GA 122 | How to Improve Your Lean ROI with Cheryl Jekiel

You're listening to episode 122 with Cheryl Jeckel. 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 Perriver with Gemba Academy and I'd like to welcome you to another edition of the Gemba Academy Podcast. As always, welcome. 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 Gembacademy.com we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now today, I'm excited to welcome Cheryl Jekyll back to the show. Now, Cheryl and I first chatted on the podcast back in episode 82, which was October 29, 2015, and we sat down on that episode at the the Lean Leadership Summit in Jacksonville, Florida. And we just talked about Cheryl's with Lean and Human Resources. So be sure to check that episode out if you're interested in that topic. That was episode 82. But today what we're going to talk about is Sheryl's experience with return on investment. And when I say that, you're going to immediately think financial and all the rest of it. And that has something to do with it. But what Cheryl's going to talk about is how improvement teams and lean and continuous improvement in general has so much more to offer to to the to organizations than just financial benefits, which obviously financial benefits are an important part of it, but there's so much more because in the end it's people being transformed. And so that's what we're going to really talk about. Cheryl is going to also share a website for our landing page that she's created where you get some free tools to help you calculate the roi. So she'll share that URL early in the episode, so be sure to listen for that. Also, just a quick little tidbit. We've been mentioning the AME Conference in the last few episodes. So if you are planning to go to the AME show this year in October here in Dallas, be sure to go to gembaacademy.com ame and you can learn how to save 10% for the show. You can also sign up for or register for our free cocktail party that we're going to have that Tuesday evening of the show. Show notes for this particular episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 122. That's 1, 2, 2. So gembapodcast.com episode 1. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. All right, sir. Well, thanks for coming onto the show again. How's it going?

Thank you for having me, Ron. I'm really excited to be here today with you guys.

Yeah. All right, well, we talked to you, I guess we were back at the leadership conference. And where was that? In Florida, I think it was. And we sat down together and talked about some really fun stuff. But I'm really excited for today's topic. But in case people didn't hear that, that first episode when you were on, Cheryl, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and maybe how you first came to learn about all this continuous improvement stuff.

Oh, boy, that's really going to date me so much. So my background is I literally started doing this work roughly 30 years ago and came across at a fairly young age and took to it like a duck to water. We were doing TQM at the time. I was in the human resources function, which is not as common a place that people really get. Get all this. But I immediately became enthralled in how to understand it partly from an HR perspective in terms of where could you see the waste inside jobs? I started to really appreciate how much of, you know, just people's capabilities was being wasted and what it meant when you started to tap into it and see the engagement and watch their skills blossom. And probably even at a young age, really understanding how looking at jobs were so narrow, like, what does it mean to be a forklift driver? And then watching some of these same people lead teams and do problem solving and monitor their own quality and do their own preventative maintenance, it didn't have to be, you know, it was obvious to me that one was clearly much better than the other.

Yeah, yeah, got it. All right. Well, as you know, Cheryl, we like to start all of our episodes with our guest sharing a quote that possibly inspires them. So do you have one?

Well, the one I was thinking about for today, based on what I think we'll be talking about, is begin with the end in mind, which is from Stephen Covey's work, and focusing on really taking a fresh look at what the end game of this, of this work can be and with the idea that it may be much. The end game may be much bigger than many people are thinking.

Yeah. All right, well, let's jump right into it. So when we think about just continuous Improvement, or lean, whatever you want to call it, what do you think are some of the biggest problems that are going on and causing issues?

I've really come to a place over and over again. I see a short term focus on cost savings. In fact, it's common. Like, you know, just the topic of lean comes up or continuous improvement, they'll say, you know, it's, oh, that's cost savings. That's a way to take the idea of even taking out waste was as if it's a reduction in a cost frame. And from my point of view, from over the last 30 years, it's really been about a complete transformation of the skill base of the workforce as well as how they work. And that the result of all that is you have a completely different organization that's capable of much greater feats on many levels. So I think it's really expanding, seen improvement as a way to expand instead of a way to reduce costs.

