GA 236 | How to Develop Strong Effective Leaders with Cheryl Jekiel

I think a lot of lean leadership skill building has not taken place for a lot of supervisors or leaders or managers in a way that they understand it on a day to day basis.

Leadership development is one of those topics many folks attempt only to discover. It's much harder than they anticipated. As just one example, you may decide your leaders need some training, but how do you ensure the training is effective? And what about feedback? Do you have a specific plan for providing both positive and constructive feedback? If you struggle with any of this, Today's guest will likely be able to help. Her name is Cheryl Jeckel. Now, if Sheryl's name sounds familiar, it should, since she first came onto the show in episode 82 and then again in episode 122. Today, Cheryl and I discuss some exciting work that she's been focused on relating to developing leaders. Now, show notes for everything that we talk about can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 2, 3, 6. You can also check out Gemba Academy's Lean Learning System over at gembacademy.com with a fully functional trial. Now let's get to the show. All right, Cheryl, welcome back to the show. How's it going?

It's going really well, Ron. It's nice to talk to you. It's been a little while.

I know, I know. So look up here real fast. So, yeah, episode 122 you are on. And then, let's see, there was one other time an 82, so. 82, yeah.

And then.

And 122 and now. Gosh, this is going to be episode 236, so maybe every hundred episodes or so. We got to catch up.

Absolutely.

All right. Well, good stuff. Hey, for folks that may not have listened to those previous episodes, give us a little bit of background on who Cheryl is and what you're up to and how you stay out of trouble.

Yes. So I have a particularly unusual area of lean that I work in. I happen to be a person who spent my career mostly in hr, although some in operations and also always in the field of continuous improvement or lean. So my area of focus has always been the role of HR in helping, enabling, as well as, you know, the importance of HR and making for a successful lean transformation. So the space I work on with different clients tends to be in either clients who really see that potential of HR to make a big difference in their lean work, as well as HR groups that are in lean organizations and trying to bring their skills up to speed. So that's really been my sweet Spot.

Awesome. Awesome. All right, well, what have you been working on lately, Cheryl?

You know, it's been some of the most exciting work I've ever done and I actually kind of came across it accidentally. I had not planned on finding it. So I've been out for most of my career working in the area of leadership development, especially in lean enterprises, so working on building skills and development plans. You know, as many of I'm sure your listeners are aware, lean requires a lot of times a significant shift in how leadership operates. And so with that, one of the things I do in the HR field is help organizations define what that means. So what would be those newly defined roles and what kinds of skills are in there and how do you build those skills? But over the years, I have to say, it's always been pretty close to an uphill climb. So much easier said than done. Easy to get stuck. This because a lot of, you know, typical managers in organizations were successful as traditional managers, being the chief problem solvers, you know, generally seen I'm supposed to be better at solving problems than other people. So when you shift it to this more coaching role, it's always posed a significant challenge to any organization I've ever been a part of or visited or spoke with to make that transition. So what I've been up to is I was working in a client and they were putting in basic performance management, which for many of us might go back to something we learned early in our careers. This is just the basic block and tackle. How do you put in training? It's a government environment, so they had never done any management training ever, but in an HR role, for me, know, several times in my career I've had to purchase or design what kind of basic performance management training. When I'm talking about basic performance management training, I'm talking about everything from how you set expectations to how you give feedback. Not just like performance reviews. It's. It's the whole gamut of those skills. And as I got involved, it saw what they were putting in. I'm like, it was like long PowerPoint decks and I couldn't see where the skills were going to build. I couldn't see how it applied. And the same environment, by the way, is very actively pursuing a lean strategy. And so they were also, again, wanting this more modern version to create a more an empowered workforce and certainly one that was more capable. So what I've been so excited with, we've put in some customized work there. So they were, I was fortunate enough, they said, go ahead, try something else. So so we did. And you might say, so what's so exciting about this? Because it doesn't look very exciting at first glance it would seem pretty rudimentary. It's been a really new view of understanding. I think a lot of lean leadership skill building has not taken place for a lot of supervisors or leaders or managers in a way that they understand it on a day to day basis. And so what's been great to watch is the more this has been built into the way they work every day. So I mean truth is most managers work to some degree with their teams on a day in and day out basis in some element of setting expectations or training or opportunities, you know, like coaching. They're up to bat to coach every time an employee asks them a question. So I've seen that there's this tremendous leverage to use this more basic understanding of how to manage people as the place to build those coaching and leadership skills.

