GA 339 | Applying Lean and Six Sigma to Human Resources with Michael Parent

Some of the best practices that I've developed is cutting back the tools. I think that's one of the first things that I would do is throw out the entire suite and, you know, look at the house of quality. Start at the bottom, and until you've perfected the bottom, don't work up.

Today I'm excited to welcome Michael Parent to the show. Now, Michael, as you'll hear, has a solid background. He started learning about Lean and Six Sigma kind of in a, you know, production, manufacturing environment. And then he eventually found himself in a human resources department, and that's where he's been applying Lean and Six Sigma. And so what we talked about today on the show was how he's going about that and some of the tools that they're using. He's got an interesting approach on how he actually reduces the number of tools that he introduces to folks who are new to the whole Lean and Six Sigma thing. So really, really fun episode. Super humble guy, but super smart, as you'll. And yeah, show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 339. Again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 339. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Michael, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm doing very well, thank you.

All right, well, Michael, we like to begin all of our shows with our guest sharing a quote. So do you have one that you want to open up with?

Yeah, I do. It's by St. Thomas Quinas, great thinker of the Middle Ages. And he said it's better to illuminate than merely to shine, to deliver to others contemplated truths than merely to contemplate.

Wow, that's a new one for the podcast. And I don't think anybody's ever quoted Aquinas, so that's pretty awesome. So what's that?

He's a pretty smart guy.

Yeah, he sure was. What's that quote mean to you?

Well, you know, I think it gets to the crux of what we do is we're not just merely practitioners going out into the field and running, you know, Lean projects or putting process improvement in place. The real value that we add is so much more about imparting, you know, these skills, these mindsets, even the tools to really let other people do it themselves. And I think that's, you know, a lot of what sometimes gets lost in translation, but also what. What we bring to the table.

One of my very good friends. So I'm Catholic, you know, so I know all about Thomas Aquinas. And, and he, He. He actually teaches a class, an online class on the summa on, on Thomas, on St. Thomas. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna send him this, this podcast. He's gonna be so tickled that Aquinas got quoted on our podcast.

Yeah, Good, good.

Very good. All right, well, hey, Michael, tell us about your background and how you first got introduced to continuous improvement and then what you're up to these days.

Yeah, so I, I'm only 30 years old, so I'm a relatively younger person practicing Lean Six Sigma. I was, I went to the University of Michigan, got a degree in industrial and Operations engineering. So a lot of what that curriculum was, was, you know, a lot of the statistics, a lot of the quality engineering. And of course there was also like a Lean component as kind of your technical elective you could, you could take. So I'm also a bookworm. I read, you know, at the time I was reading things like the Go in Search of Excellence and then eventually got to the Toyota Way. So I guess I've kind of always had it from the beginning of my career, some inkling that I wanted to do Lean Six Sigma type stuff. I was working in manufacturing for a while. I eventually got around to a great organization that did their own in house, Lean Six Sigma, even designed for Six Sigma stuff. So I was doing a lot of projects, leading a lot of things in the manufacturing space. I went to get my MBA while I was in manufacturing, and through the mba, I realized that what I liked about the business components, strategy, product development, even human centered design was something that came up a lot in the mba. These were things that I thought Lean Six Sigma could augment and also move alongside. I also thought that these things weren't, you know, that readily available in the manufacturing space. So after the mba, I was looking consciously for an opportunity to, you know, use the Lean Six Sigma skills, use the background that I had, but apply it into some unique or novel business problems. So that's what I was doing, and I eventually found my way into human resources.

Wow. Okay. So, yeah, and so obviously, you know, gonna kind of dive into your journey with Lean and Six Sig in an HR organization. So maybe let's just kind of dig into that and just, well, just talk about maybe the early experience you had applying Lean Six Sigma within an HR environment. Like, how did you go about it in the beginning? And then maybe what are you doing now, if anything different?