Well, what's interesting about that, I think if you, you know, done right and you, you know, you focus on transforming these folks and their skill base, the cost savings are still going to come, right? Because they're going to constantly be looking for ways to improve their, their work. But it's not about the cost savings, right. It's about people. So I love it.

Right. And I think it's not whether they're both about cost savings. I think what I'm pointing to so that one of the entrepreneurs I worked for a little ways back would try and approach the cost savings like send an auditor in and figure out based upon a specific team's work, what was the literal cash cost savings of that work. Now when they would get that number, that's what would be discussed as that's the savings that this work does. But if you think about that same team built in, process orientation, business skills, process improvement skills, root cause analysis, customer focus, all of those things to say that that team's work was worth $42,500 is nothing compared to what it means to get employees working at that level. And that's the part that people are not really fully seeing and understanding the financial implications.

I got you.

I think they'd understand. It's just not where we've had our eye.

Well, you know, my own horror stories back in the day when I worked at some companies, I won't mention by name, but you know, I remember going through some different continuous improvement activities where we spent more time quantifying the savings of the project than we did the project itself. And I'm not really even kidding, you know, and it was just such a pity that we had to waste so much time on that.

One of the reasons I'm so excited about this work, it's not just, can we make a better case for the roi? I think the opportunity here, if we can get better at describing what the real ROI is, I think more of these initiatives won't be stopped before their time. I think it'll help show that there's a lot in here and it would be, you know, I think it would help people stop abandoning the work. That's why I think I'm so jazzed about it.

No, I got you. Now, I want you to mention this at the end, but you've created a website, right, kind of around this work. Go ahead and give that URL right now and we'll mention it again at the end.

Yes. So for any of you that would be interested in 10 guidelines for improvement ROI. So these are all guidelines to help you approach different ways, how to build the ROI on the work based upon the skills and approach and principles that I just alluded to. Just go to improvement roi.com that's improvementroi.com and I'll send you the 10 guidelines for improvement.

Yeah. And it's free. I guess it's free.

Absolutely.

Yeah. That's awesome.

Absolutely free. And I'm looking forward to the dialogues it creates.

Yeah, that's a great URL. I can't believe that was available. I can't believe Kevin didn't snatch it up. Kevin Meyer. He's snatching up all the good URLs out there, so he missed that one. All right, talk a little bit about this kind of long term transformations. We talked a little bit about not having the short term focus on cost savings, but instead we should be thinking long term. So what do organizations and leaders of organizations need to be thinking about to make that happen?

I think one really building. First understand the skills that you're talking about building and why those are valuable. So how does having your entire workforce understand your customers better? What does that mean? And then as you get clear on things like A3 problem solving skills, team skills, leadership skills. As you get clear what these skills really look like, putting those into the jobs themselves. One of the biggest issues I keep hearing in the field is we don't know how to make this sustainable. We don't know how to make this sustainable. And yet when they describe their work, it's been, we had an initiative, we brought in some training, or we had several teams do specific projects. I'M talking I think it's going to be critical that we learn to build this right into the fabric of how work is designed in the first place. Not just like job descriptions, those documents that everybody puts on the shelf and never looks at. Truly take a look at what is the scope of the jobs as you've created them. What are the work roles? Expand those to include a lot of these skills and then you hire to it, you train and develop, you hold people accountable like your performance management includes it and certainly how you recognize and reward people includes it. And once it's built into the fabric of the whole talent strategy, you really couldn't. It would be tough to get it back out of there. So I'm seeing it's like companies need to be worked toward a long term sustainable approach.

So anything else besides skills or because that sound, I guess with training and things that's how you're going to kind of fill those, those gaps if there are any or what else is going to be involved here.

