GA 161 | Succeeding at Job Relations with Ron Pereira

You're listening to episode 161 with Ron Pereira.

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, this is Ron with Gemba Academy. And today I'm going to be flying solo on this particular episode. And what I'm going to be talking about is something that we've been spending a lot of time on here at Gemba Academy over the last few months, and that is twi. As you may have already heard, we released our job instruction course. We actually two courses in one, one for facilitators and one for learners. So go over to gembacademy.com, go navigate to the school of Lean and you can find all the information about those two JI courses. But what I want to talk about in today's episode is JR or job relations. Now, we recently finish up our live JR class. We had 10 students come in and we, Roger Bilas helped us facilitate a five day JR session. We also did JM in the afternoon. So we actually did JR and jm. So it was a very, very full week, but both went over extremely well. Again, want to thank Roger Bylos for coming. He's a great partner to us and really, really enjoyed working with Roger. But this JR is something that just does not get enough air time in my opinion. Within the Lean world in particular, also within just the TWI world everyone talks about, ji, JI is the most popular for sure. And it's extremely important. Don't get me wrong and I think you should start with ji. But Junior, in my opinion, is extremely important. As we've said so many times on this podcast and throughout Gemba Academy's videos and our blog articles and so forth. Lean, in the end, is a people based system and it is truly all about people. I've said many, many times that the tools of Lean are extremely important. Some people go off the deep end, they say, oh, they poo poo the tools. Like, oh, the tools. You're a tool head. Tool, tools, tools, tools are bad. It's all about people. Well, it is all about people. But you still do need to know the tools, okay? Because you could be the best respect for people, people around and everyone's singing Kumbaya and accountability and intrin motivation, all this fancy stuff. But if you don't know how to do 5s or you've never made A value stream map. Your, your success in Lean is going to be limited, okay? So you've got to have a balance. You can't go so far off the deep end and say it's just about the people without the tools. You need the tools, but you've got to have the people side of things. And I think it's safe to say that the tools of Lean and Six Sigma are much easier to learn than the people side of things. But that's why I'm so excited about jr, because I think that I, you know, I didn't practice Junior back in my corporate life. I wasn't introduced to it until later in my career. And so I wish I would have known about Junior, you know, 15 years ago, but I didn't. But I'm excited for you all who are working in the corporate world and you're managing people. Junior is something that I think will transform your lean organization. Or even if you aren't practicing lean and you're just trying to run a good company or a good hospital or a good whatever, JR is going to be extremely beneficial. So what I want to do in today's episode is just give an overview of jr, what the steps are, how to handle a problem and, and then how to get good results through people. Now I'm gonna link to some more material in the show notes for this episode. So go over to Gemba Podcast.com and look for this job relations episode. But what I wanna do is just first I wanna kind of walk through these four steps for handling a problem. And then I wanna share a true real world example of where I totally blew it with jr. I mean, I did as badly as a person could do and handling a situation. And I'm gonna come clean with you all on this podcast as a good lesson and, I don't know, demonstration of why or a good example of why following these four steps is so important. So the first step for how to handle a problem using JR is to get the facts. Step one, get the facts and kind of the sub notes here is to review the record and then understand what policies, rules and regulations apply. And then we want to talk with the individual's concern and get their opinions and feelings. Now this is the step I dare say is most often ignored. Some of these other steps that we're going to get to, steps two, three and four, many times happen. But this first step, get the facts, that is so often missed. And in fact, it's where I blew it in my horror story that I'm going to share. Here in a little bit. So get the facts, go out and go to Gemba, right? Go to the place the work is done, see what's going on, talk to the people. If it's a, you know, you're dealing with an individual who did something that wasn't good or not optimal, you know, do things like review the record, like, have they had a problem in the past? You know, have they been a great employee, a bad employee and whatnot, what policies, rules and regulations apply. Obviously, we can't do anything illegal or anything like that. And we need to know how our company handles certain things. In other words, just don't go fire someone because they came back five minutes from their break when that's clearly not the policy of your company. And then we definitely want to talk with the people involved and get their opinions. And also, this is something that we men fail to do many times is we don't understand how is that person feeling. This is the kinesthetic side of human behavior. It's very important to understand what that person's feeling, what they're going through. Okay, so that's step one, get the facts. Step two is weigh and decide. So the sub bullets here are to fit the facts