GA 148 | How to Create Your Vision with Paul Hill

You're listening to episode 148 with Paul Hill.

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 and 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, a quick Gemba Academy update. So we are wrapping up our first training with an industry course which we're we're starting with job instruction or ji. Now, we've had several guests on over the last few months who spent a lot of time talking about twi. We're very excited for this course. We're actually doing this one a little bit differently. We're actually the original JI kind of training sessions were planned to go over five days and so we've actually created a course so you can basically duplicate the original five day series style of training. So it's pretty, pretty, pretty exciting stuff. We're actually getting ready to facilitate a live class using the video. So we're going to play videos and then let the students do the exercises and we're actually going to record that as well. So we're really, really happy to get this out there. So look for that in the coming weeks here at Gemba Academy. Now today, I'm excited to welcome Paul Hill to the show. Now, Paul is a longtime listener to the podcast and a longtime Lean thinker. He's worked in a couple different types of Lean roles. He's worked as a kind of a site based lean practitioner and then he's also worked more as a kind of more of a corporate role where he's gone to different facilities. And so Paul kind of shares his story and his journey with what's gone well, what he struggled with, and really everything in between. So I really enjoyed chatting with Paul and I hope you liked his show. Show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 148. Again gembapodcast.com and look for episode 148. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Paul, thanks so much for coming onto the show. Where are you calling in from?

Thanks for having me. I'm calling in from St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada.

Nice, Nice. We haven't had a lot of Canadians on the podcast, so I'm excited to have you on. I guess we're recording this right now in January, towards the end of January. What kind of temperatures are you dealing with up there, Paul?

It's really warm this week. It's above freezing. We're five degrees above freezing. All the snow melted. It's been raining.

Oh, okay. All right. Well, good stuff. Good stuff. We were talking before we came on. My father is from Winnipeg, so not quite as brutal as Winnipeg, I guess, right? In the weather.

No, we're in the very southern tips of Canada here. There's a lot of the US that's north of us yet.

There you go. All right, well, good stuff. Well, thanks for coming on, Paul. I'm excited to explore your journey here. So, as you know, we kind of like to begin at the start of our podcast with our guest sharing a quote or two that possibly inspires them. So do you have one?

Well, one of my favorite things to think about is the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.

Okay.

When Alice asks, which road should I take? And he responds with, well, where would you like to go? And she doesn't know. So it's any road will get you there. So to me, it's about having a plan and a vision of where you want to go. Without that vision, you're kind of lost. You get to where you're going without having a plan.

Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty cool. I've never heard that one on the show, so that's a great one. Most people throw out all the oh, no quotes and whatnot. But first, one for the Cheshire Cat. That's awesome. Very good. All right.

Different kind of lean thinker.

I like it. I like it. All right. Hey, so tell us about your background and how you first came to learn about continuous improvement.

Well, I am a classically trained industrial engineer at a university here in Canada and started working in many different fields throughout different companies here in Ontario. Was sitting at my desk one day, bored, and was asked if I'd like to go to Japan for a year. Wow. I said yes. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in Fujizawa, Japan, learning how to do Japanese manufacturing.

Wow.

And that's 20 years ago, and I haven't looked back. It introduced me into the deep end of lean thinking. And when I came home, I couldn't do lean in English. I only knew the terms in Japanese. I didn't know why it worked. I just knew it worked. So I spent a lot of time after that reading trying to find anything written in English. So I started with Ima and Kaizen and Gemba Kaizen and started going from there, implementing everywhere I went.

Wow. So maybe that will. Maybe we'll explore that Japanese journey a little bit here later in the show. But. So I. I understand then. Well, I guess before we get into like, what are you doing today? Like what's your role today?

Well, today I am the continuous improvement manager for a division of Magna responsible for 18 facilities across Canada and the U.S. spent last week doing a material flow Kaizen in Iowa. Next week I'm doing an APQP training on putting Lean in our launch processes. The week after that doing standardized work in Tennessee. Random acts of improvement across 18 facilities is the way I feel.

Nice. Nice. So before we started the recording, we were kind of talking about, you know, you've worn a few different hats related to Lean there at Magna. So tell us about the various hats that you've worn.