So in terms of building those skills, one way I've been helping people take a look at it is I use a case study and I say here's a company, especially if people who halfway know somewhat, I mean some degree of experience with the variety of skills that get built in lean work from doing these team based efforts and teaching people visual management and again root cause analysis and how to work in a team to establish new ways of doing things, those kinds of things. So the way I've helped them identify it, if you had a workforce and you knew they'd been working in this and they've been trained in the last year and they've been working in teams and they've done these projects, if you were to separate out, remove the cost savings that they got, just take, take that off the table. What value do you think you have today? And when people usually quickly give me a list of. You have employees that now know process, they know business, they know the metrics, they know how to set those up as visual goals and work towards them. They worked in teams, they've learned to be facilitators, they've learned when they take that list of skills and then say how do you want to now build this into the infrastructure of how both your leaders work as well as all your people work. So I think a lot of it is back at a talent management design and then each after you get it designed, you can then thread it through. I would also say you don't necessarily need to thread it through recruiting, training, performance management and rewards by any means all at once or even the same way. But you're going to want to make this more. I would go at it. What is our current job structure? How are we currently organized? Many companies built those constructs differently. You'll find how we hold people accountable is not linked up with how we hire, which isn't linked up with what we're training to.

So what about your background is in hr? I think you've done some other things, but a lot of time in HR talk about HR's role and driving value in the workforce and especially as it relates to lean.

Yeah, that's really been my area of expertise. I wrote a book called Lean HR and have now spent the last six years in a really interesting learnings about how that is and is being applied out in the field. The first thing I'd say in terms of the role of HR people seem to be associating it as let's take lean methods and somehow improve the HR functioning. Let's pay benefit claims faster, let's try and reduce the waste in how we recruit and all that's. That's fine. I mean those are all good things to do. It certainly also helps the HR folks build their staff their understanding of this work. It's hard to teach something to somebody that they've never done themselves, like until they've done a three work. Then they don't know what we're talking about. But beyond that, the much bigger role for them is to understand what these skills are, what their value is, and then how to build them into the HR programming or the talent strategies, the people strategies. Finding companies use different words, but everybody has these programming in there. Everybody is recruiting people and they have some way they go about establishing what they're looking for. A lot of times how they're recruiting can also mean how do you redefine the roles and then maybe figure out if the people that you have in the jobs are right for this work. Not to take people out, but maybe to reassign or restructure how work is done. Maybe you have people in leadership roles that are really technical experts and other people that are in technical roles that would be great coaches. So HR is a huge role in understanding the framework and then figuring out what, what can they redesign in partnership with the other functions to get a design that'll support this culture. Basically this is one of the key elements of driving a culture.

Tell a story of your days in the corporate world of how maybe you made this happen from an HR perspective, maybe a success story Yeah, I mean.

Actually first of all, I think where I've realized over the years I'm fortunate my very first experience looked like this. So that's actually why I learned it this way, which is why I became so enthused. So we were working with some consultants and I was in the HR arena and they came in and they really showed us the complete backdrop of how to change the jobs to institute these kinds of problem solving. They built quality into the jobs. So we literally pulled apart what each job was. An example was things like a forklift driver, then all of a sudden included the preventative maintenance on the forklift itself. They would be active in other kinds of process teams to identify why the product going out of that plant could be improved. We started in that very same plant having employee teams of all kinds. Maintenance people, machine operators, supervisors, salespeople, all working with customers together in customer based teams. So we reoriented our workforce with the customer focus and we got huge amounts of new business. We were able to do really the same amount of output on a fraction of the workforce. We never laid anybody off, it was never, it was not a matter of taking headcount out, but we were able to grow, take on new business, rearrange what people were doing. But all the people I saw had much richer jobs, they became more valuable. So it was a multi skilled workforce. So we made jobs bigger so they were more valuable. So that's a win for employees. So employees have just much happier lifestyles, much greater contributions and the company did really, really well. So I left thinking that's how everybody did it. I thought that's what everybody was doing. And so I've since realized it's not necessarily the way everybody's been doing it. But I think one of the reasons why cultures aren't successfully being implemented is if HR is not involved and you're leaving the HR programming alone or just touching training and nothing else, it wouldn't seem like you could change a culture and not include this because you'd be sending so many conflicting messages about what you really mean. Like we train you to one thing, but we hold you accountable differently. So that's why I had such a successful experience and knew that this was a complete game changer forever and that the ROI as we've been talking about, one of the things is a lot of times if I've looked at the annual savings of a project, but it'll keep coming. You know, this workforce that can solve those problems and get you those gains, it'll pay every year forever. Once you can get the same work done on a fraction of that of the number of people. It doesn't go backwards. I mean, that gain is there year over year over year.

