GA 080 | Leadership in Sustaining a Kaizen Culture with Mike Wroblewski

You're listening to episode 80 with Mike Wrobleski.

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 Gemba Academy, and I'd like to welcome you to another edition of the Gemba Academy podcast. As always, thank you so much for taking time out of your day in your week to listen to the show and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over at Gembaacademy.com, we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now then, today, I'm excited to welcome Mike Wrobleski to the show. Now, Mike is a longtime friend of mine and friend of Gemba Academies. Mike is a Lean consultant who has literally traveled the world and taught people all over the world about Lean and Kaizen. He's one of the smartest, brightest Lean thinkers that I know. And Mike recently presented at the Summit for Lean Leadership in Jacksonville and then again at the Lean Management Summit in also in Jacksonville. So there was actually two different conferences that went on in the same week. And we were actually fortunate enough to record both of Mike's talks. And so we'll have those full talks available for viewing in our Gemba Live series of videos here in the coming weeks. But what we're going to do here is we've stripped out the video and we have the audio from Mike's, which was a shorter version of the talk that he gave on Thursday. And in this talk, Mike really kind of explores the topic of how to create a Kaizen culture. And Mike was a co author for the book Creating a Kaizen Culture with John Miller. And Mike really knows his stuff. So I've heard Mike speak, oh gosh, dozens of times over the years, and I have to say that this just talk just really blew me away. Mike is got such a presence on the stage. I hope it comes through and just in the audio. But he has such a way of just really kind of commanding the stage and doing a great job interacting with the audience. And it's one of those talks where the audience is just kind of leaning in the whole time, if you know what I mean. So really excited for that. So the show notes for this episode, which will include links to the AME conference that's coming up here later this month. So go ahead and check that out. It's going to go just go to GembaPodcast.com and then look for episode 80. That's 8, 0. Or you can also go to Gemba Academy.com AME to learn more about the AME conference and how to save 10% on a ticket if you do plan on going to the conference. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show.

Okay, well, good afternoon. We're going to talk a little session about lean leadership. That's the theme that we're going to do going forward. And I need to get a one point lesson. Okay, very good. My last name is Polish. A lot of people look at my last name, don't know how to pronounce it. So in the spirit of Kaizen and Lean and Visual management, here is a slide to help you understand how to pronounce my last name. Please follow the pictures. Robleski. Can everybody say that? Perfect. Good. It's working. You'll actually remember this the rest of the conference, if not longer. One of the things that I use with this slide, besides having a little fun with my last name, is that a lot of times we learn things. And we're going to learn things in this conference. We're going to learn about 5s, or we'll learn about visual management, or we're going to learn about technique and lean leadership. And we go really quick back home to implement that tool. And we already know that tools are not the source of actually sustaining it. You need to change your culture. But what we end up forgetting is what is the purpose problem we're trying to solve in the first place. We're so enamored by this new shiny tool that we go out and implement it. So in this case, the problem is that you see the letters in my last name and don't know how to pronounce it. This is an A to help solve that problem. So please be aware of knowing what your problems are first before you start going into all the solutions that we're going to learn. Now, part of what we're going to do in this short session is talk about some of the things that I have in my book on creating a Kaizen culture. And that's how we want to develop our culture, which is the core values and behaviors that help us do two real main things. And that is how do we become a learning organization? How does an organization become learning so that we can survive? And then how do we drive continuous improvement forever? Forever is the key on the continuous improvement. It never stops. You will never get rid of having problems and you will always have opportunities to improve. So it's forever learning, and it's forever improving as we go forward. Now, one of the things that we've learned in companies that we've worked with, the ones that actually do the best, are the ones that are the most adaptable. If you're adaptable, then you can change with how the conditions change because the real life and business is very dynamic. It's always changing. So if we're not keeping up with those changes and applying what we learn to new and more frequent problems that we see in the future, if we're not adaptable and we don't use that as an opportunity to improve, well, then we're not going to be successful. We'll actually go the way of others that have not changed. Now, we