Well, in the last 10 years working at Magna, I've worked. I started off in a division as the Lean coordinator for the division with 13 Kaizen team members working with me across multiple value streams within the company, doing equipment designs, material flow designs. And then the auto industry took a major downturn and we had the plant shut down for 16 weeks. So I went and worked for the corporate office. So I ended up being part of the international team and started working multiple sites, working In Mexico, the U.S. india, was on the road for two consecutive years, spent on average 180 nights away from home a year.

Wow.

Then the travel got to me a little bit so I asked to come home, came back here to St. Thomas and worked at format as their plant person and re established the relationship with the family, started working on value streams, redesigning equipment, teaching one piece flow, continuous flow concepts to the equipment designers, learning about Cardboard city and teaching teams how to use cardboard City simulations so that we could get the standard work done up front before we bought off on the equipment.

A cardboard city. I'm not. Are you like kind of like 3p or is that. What are you.

Well, I don't know the term 3P. It's not one of my terms. It's we actually take and do a full 3 3D full scale of the equipment with all of the light screens, all the tooling, all the palm buttons and we do the standard work and we rearrange and move the equipment around, move the part presentation around until we get it so that it works the way we want it.

Okay.

Then we hand that over to the design team who's making the equipment and work with them to build it. Once they've got it built, we go back and do the same experiments again on their floor before they ship it to us.

I got it.

Okay. So I don't know if that's 3p or not.

Okay, I got it. So talk a little bit about the difference between kind of your corporate role, I guess, for lack of a better term, your corporate role versus the local kind of site based role.

The corporate role. You only get a little bit of time in each facility, so you're having to sell yourself each time you walk in. Magnet is a very decentralized company. All of the facilities that I cover are independent. Each general manager has the ability to run their plant their way. You have to leave them with their homework because you're not coming back for a month to three months. And then you have to follow up over the phone and hope that they're doing things. So I've found you have to make sure that they have a good strong vision of where they want to go so that they'll follow through on their homework. If you don't have a good strong vision of where they want to go, they tend not to finish the homework that's been left with them. They work on the immediate problem that's causing them a problem with the customer or a supplier and then stop.

So I don't want to put you on the spot and feel free to share as much as or as little as you'd like, but can you give me maybe a scenario of any. Again, keep it as generic as you need to, but of a situation to where maybe you got kind of brought in to maybe help a situation that needed improvement. And like, what does that look like and how do you approach that? Because that's obviously kind of a touchy situation. Right. You know, I'm corporate, here to help kind of thing.

You know, nobody ever wants to hear those words, Right? Right. Yeah, yeah. I basically have two types of customers. Right. I have those where our president has sent me in to solve a problem because he's getting complaints from our customer. Or the ones where I'm invited in, the ones where I'm sent in. Not the most welcoming environment. You're there because they're failing. And a lot of pride in Magna facilities. They've got a lot of pride in what they do.

Sure.

So coming in and telling them to change doesn't always go over well, so the way I started is I look at them and we get agreement on what the problem is and where are they missing resources to solve that problem. And then I go be that extra set of hands for them rather than trying to come in and take over, help guide them to what the real problem is and then be the extra set of hands that they need.

Do you fix the problems or do you help facilitate the change?

Well, sometimes I am in there with my stopwatches, working with the team members, teaching standard work and actually teaching TWI job instruction, training with leadership. I can be in there working with the team on a changeover activity where I'm physically turning wrenches to help I become part of their team. An extra set of hands.

Well, I just bet that actually helps a lot because they see that you're willing to get in there and dig in right along with them. I would assume that gives you some credibility, right?

Oh yeah. Well, years ago I started wearing black shirts and black pants everywhere I went because when I crawled into the machines I could still go out and shake hands with the president of the company.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I'm still a very hands on engineer, very mechanical aptitude. So I like crawling in and working on the tooling and it gives me a lot of credibility with the team when I can sit there and spin a wrench with them.

Yeah, I bet, I bet. So how long do you typically stay or does it just vary depending on the situation?

Oh, right now I've got one facility where I've been told if I don't have to be somewhere else, I'm there. So they're getting help until the president says they're meeting their numbers. And then there's the plant in Iowa that I'm working with where I was in all week. And I'll go back in eight weeks and I'll go there for an entire week again.

Are you mostly running events at these places or just problem solving in general or both?

I do a lot of teaching to bring the skill level up of the team members that are in the plants to help them maintain everything we're doing going forward.

So talk on the teaching side of it. You mentioned JI earlier. We're actually wrapping up our TWI course on job instruction, so we're pretty excited about that right now. So I'm curious to hear how you leverage JI there at Magna.