Yeah, well, you can change people's lives, right? Like forever. And how do you put a dollar figure on that? So.

Yep.

All right, well, so last question I have for you in this section, Cheryl, before we go to the reflection section, is I understand that you have an interesting role in next year's AME Conference. I think it's going to be in Boston.

It is. It is. It's in Boston. And so I've been a member of AME for 15 years and they've asked me to be the chair for the Boston Conference. And so we are already hard at work. We have many of the tours lined up already. We've been working on the keynotes that we're going to have. We have a really exciting theme. So the theme for 2017's conference is Get Engaged. And its overriding theme is going to be the leadership side of lean and improvement in general, as well as how engagement, what's really the business case for engagement, how this all drives engagement, and really what the win in is when in what the win in. What's the win in it for that?

Yes. Yes. Oh, I can't wait. Boston's such an incredible city that that's going to be a fantastic venue. And I can't wait, can't wait for this year, Dallas. It's going to be here before we know it in October. So I know you'll be there. Right. Would you have anything going on there? Just an attendee. You speaking? What are you going to do?

Oh, yeah, I'm teaching a workshop, a leadership workshop on Monday. And then I oversee a lot of the large groups that are there. We have companies that have been starting to bring 25 or more people, and they do that because it really enriches the results they get. So what they're finding when they bring 50 people is it creates just huge momentum of improvement in their company. So I work with them all week. And then certainly preparing for Boston, we are will be gathering up ideas, speakers, people that all want to do something for Boston. There's usually almost 100 volunteers every conference that are hard at work as part of the group.

Yeah, well, we just had George says on. Actually I interviewed him yesterday. So the episode would have. I guess people hearing this, would have heard it the week before, but yeah, it's just. Sounds like you just. Guys, so many amazing things going on with ame, such A great organization. So.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so if anybody is looking to go to the Dallas conference this year in October, go to gemba academy.com ame and you get 10% savings and all that. Good stuff. So. Good stuff. Cheryl, let's go ahead and jump into the reflection section. And so, you know, the first question is very people oriented because, you know, we spend a lot of time aline talking about kind of those two pillars, continuous improvement, the tools, the things that we do. But the other pillar being respect for people, which can be a little bit harder to define. So I'm curious, what does respect for people mean to you?

I've always thought of it as just like a sacred respect for humanity or for a person in terms of their. You know, that each person has their own special set of skills, the contributions that they're able to make. So I think it's really just honoring all that each person can provide and what they. What, what. What they all have to them.

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

Slow down. I think I still get the advice fairly regularly, even just, you know, sometimes the fastest way and the best way to get something done is slow down and take your time and think through what you want to do and. And where you're going. So I think a lot of times slowing down a little bit really helps almost every time.

Yeah. Yeah. Didn't owner say, to become really good at tps, all the workers must become tortoises? You know?

Yes, exactly. Slow down.

Yeah. So do you have a personal productivity habit that others might benefit from?

One is, I think maybe practicing these principles in my life, whether it be my car, literally my makeup drawer is organized in a 5s formation every time I pack a suitcase. Somebody taught me this 20 years ago, I met him on a plane and he said, you know, you want to keep in mind, you're always modeling this. You're always. You want to bring these principles into your garage, like into your life, so that you don't turn them on at work. And then by the way you travel, by the way. He happened to have noticed I had a briefcase that was 10 inches thick, loaded with paper, and yet I'm traveling the world doing. Facilitating kaizen events. And so I think it's just really making sure you bring it home.

