GA 093 | How to Start a Lean Initiative with Blake Watermeier

You're listening to episode 93 with Blake Watermeier.

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@gembacademy.com now, today, I'm excited to welcome Blake Watermeyer to the show. Now, in episode 92, where we visited with Zane Ferry, we talked about how to kind of reinvigorate or restart a Lean transformation that had possibly stalled. And today, Blake and I are going to kind of explore a similar topic, but with a slightly different angle. But Blake's going to talk about how to go about just starting a new transformation or starting a new Lean movement or initiative. As you're going to hear, Blake has a lot of experience in this area, and he shares some very valuable tips that I think are applicable to anyone. And again, if you are on the journey and are making good progress, I still believe the things that Blake shares are going to be very value added. Now, show notes for this episode can be found over@gemba podcast.com just look for episode 93. And that's nine, three. Again, gembapodcast.com, look for episode 93. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Blake, well, thanks so much for coming onto the show. Where are you calling in from?

I'm in Atlanta, Georgia, today.

Nice. Nice. All right, well, it's, you know, we're recording this actually before the. Before the end of the year. So I guess everybody's getting ready to kind of take off for the Christmas holidays and all the rest of it.

So, yeah, it's that time of year, so some people are less productive when.

But here we are, you know, doing a podcast in the afternoon, you know.

Ready to go, committed, can't wait.

I love it. All right, so, Blake, let's go ahead and start with you telling us a little bit about your background and maybe how you first came to learn about continuous improvement.

Okay, well, my name is Blake Watermeyer. I've been in operations leadership for about 20 years now. Spent the bed part of my career, 13 years with FedEx office, joined them when they were kinkos and did some various operational leadership roles, Multi unit management in both retail and the commercial sections. I was really first exposed to lean and continuous improvement right after I got back to the states from an assignment in Australia. And I joined a group called the manufacturing network, where we were responsible for producing large commercial projects for those customers. Right when I joined that organization, My boss at the time had been kicking off an initiative to launch lean into the organization. So that was really my first exposure to it. And then since then, it's been a fun ride, and I've been doing it every step of the way.

Yeah. Love it. Love it. And where are you at today?

I'm with a company called arc document solutions. I've been here for a little over eight months now. I'm the regional vice president of operations for the southeast. So we have about 20 service centers that service both the document management and print management for mostly the architectural, engineering and construction space. And like I said, I've been leading this group for a little over eight months now, guys.

Nice. All right, well, Blake, you know the drill. We like to start all of our episodes with our guests sharing a quotation that possibly inspires them. So do you have one?

Yeah, I got a lot. But, you know, one of my favorites has become actually from Harry Truman. He said, it's amazing what we can accomplish when we don't worry about who gets the credit. And, you know, it really kind of. Kind of rings home. And I preach it all the time. It's actually Simon Sinek talks about it in his book. I know you've had him on your show leaders eat last. And he speaks to this concept in regards to the military versus the private sector and how in the military they reward people for being willing to give up their own lives to save others. But in the private sector, we struggle to give away credit.

Yeah, right. Forget about saving lives, man.

I don't want to give up credit. And to me, it really ties into creating that culture of continuous improvement. Because I tell it to. My people say, just think about if we removed every process, every procedure in a company that was put in place with the sole purpose of ensuring the right people got credit or the right department got credit and built a culture where people didn't care about that, but they just cared about what happened for the customer, Wouldn't we think and behave totally differently? And, you know, I really think we would accomplish so many more things and spend a lot less time and money doing it. You know, I know for a fact that both small and Big companies spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in payroll just moving money within a company to make sure that the quote, unquote. Right. People get credit.

Yeah, Blake, I want to. Let's go back in time a little bit. Jump into a time capsule and go back to your very first time kicking off a Lean Initiative. How did it go and what did you learn from that?

You know, like I said, it was after I got back from an overseas assignment and a bunch of US leaders, there was a small group of us, about three of us in a smaller department of a very big organization, and we went and got some formal training on Lean Six Sigma. And we were excited about it. Right. This is like, oh, this is great stuff. So we, you know, we had 20 locations around the country. So we went in there and we changed the layouts, we mandated 5s, you know, all those things. And we use tactics like, you know, leading people to get to the right answer, as if we could trick them into thinking it was really their ideas.

Right, right. I love that. Yes.