So break it down a little bit like give us a, give us just a high level view of what you're talking about.

So for instance, it starts with setting expectations. And so that's way beyond what it means to have a job description. I mean day in and day out, how do you make sure people understand what you expect of them? But what we with the people to understand is. So the big question, how would you know what's expected of them and they learn. I'd have to ask, I'd have to ask an open ended question. So. And what a lot of them start off with in the classes will find is they'll say, well they should know or I thought they know or these are managers, right?

You're talking about.

These are managers. They're all like thought somebody told them. And they start to understand not only just that a lot of expectations haven't been stated. And so if you can think in the world of how we want a lean leader to behave. I spend a lot of my time helping organizations really articulate how to describe what they really want that expectation to be because they haven't thought it through at that detail. The other piece we talk a lot about is how to unpack things so that bigger tasks they might say, well they know they're supposed to do, get the whole report done, but they don't know that they've ever been clear on the expectation of the pieces inside the report or inside the task. And so they realize there's a whole opportunity to improve things. But the lean skill in there is the asking questions. So it's this whole practice I need to Ask more questions to understand what the person understands the expectation to be and see if I can learn more what might be the root cause. In a way, this is a way to. It has to do with understanding the real root cause when you're not getting whatever performance you're looking for. So that could mean if I ask a lot of given managers, what would you like to see more of in your team than you see today, they'll say things like working better as a team or showing more sense of urgency. Those say things that I think would be very difficult for an employee group to even know exactly what they meant. And so as they learn to detail out the behaviors they're looking for, these are the tools to help create that. Create them.

So you're basically coaching these managers on how to better set expectations for their own team and then I assume how to relay this information to their team members, Is that right?

Well, there's really five essential areas of the performance management. First one is setting expectations. Second one is ensuring that training is effective. So there's a whole set of lessons around managers asking better questions to find out if the training that's being done has been effective and if the person has actually learned what you would have thought they needed to learn. The third area is coaching skills. So that's the basics of different kinds of questions and how to use questions. Basically, instead of telling people the answer and what to do and giving advice how to use questions to help people solve their own problems. The fourth area is feedback for improvement. While most people know that feedback's an important part of working with people, it's a skill that takes quite a bit to actually build that skill. So a lot of workplaces, what you're going to see is there's not enough effective feedback being given. And the last one, and by no means the least important, is recognition. So using positive reinforcement to get more of the things that you're looking for. So teaching leaders, so it's really honing those skills. But the whole model, based upon the idea that it's still always rooted in effectively getting to the right root cause of a situation and using questions to help you get there. And you might say, well, it still doesn't sound that exciting. What has, it's been almost mind blowing, is watching how these managers have really turned the corner to coaching a more independent workforce. I've seen more progress with this than I'd seen in any other way I've ever tried.

Wow. So talk about the contrast between this new approach and say something we may have traditionally tried in the past, what's different.

So for one, a lot of approaches to this are very one and done. You put the training, it comes in. We went through eight hours of that last week and that's the end of it. So this has a lot more slower skill building. But I think what I've also been more excited about, what's different is it dawned on me that obviously the coach has to coach the coach, meaning if you're in a facility and there's three levels of management. From my experience, oftentimes this kind of training was always only targeted towards, let's say, an entry level supervisor. The idea was everyone else could coach, but in the world of lean leadership, it's always known there's a bunch of people managing people that don't know how to coach. They don't ask questions and they don't have that skill set. So the way we designed it is the upper level managers taught the next layer that we had them keep coming in to teach the class. So by the time they were through it and each class was even a couple of different sessions, they had been through it several times because their competency, they have to not only be able to coach, they have to be able to coach a person on how to coach and so on. So if these people couldn't teach the class, what made us think the next day they could do it anyway? If you can't teach feedback, you probably can't do a very good job either doing it yourself or advising the people in your team that need to build those skills. So it helps reinforce these skills from all the way through, rather than just those that apparently need this. Because from what we're seeing, there's really nobody in the management teams that isn't interested even in their own opinion, does not actively want to be building these skills. There just hasn't been probably a clarity about how to do it. So those are a couple of the ways it's different.