together and consider their bearing on each other. What possible actions are there? Check practices and policies. And then we want to check each action against the objective. Weighing the effect on the individual, the group. And they say production here on the card. Or it could be just your business in general if you're not in a manufacturing environment. So what's interesting about this one is, let's say you had this idea that we want to do xyz. That's going to be kind of our action plan. Xyz. Well, then we want to say, well, how's XYZ going to be perceived by the individual that we're dealing with? Is it good or bad? What about the group, their employee, you know, your other employees, or that person's colleagues? And then on the business, okay, so it's interesting when you take that and you kind of lay it against those three different people, if you will, to see how everything looks. And then we want to select the best action. And really the kind of the warning here for step two is don't jump to conclusions, right? So again, step one is to get the facts. Step two, weigh and decide. Now step three is to take action. Now, this is what everybody loves to do, take action. And sadly, we often jump to step three as we ignored step one and step two. But step three is take action. Sub bullets Should I handle this myself? Who can help in handling? Should I refer this to my supervisor? And we want to consider the proper time and place and we want to explain and get acceptance and kind of the warning here is don't pass the buck. In other words, if it's something that you need to be handling, you need to handle it, okay? Don't just pass it off to someone else. Step four is check results. How soon and how often will I check? Watch for changes in output and attitudes and relationships. And then ultimately we want to understand did our actions help the situation? Did it help production? Did it help our business, whatever it might be, okay? And all the while, through all four steps, we always want to, you know, kind of understand were my objectives accomplished? Okay? So again, step one, get the facts. Step two, weigh and decide. Step three, take action. Step four, check results. So to my story. So, as I've mentioned before on this podcast and some blog articles and whatnot, I've coached my various kids soccer teams over the years. I've got some kids who play kind of competitive soccer. I don't coach them anymore, but at the recreational level I'm good to go with that. And so I'm coaching my youth 15 daughter, she's 14 years old and I'm coaching her team this year and great little team, great bunch of young ladies. And I'm really having a great time coaching them. And I use this website called Team Snap to manage this team. If you've got kids in sports, you may have used Team Snap before, it's basically an online website that you can go and load your schedule in and then you can. Parents can mark their kids availability for practice games, whatever it might be. And so I rely heavily on this in at U15, it's. There's 11 players so. And on the field. So you know, I definitely spent some time creating lineups and thinking about who's going to play where and so forth. And so we had a particular young lady on the team who had actually missed a few practices which, you know, it's recreational so it's not a, you know, a huge deal if you miss a practice here and there. But you know, I definitely noticed that they, they had missed a few practices and really hadn't heard from, from the parent. And so I wasn't sure what was going on there. But anyhow, this, this young lady was marked as available for a game on a, on a was actually a Sunday late afternoon game. Well, we show up to the fields and girls are up there warming up and I'm Looking around, I'm counting players, and we were missing this, this young lady and, well, gosh, she was marked as available. So I was a little bit worried. And so I looked at my assistant. I said, hey, have you heard from. From this, from this player's mom or anything like that? He said, no. I said, well, why don't you call him up, make sure everything's okay and. And so forth. And so he calls him up and finally connects with the mom and said he had a bad connection. Couldn't really hear anything. But long story short, they weren't coming to the game. Well, coming clean, it kind of irritated me a little bit because, you know, I'd spend all this time creating this. This lineup that was now out the window because this young lady wasn't going to be there. And so we kind of on the fly, adjusted some things and, and we made it through. Girls actually won the game. So everybody left happy and so forth. But that following Monday, the next day, I sent out an email to the team and I was a little bit still perturbed by the fact that, you know, they were marked as available. And I, you know, they didn't let us know she wasn't coming. And so I kind of put a little sentence in this little email, just kind of saying, hey, you know, if you're not going to be at a game or whatever, please, I think I capitalized please, bolded it, underlined it, like an idiot, you know, whatever, you know, trying to be a little bit. I don't know, I was trying to be. I was being a jerk. Okay, I'll just be honest. And I said, please let us know. Shoot me a text, whatever, you know, but definitely don't say they're available if they're. If they're really not. Oh, anyhow, I sent the email off and forgot about it. Well, a few days later, I think it was a Wednesday or Thursday, I got a text message from the mom of this young lady. And she said she was very sorry that her daughter had missed practice recently and that she wasn't at that last game. And she continued on to basically tell me