But, you know, we actually made some progress. We did make some improvements and we saw some headway. But after not that long, we found ourselves really beating our heads against the wall, wondering why we had to keep pushing things down and coming up with the ideas and drilling them down to the field level. I think people were executing on these initiatives out of maybe fear of not belonging, best case scenario, probably worst case, out of fear of not keeping their job. We all know how sustainable that is. We had our typical 20% of people that would get on board. Right. And then you have your 60% of your fence sitters, and then we had our 20% resistors. And, you know, we'd also. We dealt with those resistors and really kind of the more traditional change management approach that I'd been taught for so many years, which was kind of ignore those resistors or toss them to the side or get rid of them. So that led with, you know, obviously some mixed results.

Yeah. I'm curious, so I'm curious, when you. When you guys were first starting that initiative, did you kind of have a, you know, speaking of Simon Sinek's ways, and start with why, and did you guys kind of have a why, or is it just that you were excited, you learned some new stuff and you wanted to go try it?

You know, we had a why. It was to improve our quality. That was our why. We were performing at a pretty, you know, not great level from a quality delivery perspective. So that was our key driver. But again, it was from A well, here's the number. We don't like it. Need a better number.

Yeah.

It wasn't with a vision of what that meant to the customer and how that impacted the end user.

I guess another way of asking that same question is, and it sounds like you probably did, but did you communicate this? Why to all the associates that were impacted by this new mindset?

We certainly didn't communicate it effectively. It was, hey, we're going to do this. We all went to school when we got our belts, right.

Yeah.

And this is how it's going to be.

Yeah.

But didn't certainly tell them exactly why we were doing it and what the benefit to them was.

So how did your next attempts go better?

I won't say the next round was perfect. We definitely were more effective, but I still didn't get it. I felt like I was still delivering things to the field and trying to get their buy in. I was definitely more interested in listening to people, but I was still going into those conversations, whether it was a Kaizen event or, you know, really just a standard visit, you know, that I had my own biases, what the right answer was, you know, and I was still trying to play that game of, okay, I'm going to lead them to what I think the right answer is. I'm going to trick them into getting to the right idea. But I'll tell you, it was really, I guess probably the third attempt. You know, we didn't, we didn't give up on it because we knew it was the right thing to do and we were getting results along the way, but it was just real hard. So my colleague Jamie Parker, who I know you've had on this show as well, she came to us and said, you know, we've got to educate the field level team members on the tools to make them successful. So we invested the time and the money to get them educated on the resources. And once we got the level of training down to that level and gave them the education, it really became easy, it became fun. It was a game. And the leaders at that point just had to facilitate the improvements and share them across different facilities. If we did manage something, you know, we kept it very loose. Yeah. For example, we, we did say, listen, you guys have got to have shift huddles. You know, this is a fundamental. You look at Toyota, you look at all good companies that have implemented, you've got to do shift huddles. And we follow the, the SQDCM model, but we didn't say, hey, this is what your communication board has to look like, this is the time you have to have it. This is the person who has to lead it. We kept it very loose in that regard, and we. We got much more success that way, and we started to get all the right ideas from the right people once we gave them the right motivation and the right tools. Another important realization that we had on that third go round was that those resistors could actually be the ones that help you. Instead of ignoring them, putting them to the side, or getting rid of them, we increased our focus on them and listened to their ideas just as much as anybody else's.

You know, I really, really like that you said that, because I've always. I've always said that when I would facilitate a Kaizen event or any type of improvement activity, I loved having that guy or that gal that was sitting in the back row, you know, with the arms crossed and a scowl look on her face, because I knew eventually we could wear them down in a good way. Right. Like, we could just keep involving them and just not poking them, not, you know, trying to, you know, force them or anything, but just slowly bring them along. And then once they dug in, once they got it, man, those were the folks that would help spread the culture, right? Yeah.

They became your champions.

Exactly. Exactly. And a lot of times, as I'm guessing you've probably seen, they're resisting for good reasons, because maybe, like you said, you haven't explained why or we've not listened to their input before and they should be upset, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

I'm curious. One question I have kind of along these lines. If you and Jamie could have jumped back in a time machine again and gone back to the very beginning of that journey and done something different or talked to yourselves. Right. Like, you know, like the third attempt, you know, Blake and Jamie are talking to. Right. Before Jamie and Blake start this, what would you have said to them?