Okay, so I'm going to run through the five for folks that maybe are just listening. Number one was set expectations. Number two, ensure training is effective. Number three, coaching skills. Four, feedback for improvement. Five, recognition, positive reinforcement. So talk a little bit about number two, ensure training is effective. I'm obviously Gemba Academy. We're in do a lot of different types of training. You know, how do you encourage folks to go about this?

So here's what it comes down to. Most groups, if I start with them and I'll say what is required for training to be effective and they brainstorm the answer, they will Detail out what they understand it to be, including things like, it's important that a person be shown what to do. It's important the person could be able to demonstrate that they can do it given feedback based upon how they've done the work or done whatever that skill is. They realize that people have different learning styles. So some people could learn by just sitting in the class and listening. Some people would need to experience it some more kinesthetic learning. They know these things. But here's really what it comes down to. They also realize a lot of the time, and I mean a lot of the time that people have been trained, trained on a software package, trained to do a technical skill, trained to do anything, that when they then evaluate it, it doesn't meet the basic criterion. One of the models we use is to, is just to make sure that everybody we say do show, tell show, do review. And that's just a basic model, meaning first obviously the person teaching it explains it, then they do it, then the other person does it and has the teacher watch them and then they get feedback, the review of the work. That's nothing new. But they're saying the reason why we give them the model is for them to be asking themselves every time they say someone should have been trained to do something, does it even pass that basic test? Because again, either sometimes training is the issue and no one's really evaluated whether it was done effectively or two, I find people say training must be the answer. So if they're not doing what you need them to do, they must need to be trained. But if a lot of training isn't done in a way the person ever really learned it now again. And so then when we ask them how can you tell if the training was effective? And they start to say, I'd have to ask the person some questions. Yeah, I'd have to say, what did you learn? Not, did you go to the training class, did you go to training? That's what we call the highlighting. Those are closed ended questions. That's where you don't get any information. But if you ask them what they learned, then you would start to understand what the training actually, what its impact was.

Yeah, yeah. Something that we, I used to do a lot, when I would do a lot of live training is the beginning of every session or every class. We would, you know, go around the room and everybody introduces themselves and all that kind of stuff. But then really taking some time to write down, you know, expectations from each student, like what do you expect to get out of this? You know, and then constantly reviewing those expectations to see if, number one, they're being met. And then, you know, the other thing it could do if someone had an expectation to learn how to do basket weaving yet that we're going to be teaching Kanban that week, like we may have a disconnect here. Right? So, yeah, so, yeah, just talking to people. Right. I mean, you said earlier that, oh, it's common sense, but yeah, I would say, no, not so much, not so common. Right. As Mr. Twain would say, you know, so, yep, yep, yep.

And one of the other great things about this work has been, you know, they, in the sessions, they work together in a community, so to speak. And I think a lot of what it's going to take for leaders to build these more coaching type skills is to create some safety where it's okay to say, I know I should ask more questions, but I'm struggling to do it. I know I would like to listen better. I mean, the listening skills are listen, pause, be silent long enough, they can actually answer your question. Ask one question at a time. They're basic. Make sure with your body language you're fully listening to the person. But what we're finding is you'd expect a lot of them. There's the type of listener they'd want to be. And then they're, life goes on. I'm busy, I'm not slowed down, I'm not thinking about it. And I think the idea of getting support from other managers, I think it needs to be more okay in our workplaces for people to join together and say, it's a journey, we're all doing the best we can, we all want to do better. How by supporting one another can they raise their skills instead of, oh, you just must all be able to be really good at this. I'm sure you all ask great questions. I'm sure you don't try and solve other people's problems. And I'm sure you all listen just fine. And the truth is most people are struggling in those areas.

Yeah, yeah. That whole silence thing is so hard, isn't it? You know, just be silent. And that is so hard. Brandon Brown, I think, is the master at that. You know, I'll be interviewing him and I'll ask him a question and it's just silence and it's almost awkward at some point, you know, for some time because we're not used to silence. And then he comes back with this beautiful response, you know, because he really thought about what he wanted to say.