Yeah, yeah. So is there anything that surprised you over this past year or so as you've been practicing and implementing Lean?

Anything surprised me? Many things, I guess, have surprised me. I think, you know, one that we've been talking about is even just Today I was working with a client this morning and we were talking about the big picture. And even though we've been alluding to what the issues were, we really hadn't calculated what kind of numbers we're looking at. One interesting thing, I guess, given my nature to be so people based, I've been finding the surprising thing is most people don't like to talk about the numbers. But if we think about what the CEOs or board of directors think, like I've been saying, it's as if they speak another language. They speak money. Even metrics often are in percentages. But the board speaks dollars. And so it's learning. Well, it wouldn't be my first choice to talk dollars. I'm finding if you don't talk dollars, then you may not get the where it needs to get to be successful. So I've been finance. It's surprising we're not able to dollarize as much as we could. So I think my focus in the next year is going to be helping to dollarize things so that we get hurt.

Let's say that you're going about your week and things just aren't going as well as you'd like them to be and you're feeling a little bit down and in a rut and you need to recharge and refocus. Do you have a routine or ritual that you follow to make that happen?

You know, again, this is something I learned many. It's mostly to change my habits. Do something like if I normally go to work a certain way, go a different way, or take the train, change things up and it'll kind of scoot things around. Maybe even go to a restaurant I've never been to, have breakfast for dinner, you know, leave the office. Definitely. Going places I'm not normally at is stimulating and helps remove some of that stuckness.

Yeah. Well, that's what I also love about. I know you go to a lot of conferences as well, just like I do, and just mingling with folks like the TWA conference. I think it was the most recent time I saw you just. I just left there feeling amazing. Right. Because it was just these. It was a smaller conference, but just these awesome people around and just totally recharges you.

Yeah, yeah. And can I mention one more thing?

Yeah.

I've been spending a lot of the last year looking at mindfulness techniques. Now, you might be thinking of it as meditation. There's a growing movement to bring it into the workplace. They're bringing it in schools. What we're finding, if People learn to basically meditating, meaning just be mindful, just slow down and kind of don't let your thoughts calm down and be aware of what you think. It strengthens the mind, strengthens output. It helps people be more relaxed and considerably more productive in a positive way. And so one of the things I've really been trying to build in my own life is making sure I bring this into my day to day life. And as I understand the power of it, I would love to do some work with bringing that into the, seeing how it would benefit the work place.

Love it. So you've been at this for some time and got a lot of experience, but I'm curious, is there a knowledge or skill area that you feel you need to improve in order to become a better lean thinker?

Yeah, I almost want to. Like I blush when you ask me. It's asking better questions, I think I usually have always said listen better, which is still true. But I've been coming still aware when people ask me a question, I need to try and not just answer questions. I need to be the kind of person that asks people questions. You know, don't just tell people answers. Ask questions and help them learn. Let people learn on their own.

Yeah, make like Socrates, right?

Yeah, exactly.

All right, all right, go ahead and give the URL out again for the, for the landing page for the ROI.

So it's improvement ROI.com.

Yeah. Yeah, very good. Well, I'm going to go there myself and download it. So I'm going to do that as soon as we get off. So how can people connect with you, Cheryl?

So first of all, if you go to improvementroi.com, you will be able to hook into my website, which is Lean Leadership Resource Center. You could always just contact Gemba Academy and they'll get you through to me as well. So that website I gave you will get you to me and I will respond to anybody that sends me a note.

Got it? Yeah. And so everything will be on our show notes page, which people can find GembaPodcast.com and just look for episode 122 and we'll have everything there. All right, well, thanks again, Cheryl. I know you're really busy and it's great to talk and I'll see you definitely in Dallas here in October, if not sooner.

All right, sounds good. Thanks, friend.

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