have found that tools, although that we love tools. I love tools just like everyone else. I'm an engineer by training, so I like tools. But it's the culture portion. The hardest part about this is trying to get this in to our culture of how it becomes just a way of life. And what I've actually taught a lot of people is putting tape on the floor to say, this is the footprint, where this goes through your 5s program. Or you put up a board that shows this is our trending chart. Those physical things that we do with lean are easy to do. It's the behavior that goes along with that that is hard to develop and sustain. So how do we get the behavior to actually allow the tools to become really good tools that we actually improve? So what does it mean to sustain? Let's talk about that first. So if I asked you what the definition of sustain something is, you more than likely say, well, it's like maintaining or supporting the status quo, conserving or protecting, keeping it that way. But it's quite the opposite. That's not what we mean when we say sustain. What we say sustaining is a very dynamic force. It's constantly changing, it's continuous. It's how do we nourish something, how do we supply sustenance? So what you look at is consider you're like a farmer growing something. You don't just plant the seeds and then step back and let it go. You plant the seeds, you check the soil, you apply fertilizer, you're weeding, you're constantly working and cultivating to allow it to grow and develop. So in our aspects of sustaining, it's more active in the fact that we're trying to help nurture the environment in our culture, not just protect our status quo. So in the Batch worlds. In typical traditional management, what do we focus on? We focus on results. That's pretty common now. Results matter no matter what. Results still matter, even at Toyota. Results matter at any lean company. But in a lean world, what a lean leader should focus on is they should focus on the process. Focus on the process will get you the results. So the analogy I like to use is from my favorite football team, the Green Bay Packers. 4, 0. Thank you. Think of a coach on a good football team. Okay. What do they do? Well, first of all, how many teams are there? 32. How many coaches were fired last year? About eight. Eight out of 32 got fired. Why? Teams weren't winning. They didn't get results. Same in real life and business. If you don't get results, you're going to get fired or you'll get replaced or moved over. Okay, so how do football coaches keep their job? How do they get results? They have to have a winning record. What do they have to have each week to have a winning record? A win. What does the win signify? What do you have to have up on the scoreboard? More points than your opponent. So do you see in a game, coaches in the game doing this? It's 21 nothing. Come on, team, we need points. All right. Oh, gosh. 28 nothing. I'm going to lose my job. Do you see that? No. What do football coaches do during the game? What are they looking at? What do you see them doing? Watching the plays and the strategy. Watching the plays and strategies. Have you ever noticed now with the technology, that as soon as they run plays, they have pictures of the plays and people are flipping through the pictures showing where people were. What are they looking at? Either breakdowns or where they can create advantages. Yes. And what they're looking at is the play. How did the play execute? Where did we go and where did they go? How did we perform? So if you think about it, in a lean world, in business, that's standard work. They're looking at the plays of standard work. They're focusing on how do I get standard work? If we execute these plays and you perform it the way we practice going forward, then we're going to move the ball. If we move the ball, we're going to score and make more points. So they're not looking at the scoreboard, they're looking at standard work that plays at work, at the gimba, which is the actual place where. At us, in our factories. Are we doing this mistake where we're looking at the results, the scoreboards, the KPIs and the metrics and trying to run the business where we're not looking at the plays, we're not looking at the team, we're not developing the players. Now when you see an opportunity, do you think the coaches are talking to the players? What are they doing? Coaching? Where are we coaching in our business? Are we actually looking at plays and helping develop our players into leaders? Fuji Cho from Toyota said that there are three main keys on leadership. It's go and see, ask why and show respect. So go and see. That came up to go to grasp of the situations. Go to Gemba. You, you've probably heard that before. Go to Gemba. I learned that years and years ago from the Japanese. But we have a big problem with going to Gemba. We don't really understand what that means. It's like, oh yeah, go to Gemba. That means go out to the shop floor. So I do go out to the shop floor. But some of the things I've learned is that when I had Japanese consultants teach me over the last first five years of my career, they said always about going to Gemba. Genbutsu, which we talked about and genshu, they actually mean the actual place. So go to the actual place. Genbutsu is look at the actual thing, look at the actual