview with the people that I work with? We help find skilled labor and skilled trades for these companies. And I said, well, he goes, look, you'll get the interview experience. So here I am, fresh out of college. I come down and I interview with these guys, and they're awesome. I was completely blown away. And at the end of the day, they asked me if I wanted to join them, and I said yes. And one of the guys asked me, this is kind of a recruiting job. Why would a guy with a criminal justice degree want to do this? And I answered really quickly, nobody is getting shot at, and I don't have to work nights. So this. Well, I said that at the time, but I actually pulled quite a few all nighters later on down the line in my career. But the thing I liked about that job and what I gained from it was when we were placing people in these positions, I had an opportunity to go inside lots of different companies and see the work that was being done. And so I learned process up front and understanding process up front because that's how we wrote out the job requirements. And then when I was speaking to candidates down the line, I was describing what I had seen. And it also gave me a good sense of who would be a good fit for a position and who wouldn't be a good fit for a position. Because I had seen the work being done and I had seen the good things and the bad things. So that was, you know, how I started out and my being exposed to manufacturing. And then I moved back to North Carolina to be a little bit closer to my mom and dad. And in the Charlotte area, I actually got hired by one of my clients. And I was a program manager. So I was able to handle the relationship side with a very large company that has Point of sale units and lots of retail environments. We were doing the fulfillment and the integration of those. And I got a lot of exposure to the engineering disciplines and the manufacturing disciplines. And my boss came to me one day and said, hey, I'm going to send you to this thing called Lean Manufacturing training. I think it'll serve you well. And I went and I was immediately enamored with it. We were able to the team that was sent to the training, we came back and we did a few value stream mapping exercises. And in that we were able to drive a lot of waste out. And so I see things like that people typically see when they first start out with lean manufacturing, which would be cycle time improvement, using less space, a reduction in the need and the dependence for overtime. So we were being more productive. And we were. And the quality of life for the people we were working with was better too. And we were actually profitable, which in manufacturing can be a little challenge, especially in electronics contract manufacturing can be a little challenging sometimes in North America. And I just remember that it clicked with me and I was a voracious reader. I read everything that I could, everything from the machine that changed the world, the learning to see the red books, the green books. In fact, now if I were to use my red book or green book, they would probably have to list me as a co author because I have so many different notes in the page. I hear you stick it notes. But that clicked. And then a couple months later that same mentor of mine said, I think that you need to go to this Lean or this Six Sigma black belt training. And I was like, math wasn't my forte. But that clicked as well. I'm not a big fan of being singularly disciplined when it comes to improvement. I think that you have to find the right tool for the right job. So fast forward a few years. I actually owned my own company for a while and applied some of those tools to my own company and it came full circle. A mentor of mine came and said, I need some help. And so I've been working in the distribution and fulfillment. Memphis is a big center for that in that space, helping with creating some sustainable gains in relations to Lean and Six Sigma. Very good.

Sounds like an awesome career so far, Chris.

It is. And being exposed to good leaders and some leaders with opportunity for improvement kind of helped me understand that when it comes to successful, a successful lean journey, leadership is kind of where it begins. You have to start good leaders. And I started a podcast of my own about being inspired by your podcast, among others, specifically about lean leadership and trying to kind of ignite that spark in the person I was 10, 15 years ago and saying, hey, you too, can do this. And also maybe lighting some sparks of some folks that were further down the line in their career journey that want to have a positive impact in the people that work for them and work with them.

Fantastic. All right, Chris. Well, as you know, we 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?

I do, and it's from W. Edwards Deming. And I think it's. I've seen it in life, and it's probably. If I had to have something tattooed in a notebook that I'm taking with me when I go out into the Gemba, it's a bad system, will defeat a good person every time. And it's just so true. We. I've. I've seen some pretty phenomenal people surviving with a mediocre system, but I've never seen a perfect process that had mediocre people that were working.

Yes, Very well said. Very well said. All right, well, Chris, today we're going to explore the topic of intentional leadership. So to start, why don't you tell us what intentional leadership means to you?