Yeah, right, exactly.

Talk a little bit about number four, feedback for improvement. Because that's obviously probably maybe one of the more uncomfortable aspects of this model, I would say.

Yeah. And I find, I think because people consider it something negative, they associate it with a conflict or I'm going to hurt somebody. And you know, when we talk about people centric cultures and creating a more positive workplace, a lot of this is really showing people how to build their skills, how to give feedback in a really positive way. Meaning it's helping them see feedback is your way of caring enough about the person to help them succeed. And the whole way you deliver the feedback is all because I'm invested in this person's success. And so instead of it associating it, I'm here to correct you. It's I'm here to one, give you some feedback, but two, to also have a conversation. The other thing is when I was coming up through the ranks, feedback was pretty much taught as a one way conversation. I'm going to deliver you this feedback. And we all probably have learned, you know, it's probably better to make these a two way conversation. So we also. They'll go back to those questions. How do you then ask more questions to get more information and invite the person to participate in a conversation instead of you're just here to tell them something about themselves and then close with, you know, again asking questions as for their, the person's ideas about how they see the situation, how they think it, what they might do differently going forward. So a lot of this is reframing it in a positive way, really building those skills from practice of how you would have these conversations in a way that should build these relationships. What I see is the more enjoyable the conversations, the more they really don't mind it as much. They just haven't really known how to have the conversation in a positive way.

Yeah, no, I get it, I get it. So number five is recognition. Positive reinforcement. That's obviously I would think, you know, it's a great experience right. When you can give positive feedback. But I wonder sometimes is it possible to go overboard with that? You know, do you all have to temper it?

No, actually if anything we always tell people the goal is to like to, if you were to think of it as a ratio either anywhere from four to one to 10 to one for everybody, positive reinforcement compared to feedback for improvement.

Yeah.

So meaning when you take a look at your workforce, let's say a given area of tasks, you say even the quality of the product, is it more important to be out making sure you catch every time it's done wrong. Or every time you see the right behaviors that build better, better quality, keep calling those out on a higher ratio. What we run into, a lot of times people, they do have these different kinds of concerns. What would. If you pat people on the back for doing a good job, by the way, this positive reinforcement is very specific, very specific. You're acknowledging specific behaviors that have a specific impact, you know, on your business and acknowledging that it's not just this. Attaboy. So there's. So we get a lot of, like, why would you want to, you know, tell people they're doing a good job just for doing their jobs? But again, I think in the lean world, we're really creating more people, centric, positive workplaces. You know, I hope for people pursuing a more highly engaged workforce, it would be obvious why you. You really can't over recognize them.

What do you think about? You know, I've worked with a lot of folks in different parts of the world, and, you know, we would encourage, you know, give positive, you know, recognition this and that. And then we've had some cultures kind of respond back to saying, hey, listen, Ron, when you bring people up in front of the room here in this country or this culture and publicly recognize them, it like, you know, it can be a traumatic experience for them. It's not a. It's not a normal thing for them. Have you ever experienced that with folks with just different cultures in the way that they. They recognize each other?

I have some between cultures, but I would even say in any given room of people that I've been working with, there is a segment of them that find this extremely uncomfortable. Like, whether it comes from their upbringing, how they were parented, or any other number of things in their cultural norms of their families or backgrounds of why it's so uncomfortable for some of them, they would just be like, no one's ever spoken to me like that, so I have no idea. You know, it's very hard to speak that way. A lot of times, though, we also encourage everyone find their own words. You know, why we might model it. You need to find your own way of saying it. But once they experience it, you know, a lot of it is getting them to practice just in small, like first by themselves, then with just a partner. I wouldn't put them in front of a group real fast when they're that uncomfortable with it. And, and as I said, there's been at least a few in every group that we've been working with.

Yeah, got it, got it, got it. Very. So Obviously this has been a great, a great find for you or a great discovery for you. I can hear it in your voice. Talk about how it's maybe made you think differently on just lean leaders in particular, we spend a lot of time with just the lean leadership side. How has this changed that?