machine or the actual process. And the Ginsu is find the actual facts. Now I wrote the Japanese kanji up here so that you can see some similarity. What do you see that's similar? Well, if you look at the first symbol, that's the similarity. One of the things I learned of the nuances with the Japanese culture is if they repeat something three times, it's pretty important. So they kept repeating these three things. So Tada, we realized this must be really important. So let's talk about what this is, which is the gen or genba. And if you know anything about kanji, Kanji is more about symbols. It's about storytelling. It's not so much letters. So you can break this down into this portion right here. That symbol, what does that mean? It's I to see. You want to go and see. And then here, those are legs. So it's go and see. And then this one here is king. And the king is not meant to say that you're going to go rural. It's meant to gain wisdom. So you're going to go and see to understand, to gain wisdom. That's how you're going to use this to lead. So when we go to Gemba, this is our purpose, this is our mission. We're not going to, as you heard earlier, say, hi, it's not a social visit. It's not to just make superficial comments like that looks good. It's there to understand the value stream flow and also understand what the problems are so that we can solve it. The problem that I see going around to many, many different manufacturing companies and businesses, transactional, doesn't matter, any businesses. What I see is the gimbal walking dead. How I view this, and this is from my observations, you may see something different. I see management saying, we're going to go on a Gemba walk. And they go over on their routine because it's mindless. And they go, look at this board and they look at these, look for red, look for green. That's what they told us. Let's talk about the red and look at those metrics. Oh, those results look good. Then we go over to the next board. Let's look at the results. Look for red and green. Okay, there's red. Need to improve this. Please go over the next board. And they go through the tour of the whole facility, going board to board to board. And I'm trying to say, turn around, Gimba's behind you. Gimba's the work, the work. It's not the boards. So the idea is, when you go to Gimba's, go and see the work, Go and see the people. Don't do this mindless walk of the boards. And that's what I end up seeing in most manufacturing facilities, most office complexes. They go board to board, not look at the work. And that's as leaders. We have to go to the work and go to the people that are doing the work. And we need to now look at how we're going to understand the situation and solve it. As mentioned earlier, we talked about Professor Schein. He said that the only real thing, real importance that leaders do is create, create and manage a culture. And that, I truly believe, is what we need to do as leaders. Are we working on this daily? Because it's a daily system. One of the things that we don't do that most good professional teams do is daily practice. Now, if you look at it, even though you have in this picture the MVP from last year, the best football player in existence, probably in the hundred years of football, next to Bart Starr and Brett Favre and some of the other great quarterbacks that were at Green Bay. Yes, yes. But even if they're great performing at great levels, they all practice. And what do they practice? They practice basic skills to keep getting better and better. Where do we practice in business that's missing? We don't practice. And I think we can. I think we can practice to become better. Can we practice a good communication cell meeting, a daily huddle meeting? Can we practice conflict resolution? Can we practice our coaching style and techniques? Most of us practice our coaching game time. We go right to the game, right to work, and we practice coaching. But we can simulate that. Suppose I need to have a conversation with one of my employees and it's probably not going to be pleasant. I'm going to think about what I'm going to say, but do I ever practice that? Could I get a colleague or my boss to saying, hey, could you help me out? I had this really sensitive conversation. Can I practice with you to see how I'm going to deliver? Am I going to deliver correctly the right message? Because sometimes when I deliver a message, even though the words may be right, the message may be wrong. So do we ever take the time to practice that? Here's one thing I've learned to believe is that reading a book or attending workshops doesn't give you skills. Years of practice does. The problem is I know very few leaders who are willing to put in years of practice. That I think is one of our personal reflections we have to look at as lean leaders is, am I practicing to become a good leader? Am I actually learning to develop my skills to do this? And actually, there's very few people that are doing this out here in order to make this a habit. To become really good at this leader, it takes focus and deliberate effort. You want to make this part of your core belief. So it's not just the actions of what you're doing. It's. But do you believe this in your heart? Do you believe that it's important to plan slowly and act quickly? Is it important to be a teacher? Is it