Well, intentional leadership to me means that you have a sense of direction. It's a sense of path, a sense of vision, and it's also active leadership. It's not leadership from a conference room. It's not leadership from an office. It's leadership out on the floor with the people that you are leading. And, you know, as lean practitioners, we tend to think that, you know, we can become focused on a manufacturing or distribution floor, but it's equally as applicable in a finance value stream and an HR value stream and a health and safety value stream. And intentional leadership is, you know, being active and out on the Gemba and. And wherever it may be, and interacting with the people that you're leading and understanding what their problems, challenges, and frustrations are and equipping them with what they need in order to be able to succeed. Yeah.

Tie us back into lean thinking. Why do you think it's so important that intentional leadership be. Be a part of this whole journey?

Well, I've been around a lot of successful Lean implementations, and I've also been around some that kind of struggled and sputtered a little bit. And it starts with good leaders. When you listen to some of the great thinkers that we've had on your podcast, they talk about it starts with leadership. You have to have a leader at the front that is devoted to the change that's about to take place, because you can have folks that maybe are in the middle and they can be successful at some point. They can apply the, the red book and the green book to their space and make it a showcase. But it really takes that leader at the top that when everybody else says no and they say yes, that's what happens to really drive the continuous improvement culture. Continuous improvement isn't something that you delegate out to somebody. It starts at the top and it moves from the top. I've seen that leaders that are devoted to it, that invest in their people with it, that are invest in their processes with it, that are actually active out on the space where value is being created, they're the ones that succeed with this. And it's because they demonstrate respect for the people by investing in their people with leadership.

So I'm curious, what would you say is the opposite of intentional leadership? I mean, would it be something like accidental leadership? I don't know. Is there even such a thing?

I think, I guess vacant delegation would probably be the thing that I would cause it. You can have intentional. You can have leadership by position, which is maybe you acquire a company and you're put in position of leader or somebody leaves and you're, I guess, the unspoken leader and you kind of get informally put in that position. But intentional leadership is every day coming in and. And having leader. Standard work that is wrapped around devoting and creating value for the people that you work for. And that is in the sense of, I'm gonna. My people will understand what I expect from them as far as standards. They have the work instructions that are easy to understand. They have the ability to stop when they see a problem and solve it. And you give them honest and constructive feedback in order to make them a better person, not just a better welder or picker or forklift operator, but you equip them with tools that help them think the way that a lean thinker would, not just have them making widgets, so to speak.

Yeah. So I'm curious, can you think of like a real life example of where you've seen intentional leadership in action, Maybe even give a specific, you know, you can change the names and places and whatnot if you need to. But I'm curious. I mean, tell us a story.

No, that's easy. I have a mentor of mine that was the gentleman that, you know, gave me the opportunities with leadership and lean. And it was when I first got Promoted into an operations role with his organization. He, you know, typically in that at that time frame, all of the managers had offices upstairs away from the manufacturing floor. You know, called it mahogany row, so to speak. And when I got promoted, the ies or the facilities guys that typically handled moving everything, they came to me and said, hey, we're ready to move you to your office. And my boss came in at. My mentor came in at the time and said, hey, I've got something different planned for him. He pulls out this drawing of the floor and says, right here, I need you guys to clear this floor out. And there was some racking and extra materials there at the time. And he says, clear this out and lay down an epoxy floor. And I want you to set up a four foot cube in this space. And the facilities guys were, hey, this is twice. This is an office large enough for two people. He goes, ah, good point. You're going to put Chris in there with his manufacturing engineer. And looking at, looking back on it, it was intentional in the sense that he was breaking the paradigm that we had had there, that leaders were upstairs and the workers were downstairs in the sense of the leader sits beside where they needed to be and where the value was taking place. And I'll tell you, it served me so well and in the sense of whenever there was a problem on the line, I found that I was slow, even though I was probably 30 years younger than the manufacturing engineer I had at the time. He was always the first out there solving problems. And we, our productivity increased, our, our utilization increased. We were able to solve problems more quickly. But I think the biggest thing that I learned out of that was when people, I guess the Hawthorne effect, people work well when they see that you're working well or that you're observing the work. And it also was reflective of me. There was no time for lollygagging. I needed to be solving a problem. I didn't sit in my, I didn't want, I didn't want the people that I worked for to perceive me as being lazy or not contributing to their success in that way. So that made sure that I was active. And I guess my dad was a doctor, so I would call it rounding where it's, you're walking around and you have a set path and you have a set set of questions that you ask at the set places every time. And at the time I was doing leader standard work, I just didn't know what it was called.