I would have started with, you know, trust your people. And, you know, I'm probably going to hit on this a couple more times, Ron, but trust your people. Trust that they want to do the right thing and really listen to them and don't just go in with your own biases. So take the approach that you teach them what you know, the same tools that you got, that the company invested thousands of dollars on that education for you, we'll give it to them. And you're not the expert at training them on it either, so get some resources to help them.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So obviously you learned a lot, and sounds like that story ended well. Anyhow and. And FedEx is doing great, great work now. But what have you applied from what you've learned to arc?

Well, you know, I didn't do what I did in rounds one and two with FedEx office. You know, I came in really more focused on training and educating first. You know, I'm really, again, only eight months in, so I'm really still in that training and development phase. We started with Paul Aker's book Two Second Lean, one of my absolute favorites.

Right? Yes, Y.

And with that, we got the field. Management and leadership has gone through that and we've certainly gotten some buy in there and we have some that are running with it on their own, and then we're going to have some that are still lagging behind a little bit, and that's normal. So what we're doing now is we're going the next step and we're investing in the training at the team member level in the field. And this is where I know we're going to get our traction from, from past experience. But on the offhand, if it doesn't work, then I know who to look at, and that's yours truly. But I know there's a world of people that are willing to help me out, whether it's old bosses or colleagues or books or Gemba Academy, whatever.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, it sounds like you got a great start and you've got obviously an awesome background that you can bring a lot of those lessons learned. And yeah, there's going to be bumps, right? Of course. I mean, it wouldn't be normal if there weren't, but sounds like you got the right disposition to happen to attack it. So you mentioned trusting your folks as a key part and investing in those folks with some training. But what other. There's someone listening to this podcast right now, Blake, and they're just starting. You know, it's 2016 and we're going to start a new Lean Journey or we're going to make things better. What advice do you have for that person, like right now?

Well, you know, I guess the first step is to, you know, like we said, trust. And you have to start with putting anything in the past that happened. Sometimes along the road, there's a breach in trust. Right. Whether it was leadership breached the trust of the employees or the employees breached the trust of the leadership. And you got to start from somewhere. And someone's got to put their big boy pants on and put that behind them and start with trust. Because there's the old saying, how many people actually wake up in the morning and say, I'm going to go do a bad job at my work today. And there's not that many people and they want to trust their leadership. And if they don't trust their leadership, then you got to figure out why. And it may be something that somebody else did way before you, but guess what? It's your problem now. You got to figure out how to fix it.

Yeah. Yeah. Now, on the flip side, let's say that someone's listening to this and they're not new on the journey. Maybe they've done a little bit in the past and they've practiced a bit of lean and continuous improvement and it just hasn't gone well. And maybe they're ready to give up or maybe someone's listening and they've already given up. What advice do you have for that person?

Well, you know, a. The most obvious is don't give up. You have to humble yourself and really look at the root of the failure. You know, we've all, you know, read those stories or heard those stories. Right. Of a big company that, you know, led their entire lean department. Go. Or, you know, these Fortune 500 companies have just cut their Lean initiatives. That Lean doesn't work for us. And a lot of us Lean practitioners, what do we do? We kind of. We kind of laugh or we scratch our heads and say, nah, you're letting it go because you don't really get it. Because it's about the people. It's not a corporate initiative. And if it's not taking hold, it's because leadership may not be taking the right approach. And you've got to keep trying different things because if you get, I mean, we know it works. I mean, it's been proven too many times that it works. And it's not just Toyotas. It's not just whatever company you can name out there that's been successful at it. Anyone who's stuck with it and got it embedded in the culture, the reward is great. So I would again, just stick with it, try different things. But if I could give them one piece of advice on where to start, it would really be with. With teaching the eight Waste. So many people want to start off with teaching some of the tools of Lean and, you know, whether it's 5s or kaizen meetings, one piece flow. But you know, those tools, going back to your point about the whys, they have to understand the why. And the first step in identifying and fixing a problem is knowing there's a problem to begin with.

Yeah.

So really have to start with the eight ways, and I've pretty. Pretty adamant about that one.

Yeah, I love that. Great advice. All right, well, you know, I'm curious to continue our relationship and knowing how things go there at arc. It sounds like you got a lot of good stuff going, and I'm excited to see your journey and follow you guys. Well, let's go ahead and jump into the reflection section, Blake. And the first question that I have for you is, you know, we spent a lot of time talking about the two pillars of lean continuous improvement, which are the tools and respect for people. And the tools are pretty easy to, you know, put your finger on and define, but respect for people can be more difficult. So I'm curious, what does respect for people mean to you?