I think I was alluding to it earlier. I think it's going to be important that we find more ways to consider how to build lean leader skills as a part of normal work, not a special kind of work. Because some of the people I've talked to like, they're like, well, we'll do these specific kinds of questions. And I don't think there's anything wrong with using specific kinds of questions. That's not what I'm pointing to. But I think to really get the boost on the skill building, it needs to be sitting on top of something that's an everyday, all day kind of skill. And the problem with lean a lot of times is it sounds like it's something like, well, we do our normal work and then there's times we're doing continuous improvement work. There's, you know, like it's on Thursday or Saturday. It's a specific. And I think this has definitely shown me it's going to be critical that we try and integrate lean skills with basic management skills, with their basic understanding of how to get through the workday until there isn't two different ones, there's just a way they work. So I think it's how can we integrate more people's basic understanding of how to manage with some of these more lean skills, More, as I said, I think more blended together.

Yeah, yeah. So good. So good. So are you going to turn this into a workshop or anything like that, Cheryl? Because this sounds like something I do well.

We have workshops and some of the work that we'll be doing is making this so it can be customized to different organizations. One of the other benefits I've seen when I was first purchasing this kind of training, it was always that you got the off the shelf stuff and the scenarios didn't blend. It's like, you know, I'd be having entry level supervisors in a production area watching people on a salesforce have a feedback conversation. Yeah, we've been making. Everything is customized fairly readily by the way, using actually fairly lean practices. We can. So we have it structured to be the same material is easily customized into an environment. So we have several groups that we've been working with and we have a workshop that we'll be doing up here at AME in October and we'll be back. You know, we'll probably do that one again. So people are accessing it through public workshops, and we've tried to make it fairly readily available for an organization to bring it into there. As I said, it was designed to be internally taught, so our role is just getting it accessible. So getting it in any given organization's natural language, the way they use their values, their colors, their logos, so it looks like it's part of them, and then it's just where they build these skills.

Are you doing a workshop just one time at AME or more than once?

So far that one is just scheduled that once. But we are busy. You know, we are working with different groups, scheduling some more, so there will be definitely more to come. Okay, maybe. Maybe we'll get it out here for Gimba Academy in some format.

Yeah, there you go. That'd be awesome. So what do you know what day at AME We've been pumping AME hard here on the show the last few weeks.

Gotta be on Monday.

On Monday. Okay, great. Well, I might try to sit in on it and be a pupil.

To have you there. You'll get to practice and meet your teammates. So.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. I love it. All right, well, hey, Cheryl, I. It's been a while since you've been on and we've got a few new reflection questions. I'd love to run a few of these past you, if you don't mind. So this first one is just more of a bigger, broader question. You know, this lean movement of ours has been going on for some time now. And, you know, it's gone through many different, you know, phases, if you will. You know, tools, and then now it's people, and now it's tools and people. And just where do you see this movement of ours going over the next five to 10 years between just lean in general, like what we call lean today? We're going to AME in October. Right. And there'll be all these people giving workshops and giving keynotes and whatnot. And there'll be a theme. Right. What do you think that theme will be in 5, 10 years? Will it be the same, just continuing on like where we're at now, or is it going to evolve into something else?

Well, I know where I hope it would be. So if I was in charge, I know what I would make it to be. I think there will be, hopefully, an increased awareness of the value of a fully engaged workforce with a continuous improvement skill set. So I think My hope is that they will continue to move away from seeing Lean as a short term cost saving approach. And C, its real value is changing how your workforce actually not just how they work, but what they're capable of delivering. And then, as I said, I think also the real value of engagement. So I think Lean is worth quite a bit more than most people have an understanding of it. I think we've been asking too little of it. So not only do I not think it'll go away, my hope is people will come to a fuller understanding where the value really is and what it could create for them.

Imagine you had a time machine, Cheryl, and you could jump in it and you could go back in time anywhere, anytime and spend one day with a person you choose. Anybody. Who would it be, why and what would you want to learn?

So it's Abraham Lincoln. So I live in Illinois. So we're the land of Lincoln. Anyway.

Okay.