Well, I ran into Bob Rona at the AME conference a few years ago when he was doing a session on Toronto.

Toronto?

Yeah, in Toronto. We were there and got really excited, went and bought a bunch of the books, talked to MAGNA Corporate. We sent a dozen people off to go take all the courses so that we had trainers in the building. We are rolling it out across all of our divisions in MAGNA Wide, not just in my small group, Cosma, as the best way to train team members how to follow their standard work. We're working with team leaders and supervisors to become the trainers. And we've got some divisions that are taking it to the point where they're making videos, putting the narration so that every team member gets the same speech the same way every time. So kind of like a live coach.

Like the job breakdown, kind of just bringing it to video. Is that what you mean? Yeah.

They take the job breakdown sheet, turn it into a video with all the narration, and they. They take it out on a tablet, play it for the operator at the cell and the team leader in the or the supervisor actually walk through it all. And that way everybody's getting the exact same words, the exact same key points, the exact same reasons why we were finding a lot of variation, shift to shift and teacher to teacher on how things were being done. So as a countermeasure to get some consistency, they went to a video.

Wow, I really like that. I like that. Now, what about, like, JR and jm? Are you practicing those as well?

JR is slowly coming into the facilities. MAGNA has been teaching their best supervisor training for years and incorporates a lot of the JR stuff already. But we're finding J.R. coming into the scene is helping a lot, getting the relationships built. A jm, because I do the traditional standard work with the combination tables and standard work charts. I didn't get into the JM because I use the combination tables for a lot of that.

Toyota doesn't either. So don't worry, you're okay. For those who don't know what all These acronyms mean, JI's job instruction, JR's job relations, and then JM job methods. And we've actually done several TWI focused podcast. So if anybody wants to learn more about just twi in general, go to gembapodcast.com and just kind of look for the twi episodes and. And we'll link to them in the show notes for this episode as well. So one thing that I want to circle back to. Paul, you mentioned earlier the importance of helping, you know, the plant managers kind of create their vision of kind of where they want to go. Talk a little bit about how you do that and why you believe that's so important.

I asked them what they want the future of their company to look like and why it's important to them. The gentleman I was working with this past week, he wants to keep his 300 people working and his entire being is around keeping his 300 team members employed in Iowa. And we talk about what does that mean and how competitive he has to become to keep his 300 team members employed. So we've got a vision together of what the company will look like in a year from now where he's going to be winning any business that he wants to put into the plant so that he can keep everybody working. Without that vision, it's really hard to keep teams motivated.

Right.

I believe it's the management's role and responsibility to provide a vision to everybody and encourage them to use their creativity to work towards that vision. It unleashes that potential in our team.

Yeah. So do you. I'm just like, from a mechanics perspective, like, do you kind of just sit down over lunch and say, what's your why? Or do you kind of have a process that you follow?

Well, I'm starting to learn a process called appreciative inquiry and I'm starting to try that out. I've been using the basic, well, where do you want the company to be in five years, 10 years? What do you want your legacy to be up till now? And I signed up for a mastermind group that was all about appreciative inquiry.

So talk about that a little bit. I'm not familiar with it.

It's a method of asking questions so that they come out positive and everybody's looking for the positive. So many of our questions are negative connotation.

Why are sales down?

Yes.

Yeah.

Instead of why are sales down? What can we do to make sales great? And it's a brand new skill to me and I'm not good at it yet, but I'm practicing.

Nice.

Nice.

No, I've never heard of that. It sounds interesting. I might look into it. So good stuff. Well, it sounds like he got a lot of cool stuff going on, Paul, and definitely want to stay in touch. Are you going to be at AME this year in Boston?

My plan is to be at the conference this year. I haven't made the last few because of work commitments, but I've got this one on the calendar already.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, we'll be there, so hopefully we can meet in person. But let's go ahead and kind of transition into the reflection section. I mentioned before we started. I got a few new questions. I'm going to kind of unleash on you for the first time. No one's ever heard some of these questions, but this first one's an oldie but goodie. You can't ever miss this one. This is a great. My favorite one is we spend a lot of time in lean talking about those two pillars, continuous improvement and respect for people. What does respect for people mean to you?

For me, it means getting out of the people's way. If we give them the vision of where we want them to go and then unleash them to do what they're good at. Our team are the 25 square foot experts. We need to treat them like that expert and have them have pride in their work. For me, it's management, getting out of their way.