Yeah, now what I'm curious, what about the rest of the Folks up in the mahogany circle or whatever you called it, did they eventually move down?

It created an exodus. When they started seeing the results, folks started saying, hey, can I move downstairs? Sure, you can sit wherever you want. Just as long as the people that work for you or the people that you work for have what they need in order to be able to achieve their. Their success.

Yeah. Fantastic. So the last question I have for you in this section, Chris, is, I'm curious, are there any practical things that we lean thinkers can do in order to move towards a more intentional leadership way of working?

There are some things that you can do from an intentional standpoint, Ron. And I think the first thing is demonstrate to the people that you're trying to help that you care. And that's by listening to them, ask them what they're frustrated with, what's the problem they deal with every day. And there's no set path as far as from a lean standpoint of what to fix first. I think that the thing that you fix first is whatever you need to start with. Taichi Ono says, start from need. And that's a real quick way to build some success in the sense of getting some traction for the understanding of application, of continuous improvement. And then also it allows for you to really make someone's life better. I know Paul Akers at FastCap always talks about he doesn't want cost. When he started out, he didn't want cost improvement ideas. He wanted ideas that would make the people that were doing the work make their lives better, make it easier for them to do their job. And I think that when that's applied, that's intentional leadership in that sense.

Yeah, exactly. Paul's amazing.

Yes, he is.

All right, Chris, well, let's go ahead and transition into the reflection section. So, 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. Red book, green book. The tools. Right. It's kind of easy to put your fingers on what that means. But this other pillar, respect for people, sometimes can be a little bit harder to understand. So I'm curious, what does respect for people mean to you?

Yeah, we touched a little bit on it earlier. I think respect for the people means giving people what they need in order to accomplish what you've asked them to do. And that starts out with a clear set of standards. It starts out with having work instructions or standard work that's easy to understand and follow. It means giving them the tools that they need. And that's not Just equipment and fixtures. It's personal protective equipment. Everybody deserves a right to go home safely after a day at work. And then honest feedback. And, you know, some people get lost and say, respect for the people is, you know, kinder, gentler. It's being nice. Yes, it is. But it's also a sense of holding your teammate and your partner accountable and providing them constructive feedback. And this is kind of how it bleeds over into my family. My family at home, we have a mantra, so to speak, of if it comes up, it comes out. There are no secrets. There are no. You don't hire. You don't harbor anything that you think is going to hold the family back or hurt the family in some way. You deliver what you see as an opportunity for improvement or a problem in a constructive way that the family benefits and the individual that's receiving the feedback benefits from. And so when you put all those things together, I think there's no one thing for respect for the people. I think it's kind of a combination of all those things.

Yeah. Fantastic. Chris, what's the best advice you've ever received?

Oh, day one, when I got promoted into a continuous improvement role, my mentor came to me and says, chris, if you're easy on the people and hard on the process, you've got this thing licked by about 90%. And he was absolutely right. You know, we talked about it a little bit earlier. You know, a bad system will defeat a good person every time. And really, we owe it to the people that we work with to. And that we work for to make their. Their job effective, make them as effective as they can be in their job. And that's oftentimes, you know, there's a group of about 5 to 10% of no matter what you come up with, they're not going to want to, I guess, conform or adopt or try, so to speak. And I call those people cavemen, and not in a derogatory sense. CAVE is actually an acronym which stands for Constantly against Virtually everything. You could say, hey, we're going to give everybody a 10% raise. I mean, I don't want to raise none of that. Raised jazz for me. So really focus on the process, and you'll make the lives of your people better.

I love that. I was taught cave people, citizens against virtually everything. That's what I constantly against virtually. I love that. Yeah, cave people, you gotta love them. All right, so do you have one thing, Chris, that surprised you during your last year of practicing or implementing lean?

Yeah, I. Yes. And that was kind of an from an introspective standpoint was the role of the leader. And looking at me personally and realizing that, I guess knowing what you don't know, I've been doing this for probably close to 13, 14 years and I still have a lot to learn. And I'm still. There's still aha moments for me every day. And it's really being humble about it, not being beating on the chest. Look at me. You know, we tend to be a results oriented society, and results are important. But I think the real success that I derive now is from, you know, watching the success of others that I've invested in. And that could be an investment in time, an investment in teaching, an investment in listening to what they have to offer and, you know, not necessarily needing to have all the answers, but at least know where to lead people to look for the answers.