But this year I've just done some reading and I've become more aware than I would have been earlier in my life what he really faced. I see him as a person that faced some big challenges and he, you know, just stuck with what he knew to be right, despite no matter how hard the challenge became until he came out the other side of it. I believe he's, you know, probably one of the people we owe the most to. And he's always become, to me, more of us, you know, that any one of us has, you know, has that in us. I mean, in a way he was still a pretty regular person, capable of amazing things. So I'm just very interested in his leadership and what made him like that and how did he find it within himself to do all that he did.

So if you, you could, you could ask him questions. It would be leadership related, I guess, or.

Right. Actually, I mean, he's written, there's a book that he's. I have several friends that looked at some of his teachings for leadership, like how he taught people how to lead, including I think, the self reflection, the how to be anchored in your own set of beliefs. To move from. One of the things I would say about lean leadership is the need to be really anchored in what you know to be correct. Like not you're not, you know, just what's the in thing or what's everyone else doing. You have to kind of find your own inner anchor about moving from that place. You know, I think self reflection is probably one of the most critical skills. So. Right. I would probably be asking him, so how did you come to being Able to deliver that way to know yourself well enough that you could make for a big change and. And not veer off of it, no matter what. People around you were saying, if there's.

One book on Lincoln that you would have folks who don't maybe don't know a lot about him read, which would it be?

I think it's called Lincoln.

Okay.

I don't. I'll have to look it up quick, but.

Yeah, no, it's okay. That's okay.

Yeah.

I don't know a lot about Lincoln. I mean, just, you know, what you learn in school and whatnot. But I have heard stories. Where did he struggle with, like, depression and stuff like that as well?

He did. His wife did as well. First of all, when I was growing up, the park I played in had a little house that he lived in when he was little. Oh, wow. So I've been raised close to where he spent some of his life. So that's why he's always, you know, kind of close at hand.

Yeah.

But no, he definitely. He went through a lot. His family, his wife also suffered from quite a. You know, again, he had a lot of things that he had to overcome. Yeah. A lot of personal adversity. But.

So what's the. What's the best book that you've read over the last year?

Oh, I do know that one. It's something on executive coaching. Actually. Don't have it right here. It's really good book on coaching. Extraordinary Coaching, I think is what it's called.

Okay.

And it just does a better job. Coaching Habit had always been one of my favorite books up until then. And this one is just a lot more detail around what really goes into getting over giving people advice and what. What kinds of a change do you need to go through to become that kind of coaching leader that you're looking to be? So I just really. I mean, I wrote all over it. It's really been a great book.

That's how, you know it's a good book. Right.

That focused on exactly what its title was. But I just had a great time reading it.

Yeah, I always get a kick out of, you know, you know, meeting, you know, some of my lean heroes. You know, like Mike Rother is one of them. You know, back when I was a young, young lad running around factories, I had always Mike's books, you know, Learning to See and all the rest of it. And they're all marked up, so now I'm proud to show them. Look, I really did use your stuff, man, back in the day. So yeah. Really, really good, Cheryl. All right, well, hey, what's the best way for folks to connect with Cheryl?

I'm just out of my website, www.leanleadershipcenter.com. i'm also out on LinkedIn, so you can just look me up under Cheryl Jekyll, and I always respond to anybody that ever reaches out. Always happy to help anybody on their journey in any way that I can.

So awesome. We'll link to everything in the show notes as well. So this will be GembaPodcast.com, this will be episode 236. And your last name? J. Off the top of my head. J, E, K, I, E, L. Is that right?

Correct.

Look at that. Now spell Perera. Quick, don't look.

P E, R I, E, R, A.

Pretty good. Yeah, not bad. We both passed our spelling test today.

That's good.

All right, well, hey, Cheryl, I can't wait to see you out in San Diego. And hopefully everyone listening goes out to buy a ticket and comes and joins us because there could be worse places in America to be in San Diego, right?

Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Thanks so much, Ron. I had a great time. It's good catching up with you.

All right, take care. Thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast. Now we invite you to take a no strings attached, fully functional Test drive of Gembaacademy.com gain immediate access to more than a thousand Lean and Six Sigma learning resources, all free of charge at Gembaacademy.com.