Well, it goes back to trust. I mean, we've talked about it some already, but, you know, I really. Hemingway said it very well. He said, you know, the best way to find out if you can trust someone is to trust them. So you have to start somewhere. And, you know, like I said before, people don't come to work and want to do a bad job. They do want to trust their leadership. And. And you have to start off with trusting them. And if we can't get them to trust us, we have to look at what am I doing that's not allowing them to trust me. Have I said or done something in the past, and we've got to sit down and figure that out? Does that mean that every single person in the company is a good fit and always has 100% the best intentions? Not necessarily, but the vast majority, as we know of people do. And that's really where it has to start.

Yeah. Trust and autonomy. You know, it's so easy to say, but, man, it is tough, right? It is tough to do.

It is. Especially when there's a history.

Yeah, exactly. What's the best advice you've ever received?

Well, it's actually relatively recent. Got it from my fiance. And what she's got me to realize is sometimes the thing that drives me crazy about somebody is the exact characteristic that makes them good at what they do. And to put that in context, you know, a little bit of a story here. Here I was finding myself in a situation where the sales leadership and the operations leadership had kind of a not so great relationship, and there was some finger pointing going on, et cetera. And, you know, oftentimes as operations leaders, we're wired to kind of be willing to take the blame and accept responsibility when some things don't go wrong. And sometimes sales leaders aren't necessarily as humble for lack of better terms in taking that responsibility. And I'm speaking in generalities, of course, but, you know, my fiance noticed that this was causing me some frustration and angst. And she said, blake, you gotta realize that what you see is a lack of humility is the tenacity that they have that has wired them to be the kind of people that can go knock on 100 doors a day just to get that one appointment. So the thing that you don't like about them is exactly what you need.

Wow, that's awesome. And it's so true if you think about it. Yeah. Because we all have different styles of. And different gifts and. Yeah. What might bug you about somebody is really their strength.

Absolutely. Yeah. Love it.

All right, what about a personal productivity habit? Do you have others that have one that others might benefit from?

You know, an old boss probably 20 years ago taught me to plan my perfect week ahead of time. So what I do is I actually plan my week ahead of time, literally hour by hour, minute by minute. So on my Outlook calendar, I have every minute of my week planned. Some of that time may be some generic administrative time or email time or being in the Gemba time. And does every week go perfectly as planned? Well, of course not. But I promise you that if you start out with a roadmap of what your week's going to look like, it's going to lead to a tremendous amount more productivity.

Now, do you do a plan actual kind of thing, like do you print your calendar out or do you just use it electronically? I'm curious, how do you track and know how you're doing?

So I actually put it in my Outlook and I share my calendar with all my direct reports. Unless it's a private appointment, if I'm having a conversation that somebody doesn't need to know about, but they can see my calendar and they can see what I do. I use that. Back when I was in the field, I used to print my calendar up and stick it on my door so that my team could hold me accountable to that. I gave them permission to say, hey, if I said, I'm having a one on one with you at 11 o', clock, you have permission to call me on that and not moving around so that. So that helped me be more productive and stay on task. But I do it mostly electronically now. But I would encourage people that if you're in a, you know, if you're in a facility that you, that you post your calendar on your bulletin, let people see it, and they'll pro. I promise you they'll help. They'll help keep you on track.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, what about email? How do you approach that? Are you inbox zero kind of guy or.

I am an inbox zero guy galore. My rule is if I have to scroll in my inbox, then I am way behind. And. And so that's all of about 10, 15 emails. I can't say that I'm perfect about the whole touch an email once rule, but I might touch an email a couple of times. Some people are better at it than me, but I never have to scroll in my inbox and I make it a goal to get to zero.

Now, are you a delete email guy or a file email guy?

Both. I have a pretty big archive. I'm sure my IT guy would tell you that. File guy, right?

Yeah.

As I approach 5Gig in my inbox, I'm sure you would know I saved my archive file. But yeah, again, it just depends. But if I think I might possibly need it, yes, I save it, but if not, then I delete it.

I'm just asking because I've gone through various phases of my professional life with email success and failure and it just ebbs and flows. I'm constantly fascinated to hear how other people do it.

I actually heard a funny story. Steve Cain told me this last week that he knew somebody who when they got back from vacation, they just did control alt delay deleting their entire inbox. If they really needed me, they'll call me.