Yeah, fantastic. So, Chris, imagine there's a situation, you're having a week and things aren't going well, and you need to recharge and refocus. Do you have a routine or ritual that you follow to do that?

I do, and it's served me well. I live near the Mississippi river and here in Memphis, and they have a beautiful greenbelt park. And I have found that moving, just getting out and taking my dogs for a walk or a run down in the river area, getting outside. I know that you've done a lot of learning in the sense of endorphins and serotonin and all that, and I think a good dose of exercise is like grabbing a handful of antidepressants that give you ultra focus and taking them at that point in time. Exactly. So movement, getting out, moving, exercising, and just working out your stress in a.

Positive way and breathing in that beautiful air out there, huh?

It is. It really is.

It's clean air.

That's what it is, man. Yeah, I love it.

All right, Chris, do you have one knowledge or skill area that you feel you need to improve on in order to become a more successful lean thinker?

Absolutely. I think every lean leader needs to actively work on their ability to listen. And listening is not just hearing people. Listening is taking what someone else has shared with you, focusing on what they're trying to share, asking reflective questions back to them so that they know that you understand what you're saying. And a benefit for me is I was born with no hearing in one of my ears, so I have to focus a little bit more when I'm out on a noisy manufacturing or distribution floor for what people are trying to say. So it's helped me, but I think that maybe folks that have 100% hearing, I don't think anybody has that now, but maybe people that have better hearing need to spend more time on their listening and not just their hearing.

Very powerful. All right, well, thanks so much, Chris, for taking time to come onto the show. I know you're very busy. Why don't we wrap this show up with you sharing some final words of wisdom, and then I want you to tell people how to connect with you, especially your new podcast.

Okay, well, thank you. Well, I think a. A parting piece of advice, or, you know, parting wisdom is you can't steer a parked car. And I think oftentimes people can become frozen with analysis or paralysis by analysis. You don't know what to do first. And I think the best advice is just go do something. And once you're moving, you can steer, you can change directions. It's that you can't reach the check and adjust or study and adjust in the PDSA or PDCA cycle until you do something. And so you've got to do something. You've got to move how people can connect with me. I have a podcast out there that partly inspired by the podcast with the Gemba Academy podcast here, and that's the Lean Leadership podcast. You can find it on itunes, it's on Stitcher, or you can just go to the website, which is leanleadershippodcast.com we focus on specifically the leadership standpoint of the lean and continuous improvement in Six Sigma. And the idea is that somebody out there, whether they're an experienced journeyman, professional, or they're somebody that's just starting out with lean or continuous improvement, that they're inspired by a leader like yourself or like some of the other great authors that we've all benefited from. That's really kind of how I came up with the idea for the podcast. It was I simply made a list of all of the people, the mentors, the authors that I had voraciously read and took in their podcasts and took in their webinars and went and saw them at Lei type training. And I just went to that, went down that list and said, hey, I'd like to pick your brain about your continuous improvement journey. And I've been overwhelmed with the answers that I've gotten in the sense of it's like sitting beside somebody while you're reading their book. You almost want to ask them the question. And now I'm able to ask them the question. Yeah, it really is. Yeah. And, you know, I have a 25 minute ride to work in every morning. So I found that listening to podcasts helped me focus on the day. It helps me invest in myself. And I think that people that are continuous improvement professionals, we need to follow the ILT model or the invest, learn and teach. So we need to be investing in ourselves and improving ourselves and then taking what we've learned and teaching it to the people that we've been entrusted to help improve their work environment. So can't steer a parked car and invest in yourself by listening to a podcast.

Love it. All right, well, very good, Chris. Yeah. And keep up the great work. I've enjoyed watching you start your podcast and can't wait to hear many more episodes. I don't think there can be enough folks out there talking about Lean, so hopefully others will be inspired to start their own podcast just like you have.

I appreciate it. Folks can also reach me on Twitter, I'm on Facebook, I'm on LinkedIn. If you have a question, ask. And if I don't know the answer, and I'm sure you've said the same thing, if I don't know the answer, help you find the person that does have the answer. Because really, improvement is all about helping people and connecting with people that help them improve. So, Ron, thank you for inviting me to speak on the podcast and I love the work that you're doing. Thank you.

All right, well, thank you, Chris, and take care.

Thank you.

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