important to not blame? And am I practicing that skill every day? So of course we must make that desired behavior clear and explicit. And the best way to do it is to lead by example. So I hear many times when I go to companies that, oh, we'd be a really great company if only the CEO was on board or some other senior leadership team, we would be so great if they could buy in on this. I am so frustrated and stuck. Well, the way I look at it is you may not be able to control your senior leaders, but you certainly can influence them. And the best way to influence them them is through your behavior. So don't worry so much about trying to change your CEO, but think about this Next two days. How I yourself, how can you become a good, lean leader, develop yourself in this process? And then when you develop yourself, look at how can I develop the people under me? Now I go to a lot of coaching sessions where I go to plant managers and I do a coaching session. And the coaching session would be something like, well, we're not getting this metric and this team's not working on this. And then we talk about results. And I say, well, who reports to you? Well, we have these three assistant managers. I said, how are you developing those people? Let's take one at a time. What's your development plan for this person? What are you doing to help this person? What are their weaknesses? What are you doing to help coach them? And I broke the job down to saying, even as a plant manager, you have the results of what the plant needs to do, but what are you doing to develop your team? In other words, your direct labor staff, what are you doing each level? Let's talk about your assistant managers first. Best thing I can do when I coach is I ask leaders, how do you spend your time? What do you do? I actually make them write down some of the things that they do. And I do this exercise worldwide. I was in Saudi Arabia a couple weeks ago. I did it there. I've done it in Portugal. I've done this in Singapore last year and in India. This is same question I ask as a leader, what do you do? The answers I get most meetings go to meetings. Second most is firefighting. Dealing with problems. Not problem solving, but firefighting. Next third, emails. And then I hear I do presentations, reports, etc. What I don't hear is Gemba Walks. Developing people, Kaizen developing my own skills. Those are things that are missing. So please evaluate your role of what you do. And the best way to do it is what do you do each day and examine what you do and you spend your time on? The one question I would ask is, are you working in the business or are you working on the business? So are you so caught up in getting the results of actually getting the process of making your product or delivering your service that you're not stepping back and saying, how is this process to make this product? How is this process to deliver this service? How can I improve this now? I'm just as guilty. I was a plant manager once and I was so absorbed in getting results, I actually drove my car to a supplier which was about 35 minutes away, loaded axles in my car and drove it to the plant just to get production out. That Night heroic effort, but totally the wrong thing to do. Because I spent so much time on trying to get in the business of getting the product out that I never stepped back and said, how bad of a broken process do I have that the plant manager has to go in their personal car to go get some stock? What's broken and why am I not fixing what's broken? That's where we have to look at lean leaders going forward. We need to step back and spend our time. I would say that almost 95% of your time should be working on the business, and that includes kaizen and people development. Less on working in the business. So in essence, that you need to lead through service. So essentially come to work every day not looking at your task list of things you need to do. But how can I make other people successful? How can I develop them and what I can do to make people better. Develop your kai's and I's into superhuman power. You all have that ability to see opportunities for improvement. Develop your kaizen eyes, develop your kaizen mind and teach others. You are now like kaizen man. You have that super ability to go forward. Teach that to others. And a couple other points. Be curious. Be curious about problems. Be curious about your process. Don't just walk by it. Most of us walk through the plant, going from meeting to meeting to this session to that session. We never stop and look to see how the process is working and ask questions why. In essence, it's one big experiment. PDCA going rapidly is an experiment, so you have to do it daily. What kind of kaizen's can I do? What can I learn from this process? And you realize it's not a permanent solution, but it's a solution that you think will work at this time. Be willing to fail and make mistakes. How many people can say that they've started a fire in a plant? I have. Once in kaizen, I was working at a casket company making wood caskets, and we did a problem. We had twisting of the rails. So we did a kaizen event on it, and we replaced staples in it so that we eliminate the twisting, which we did successfully. Ran it all week long. Two weeks later, I get a call from the plant manager saying we had a fire in the