that her father, the mom's father, father, was extremely ill and was about to die, pass away. And that's why everything has just. Just been off. That's why they missed practice and missed the game and so forth. And. Well, obviously I felt horrible. I felt horrible for sending that email. But you know what really bothered me more than anything? I felt horrible for just the, the anger that I had in my heart for why they weren't at the game. Now some people say, well, they should have let you know and this and that, and maybe they should have. But you know what? My father passed away a few years ago. And I can tell you one thing. When I was visiting with him in his last days, the last thing I was thinking about was my kids soccer teams, right? So anyhow, what I failed to do in that particular situation was step one of the JR process, and that is get the facts. The only facts that I knew were that, you know, this, this young lady had missed some practices and. Which was weird because early in the season, you know, they were really good. You know, there wasn't a problem. And then all of a sudden they started missing. So I just thought, oh gosh, maybe, maybe they're not liking the team or they don't like me or something. I did something upset the mob, I don't know. And then when they didn't come to the game, I thought, well, you know, the bad feelings that were running inside of me were like, oh, why? Why are they quitting on the team? And why don't they, you know, tell me and communicate with me? And anyhow, so I had all these ugly thoughts running through my mind. Luckily, I didn't vocalize all the ugliness. It was more internal ugliness, but it was still there. So what I could have done and what I should have done was simply called up the mom maybe on that Monday morning, or shot her an email or text message, something to say, hey, is everything okay, you know, with your daughter? And you guys have worried about you, and it's not like you to miss games. So I just wanted to check in and see how everything was going. Had I done that, I bet you she would have replied back immediately telling me the situation and what was going on. And those facts would have definitely then helped me better. I don't know, put everything into its place and then I could have, you know, better taken steps to weigh and decide and take action and check results. You know, I could have handled the situation so much better. So I guess the point, the main point that I want to get across in this particular episode can't go through a whole JR class of one, you know, 20 minute podcast, but is when you're dealing with problems, whether it's, you know, with your, your colleagues at work or your spouse or your children or your neighbor or your uncle or your brother or your sister or whoever it is, get the facts. Get all of the facts. Don't just get the facts that are convenient for you to get or get the facts that best suit how you're feeling, you know, you need to really go out and get all of the facts. And I think that this happened at Gemba Academy recently. You know, we were, we were dealing with a particular situation and me and one of my business partners were, were talking about it and, and I get into too many details, but it was like, you know, what, what's going on and this and that. And then I, and I said, you know what? I think what we got to do is we got to stop speculating, right? We kind of stop making all these assumptions of how things are happening the way we think they are. We need to really stop and go get all of the facts and then we need to come back and talk about what we should do. Well, ends up after we did that, we in fact didn't have everything right. And once we did get all the facts, you know, the next steps were much easier for us to take. So if you take nothing else from this, take step one of the JR process and get the facts before you worry about what actions you're going to take before you take any action, definitely before you take any action and, and then, you know, you're going to be able to check the results and so forth. So that's just a high level overview of how to handle a problem using the job relations process. Now, on the flip side of the JR card is foundations for good relations. So I want to just kind of quickly cover these again. The JR class, we're going to go through these in great detail, but this is really, really good stuff. And when you hear it, you're going to think, oh yeah, that's common sense. But I think that if you take each one, each four points and really assess how often do you consistently do all four of these? I think you're going to find like I did, that there's many, many opportunities for improvement as we go about our day to day lives. So foundations for good relations. Number one, let each employee know how he or she is getting along. Sub bullet here is to figure out and tell the person what you expect and point out ways to improve. Okay. Let each employee know how he or she is getting along. Now, how often. This is something that I'm pretty bad about and my business partner Kevin Meyer is also bad about it. We kind of came clean. We had a team meeting with Gemba Academy folks a month or so ago and this is just something that we stink at is giving feedback. We just kind of got our heads down. We're going Forward. So something that we need to work on here at Yemba Academy. But I think many folks listening probably can relate that we probably need to be better at giving feedback. And I don't just mean during the annual review that you sit down and you talk to these people, you know, talk to them on a regular basis and let them know how they're doing. Okay, so that's step, that's number one foundation for good relations. Number