Well, yeah, that's. Actually he's telling you because it's a story that I shared with ab. It was a former colleague of mine and it was very clear in his out of office that these are the. It was a European guy from Finland. I'll just say it. And they have a different style over there. Okay. And his out of office said, I'm gonna be out. They're out for the whole month. Right. You know, like July or whatever it is. And he said, if you're sending an email in between these dates, realize one thing, I am not going to respond to it. So you must send me an email after this date. And he would go in and he.

Would just select all delete.

And he's pretty senior guy, so I guess he couldn't get in trouble. But I was like, man, that's one way of doing it.

Yeah, he's confident, that's for sure.

So is there anything that surprised you over this past year as you've been practicing and implementing Lean?

Maybe not as much Of a surprise, but certainly a reminder that people really do want to be led and they don't really fear change. You know, they're not as horrified as change as people like to preach. I really expected a little bit more trepidation from my people as I entered Arc Document Solutions from the outside, I thought there might be some. Oh, no, here comes the guy from the big company. He's going to tell us what to do. I experienced a little bit of that, but really not a whole lot. Tons of support from my leadership above me and letting me do what I want to do. And for the most part, my direct reports and the people under them. And the people under them have been really eager to see what I brought to the table from this continuous improvement methodology. They wanted to see why my boss brought somebody from the outside in. And it really just took a few small gestures to earn their trust by letting them see that I truly was interested in the best for the employees and for the company. Yeah.

Fantastic. Blake, do you have a routine or ritual that you follow when things aren't going well and you need to recharge and refocus?

I use the old phone. A friend. You know, I've had the luxury of working with some pretty awesome people in my career and been able to maintain those relationships and, you know, some who have mentored me and some whom I've mentored and, you know, when things aren't going well, I pick up the phone and I call them because. Because the odds are that they've been through what I'm going through or something very similar. And why am I going to make the same mistakes over and over? I'll learn the mistakes they made and try to avoid those and do it right.

Sounds like you can also just call your fiance and she'll set you right, too.

Yeah, she absolutely will. I'm lucky in that regard.

Awesome. Awesome. So is there a knowledge or skill area that you feel you need to improve in order to become a better lean thinker?

You know, I constantly have to work and remind myself not to tell people what to do or even how to do it, but to teach them how to identify waste or how to identify problems. You know, every time I go visit a location, you know, at least once every visit, I have to bite my tongue and resist the temptation of pointing out a waste or telling them how to fix it or even tell them that they have to fix it, because I know if I do that, that's going to breach that trust and it's going to create resistance. And I'm still trying to master that of asking questions without coming across as questioning what they're doing. I truly want to know why are you doing it this way? Not because I'm questioning that, because I just want to know. I'm constantly mastering that art, and I hope to figure that out one day.

Yeah. It's like you started by explaining what you guys were doing round one and two at FedEx office, asking the question that you know you already have the answer you want to hear. Right? Exactly. That's. That's tough, Right?

Exactly.

All right, Very good. All right, Blake, well, I've really enjoyed visiting with you, and again, I can't wait to follow your journey and see how you guys make out. But let's 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 over social media or some other way?

Okay, great. My advice would be to be consistent and be relentless that you can create an environment of continuous improvement. The one constant is you. So if it's not working, then you got to look at yourself and change your approach. Because if it were easy, then not so many people would be giving up on it. But the reward is huge, because when it does click and when it does get going and when you create that culture that is embedded in the organization, the reward and the growth that you see from your people is outstanding. And as far as where you can find me, best way is probably to find me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty much the only Blake Watermeyer at ARC Document Solutions. So search for Blake Watermeyer and ARC and you'll find me.

Go ahead, spell Watermeyer. Just for the listening only, folks.

Absolutely. That's W A T E R M.

E I E R. All right, very good. Hey, so are you guys thinking about going to any conferences this year or anything like that?

You know, I will probably be attending the American Manufacturing for Excellence conference. I missed this past October due to a conflict. I wanted to see my old colleague Jamie. I heard she was speaking there. She did.

She did. Awesome.

That's what I heard, and at least that's what she told me.

No, she did great. She did great.

But I intend to attend that for sure next year.

Well, fantastic. It's here in Dallas in our backyard, so we look forward to hosting you there and having a great time.

Looking forward to being there.

All right, take care, Blake.

Thanks, Ron.

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.