plant. We did a root cause analysis, and we came to you as being the root blame. And of course, I did teach that. It's the five whys, not the five who's. We went through that session. They go, yeah, we heard you in that, but you're still at blame. I said, okay, Explain to me what happened. First of all, was anyone hurt? No, no one was hurt. And they explained that. Remember that Kaizen event you did a couple weeks ago when you moved those staples around? Well, that machine caught on fire. Apparently what you had done is you had moved the staple. And I said, well, it was we and it was a team, and it was a process change. So in the process was changed to move the staple. It came in contact with the moving metal saw blade. Moving metal saw blade, metal nail. Spark. Spark goes in the dust collection system. Poof. Fire with wood chips. Okay, so they burned up the machine. Everybody was evacuated for an hour. They came back, they fixed the machine. Everybody was up and running. So we learned a lesson from this. We didn't fully understand the capabilities of the process before we made the change and walked away from it. So that became a lesson that we taught all Kaizen events, is that you need to go forward on your teams to make sure that you understand the process. Again, going back to the gimba, understand thoroughly understand the process before you just walk away from a change. So you will make mistakes, you learn from them and teach others. I can still Kaizen there, but I'm not allowed in that department anymore. I don't know why. Okay, the last piece of advice is do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the why. Seek what they sought so you don't have to follow the same model everybody else follows. Know the end objective of what we want to do. Find your path, things that work with your culture, with your company, with your employees, and seek that end result. Thank you so much. Any questions? Yes. Tell us a Shingo story. A Shingo story? Yeah, Shingo. Shingo was my first sensei. He came in 1985 and taught me the med system. We took a die that took one hour to change over. And in one week, he taught us. Although he could not speak English, he could only write down drawings. We took a one hour setup, down to four and a half minutes in one week. And then he said, go forth. But how he did that was very interesting because he didn't say a lot of things. He did a lot of drawings. So he's explaining it. So there's a difference between coaching and mentoring. Coaching is just ask questions. Mentoring says, let me show you a skill, teach you a point, a message, and then help you. So he did both. He did a coach and a mentor. But he would go in and every time we turn to him, like when we did a changeover and it went from one hour to 30 minutes, we turned to him and he says, please try again, you have more waste. And he would teach us something else and then we'd go do this. And then he said, ah, you're down to 20 minutes. Please try again, there's more waste. And he was telling us things about having the dies the same height, of having internal and external elements, how to put slots in so you're not ratcheting things down. You can just pull it out and slide it in. So every time he would review our tapes and review what we're doing, he said, please try again, there's more waste in the process. Well, when we got down to the four and a half minutes, we're like high fi ing each other. We beat that 10 minute mark from the Japanese. We're so much better than them. Again, we're young in our ego, but we turned to him and we expected great accolades. He just shook his head and said, please try again, there's more waste in the process. You can save 5 seconds here and 10 seconds here. So what he taught us is even after you achieved a goal, continuous improvement is forever. You're always looking for waste. You're always looking for improvement. It's good to congratulate you that you did a good job, but you always have to still be humble and saying, please try again. There's still more waste. You can improve. That's one thing he taught us. His son, Ritsuo Shingo never really knew or worked or spent much time with his father, but his nature is almost exactly the same way. Isn't it amazing he teaches exactly the same way. Yes. Now, I've had Japanese consultants that yelled at you, I think, called Concrete Head, because I couldn't get it in my head. I've been fired before. I was told to get rid of my automation, get two mules to move the product around. So it was really unusual some of the things that the Japanese would tell you. But really, if you step back, they always had a purpose of why they said it the way they said it. They're always trying to teach you something. So you have to just step back and say, well, what are they trying to teach me? What can I learn? Yes, ma'. Am. I found it very interesting when you went into detail about the characters. Can you elaborate on what King use again? King. King is not that I'm in power. King is to seek wisdom. Okay. So I think in the Japanese, they think King is wisdom orientated. So I'm sure that is along the lines of their impression of what a king would be is a wise King. So what you do is you go and see, to go gain wisdom. And that's the only way you're going to understand, truly understand the truth or the wisdom is to go see yourself. Yes.