two is give credit when due. So sub bullet here, recognize extra or unusual performance and tell the person while it's fresh. Now this is something that we talked about in our culture of Kaizen course is how we got into kind of brain science and neuroscience and how different chemicals come across. And one of the chemicals that I'm really fascinated with is serotonin. This is kind of a feel good chemical. So this is why when your kid falls down and scrapes their knee, they run up to you and they're looking for a hug. And what happens when you, when you embrace your child, give them a hug and you start patting their back and rubbing their knee. And that physical touch is actually releasing serotonin in your child's body and that's part of the reason they feel better. Well, interestingly enough, serotonin is also released when we give public recognition. So the next time that you have a stand up meeting or you're having a team meeting or I don't know, a Skype conference call or whatever it is, and you've got other colleagues around, take the time to single out a colleague for something that he or she did that was good. And I can promise you the minute that you're, that you're giving praise to that person in front of other people, that person that's getting the praise is going to be flooded with serotonin and they're going to feel like a million bucks. So give credit when due. That's number two. Number three, the number three foundation for good relations is to tell people about changes that will affect them. Tell them why if possible, and get the person to accept the change. So you've, many people out there have probably read the famous book who Moved My Cheese? If you haven't, it's a must read. The next time you're on a 30 minute airplane ride, you can probably have the book read before you take off and land. It's a short little book, but it's all about change. It's all about, you know, being able to communicate that change. And so this is again something that within a Lean World in particular where we're sometimes not the best at. You know, we move into an area, do a Kaizen event, and we start making all these improvements. Meanwhile these folks over here, they're like, what the heck are these people doing? My work area. And we didn't bother to explain to them what we were doing and, and why we were doing it. Didn't even get their feedback or their ideas or whatever. So this is an example of failing at step three here of foundation for good relations. So we want to always tell people about the changes that will affect them. And then last but certainly not least, number four, we want to make the best use of each person's ability. Sub bullet here is look for abilities not now being used and never stand in an employee's way. This is something that I think we lean thinkers, we, when we're doing things well, are pretty good at. You know, we're, you know, the so called eighth waste, you know, the waste of talent or not not utilizing everybody's abilities and so forth. That's something that's near and dear to our hearts. So. But it's something that we need to continue to practice. We need to make sure that we're leveraging the talents and just really asking people what they're good at and what they enjoy and, and giving people an opportunity to do something that they may not normally do. Because you just, you never know. You might have a web designer who develops websites at night, you know, for fun, and you're over here hacking away at your website, screwing it all up. When you just ask that person, they could probably help you in five minutes, right? So make best use of each person's ability. So those are the four foundations for good relations. Number one, let each employee know how he or she is getting along. Number two, give credit when. When due. And number three, tell people about changes that will affect them. And number four, make best use of each person's ability. Again, we're gonna have a lot more coming on job relations, but I wanted to kind of share that story in particular on how I failed to get the facts and why that's such an important aspect of not just job relations, but just being a good human being. You know, I think if you wanna be a better human being, you'll make sure that you get all the facts you. Before you rush off to judgment and definitely before you run off and start taking action when you may not even really understand what the heck you're doing. Okay, so that's all I got for this episode. As always, thank you so much for listening this podcast is just a great joy to do each and every week and we really do appreciate all of you. And one thing that we don't ask a lot of, I just, I've always felt weird asking for this, but apparently within itunes, if people leave good reviews, like five star reviews, it really helps the show kind of show up in searches when people are looking in itunes. So one of the things that we're always wanting to do, not just from from a business perspective, but is spread the word about Lean to folks who don't even know what Lean is. So if you have the time, if you go over to the show notes, go to gemba podcast.com click on any of the episodes there, you can scroll down a little bit and there's a link that goes to our itunes page. And if you could leave us an honest review, if you think we stink, then I guess give us one star. But if you enjoy the show and you like what we're doing, please give us a five star review and put a little note in there. That would mean a lot to us. And apparently it does help the show reach other people who may not know what Lean is. All right, that's all I got and we'll talk to you next week with a so called normal episode.

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