What's the worst advice that you hear? Kind of within the lean world? Maybe some lean folks that you deal with, you hear them say this advice and you cringe every time you hear it. Can you think of anything?

The one that I'm really struggling with right now is why do we need standard work? There's so many people who aren't good with the lean tools and they're talking about the philosophy. You need to know the tools as well as the philosophy to be really good at leaning. So spend the time and get intimate with the tools as well as the overarching philosophy.

It's funny you say it that way because so many times, you know, and I'll even say it, you know, oh, the lean tools are important, but you've got to have the people side of it, which you do, but you really do also have to have the tool side of it. It's not. It's not one or the other. Right. I mean, you. You could be the most respectful person in the world, but have zero clue. Right. When it comes to a technical perspective, whether it BE standard work or 5s or pull systems or flow or anything.

Right.

If you don't have these basics, you're going to struggle no matter how respectful you are. Right?

Yep. And that's. I'm running into a lot of people who don't know the basic tools.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's great. Well, good job security for you and for Gamba Academy, right?

Yes.

All right. Hey, what's the best advice that you've ever received?

This goes back to sitting over beers in Japan with my manager. I was terrified about a presentation the next day and he asked me why I was terrified, told him about the presentation. He goes, is it going to kill you? I said, no, don't worry about it. Well, what if it was going to kill me? He said, really, don't worry about it. You won't be here to worry about it.

Yeah, yeah, I heard. I had something very similar from this guy Jocko Willink I've been following a little bit. He's this former Navy SEAL and gives all this kind of hardcore advice and motivation or whatever, and he's like. He said exact same thing. Are you hearing my words right now? Yes. Then it can be a lot worse. Don't worry.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah. Are you hearing my words? It's all good. All right. Hey. So if you could go back in time to when you first began your lean journey and you could give yourself some advice, what would you say?

Be open with who you are. I spent a lot of my time hiding the emotional side of me being the stereotypical analytical engineer and didn't bring out the people side, the caring, the passion for the people. And it left a lot of bad tastes in previous roles. And the more I open up and the more vulnerable I am with my own feelings, the more open people are with me and we get further.

I want you to recommend two different books. And the first book is going to be for someone who's just starting their lean Journey. And then the second book is going to be for someone that's been on a journey for a while, been around the block a few times.

Every new co op student that works for me gets a copy of Lean Production Simplified. First book everybody gets from me.

Okay. Lean Production Simplified. Got it.

And then the best book I've had in a while on Lean was the birthplace of Lean. It dug into the history, the past, the interviews of the masters who created this. And I realized that all of this came out of the PDCA activity, the Plan, Do Check, act circle. And it has. I've doubled down on my Plan, Do, Check, act now. Yeah, yeah.

Awesome. What are you most proud of as it relates to your lean journey?

I'm guessing that the people that I've developed along the way. There are several people that I've worked with that have gone on to get promotions and open their own consulting firms after working with me for a while. So it's the development of the people.

Yeah, yeah. Very cool. Yeah. It's always the. When the light goes off or goes on in their eyes and you see it, that's pretty special.

There's nothing better than being in that room teaching, and you see the guy start at the beginning of the week with his arms crossing back in the chair to where he's basically crawling across the table to try and draw more information out of you. It's just phenomenal.

Yeah, it is. It's pretty special. All right, well, awesome stuff, Paul. Really, really enjoyed chatting with you. Let's go ahead and wrap things up with you, maybe sharing some final words of wisdom and then be sure to tell how people can connect with you over social media or whatever.

Final words of wisdom? Go out and try. Lean is about doing things. The faster you go out and try, the sooner you'll know whether it's going to give you the result you're expecting. How to get hold of me? You can find me on LinkedIn. It's Paul Hill and my website is Lean Geek.

Oh, Lean geek dot com.

It's a WIX address at the moment, but Lean Geek is what I'm working through.

Okay. All right, well, we'll find it and link to it in the show notes. People can find that@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 148 with Paul Hill and we'll go check out Lean Geek together. And I look forward to seeing you at ame We Gemba Academy, we always do this kind of cocktail party deal on the Tuesday night of the show. We had about a couple hundred people this last year, so we're hoping to break 300. So you need to come and have a drink on us when you're in Boston.

Sounds like a plan. All right.

Okay, Paul, you take care and I look forward to meeting you in person one day.

We'll see you in Boston.

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