For the coaching and the way you explain does the coach stand with the back to the team or face the team and all that kind of stuff. Have you ever tried to. I mean, that's pretty understandable to anybody probably in the US who's watched any kind of sporting event because the coach is always on the sidelines.

Yes.

Getting involved and engaged. How would you help your leadership kind of absorb that information so that they can understand how it fits into their work?

Well, first is awareness of the problem. I would say, are we coaching well? Do you think we coach well? And if you get people to embrace that there is a problem, understanding the situation, then we can say, well, where do we want to be? And then we can look at the gap that we want to prove. We. But there's some things, little tricks you can do, little techniques that I found that are really helpful and I'll share one with you really easy. I'm going to come down here real quick. I know you guys probably aren't going to like this. Can I coach you for a moment? Typically when we coach, we'll sit here and we can coach like this. What position am I to my coachee? Power position. I'm standing up, you're sitting down, I'm down. You know, it's not a good position. It's also face to face. A better approach would be could you just stand up and turn to the side? Shoulder to shoulder is a better approach. It's like, can I look at your leader standard work. And then you would show it to me. And it's like a triangle that you're doing. So you're always looking. Or let's look at the process together. And you look at the process and you're improving it. And what do you see? Notice the position of side by side is much more effective than being face to face because now we are working together as a team to solve something here. We can also say, what do you think about how you're leading this team in the comcell meeting? Even if it's personal behavior, we can do it side by side. That's one technique I've learned from coaching. And you'll see that on the teams here. Thanks. You'll see that in the teams here that most of the coaches stand side by side with the football players, not necessarily in front of them. At least the Better coaches that you see up here. You do realize you're in Jacksonville using Pinnacle Football? Yes. Yes. I actually was in Pittsburgh when Green Bay beat Pittsburgh in the super bowl, and I was doing a 5s event there. And I love going to Seattle and I love going to Pittsburgh and some of the others. We got you this year. We were doing a 5s on this brake press. And I said, you know, this really needs to be cleaned up. And we got it organized. And I noticed that the moving rams there, usually for osha, we paint those yellow. What do you think? Yeah. Okay. So they painted all bright yellow for a moving piece. And I said, well, now that that's painted, the rest of the press looks really bad. What can we do? Well, we should paint it. And I said, all right. What color should we paint it? And they go, I don't know. I said, how about green? So they painted the whole press green. And then they step back and say, wow, this looks great. And I said, yeah, it's fantastic. If you asked me, I said, what can we do to improve it? And I said, you know, we need a big G right here. That's when I was told that I had to wear a Steelers jacket the rest of the week at the plant. So, yes, I'm aware of where I'm at. Just one more example of the difference between a mentor and a coach. Okay. Coaching usually involves only asking questions and not giving information. This is one of the hardest skills to do because we have knowledge ourselves, and. And it's so easy for us to give the answer or so easy for us to just solve the problem ourselves. But what we want to do is challenge our employee to learn to become a better problem solver. So we try to do that through questions. What do you think? What do you see? And one of the major things that I've been working with my clients right now is that we don't do a good PDCA in our problem solving. We either do a lot of pp, a lot of planning, and not actually fixing anything, or. Or we go straight to do, and it becomes do do. Okay, so that's what I see. And what I normally see when you do problem solving is when we say we do three Cs, what is the concern, what is the cause, and what is the countermeasure? What I see is two Cs. What is the concern, the problem, and what's our countermeasure? They skip over the cause. So I catch that, and I say, all right, from a mentoring point of view, I notice that you're catching that. What is the cause? Show me your cause. So through questions only, you can coach. Mentoring is you don't know how to do a skill, you don't know how to do 5s. Let me show you. And then you can practice it. So you're always developing or giving information on a mentoring side or on a coaching side. You're trying to do it through only questions. That's the main difference that I was taught.

Thank you, Mike.

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