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, coming into it, it's A bit of a culture shock. I don't know how many people out there have ever made transition from manufacturing into something that's got a much softer background, like human resources. One of the biggest challenges I faced is just the speed in which I could go. Manufacturing's got a history of engineers and kind of very technical components to it, even from a very early onset of manufacturing. So there's a culture of just people being technically literate, understanding data, understanding how to make decisions with data. So that was something I really had to kind of reset my expectations to it. You know, it didn't come up in the interview process or anything like that, surprisingly, but it was a little bit of a culture shock. So, you know, going about it from the start, it was a lot of gemba ing because I quickly realized I was not, you know, in my comfort zone. So it was a lot of, you know, really trying to understand what other people were doing and then also kind of being, you know, a little bit of an apostle myself for Lean and Six Sigma methods because these are folks who have never been exposed to this at any time beforehand. So you're doing a little bit of sharing what you do, but you're doing a lot of learning about what they're doing because that's obviously going to make you a little bit better in what we're doing. So what I'm doing now to answer that second part of that question is really applying the Lean Six Sigma methods to a couple different areas. Talent acquisition is a great opportunity for human resources departments to really visualize a process of look, I need to get somebody who's a high quality candidate into my organization. I need to do that relatively quickly. So mapping out that process with the recruiters, with the recruiting managers and the directors and you know, getting them to understand what their process looks like, that's just, you know, one, one problem in a handful of different projects I'm working on right now.

Yeah, that's kind of one of those, those classic HR style projects, you know, because golly, you know, I remember back in my corporate days there's some horror stories. You know, you're trying to find, you know, specific type of engineer or something like that. And boy, it can take a long time and then you think you found them or. And then all of a sudden it falls apart at the very end and get to start over again. So. Yeah, yeah, right, yeah, so, so when you, you know, there's actually, it's kind of like when people say Lean accounting or Lean in HR or whatever. So it's Kind of like, you know, are you. It sounds like you're applying lean within the HR discipline. Is that, is that right? Like, so you're working with HR professionals, trying to help them streamline their work, improve their work. Is that, is that accurate?

Yeah, I would say that's accurate. I guess that's one of two components of what I do. I think the. SO one, you know, straight rudimentary process improvement type stuff, you know, teaching people lean. I think the other one is kind of operations management. A lot of these HR managers and directors, like I said, they don't have a background in operations management. And once they start thinking about their processes as operation, what they do is operations. You can kind of see the deer in the headlights look and they don't quite know what to do about it. So a lot of that is using the lean philosophy, using some other best practices to create for them a KPI and really coach them up on how they ought to be running their departments.

Yeah, we even just concepts like Obeya or, you know, just visual management, you know, like make your work visual.

Right.

That can be a very enlightening to folks in, you know, in a front office environment who, who haven't always done that. Maybe they have a Salesforce dashboard or whatever locked inside their computer, but, you know, it's only there when you go click on the link. Right, right.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah. Very good. So can you give, I mean, I'm curious. The staffing one is always interesting to me and I will ask you to, you know, share any trade secrets or anything like that, but be curious to dig into that one a little bit. Like, what are, what are some of the things that you're seeing from a, like a current state, you know, map perspective.

Yeah.

I'd be curious to hear what you're learning there.

Yeah. So luckily my organization has, has worked with a benchmarking organization. It's by PwC. It's called, I think, Saratoga Institute. Saratoga something, but I think it's the institute. So they provide benchmark metrics which help us define what some of those KPIs ought to be and then also help us with some efficiency measures, particularly with talent acquisition. Looking at time to approve is a big one. So, you know, you've got a requisition, you have to get it approved, and then sometimes something might happen and it has to get reapproved. So there you've got redundancy, you know, you've got rework, and then you've also got a longer time to fill, which is kind of like Your lead time for your entire process. So right now we're seeing like a very high elevated time to approve in some of our processes and some of our different business areas. So we're digging down into that. We're moving some things around in our process. If you think about it from a value stream mapping standpoint, those big blocks, sometimes I'll just say one of those blocks is having a strategy meeting with the business line. So these are recruiters working with the business line, figuring out what exactly they want, how they're going to approach it from a market standpoint, a labor market standpoint. These are conversations that probably can be had before the requisition is approved in the first place. So this is going to reduce rework. It's going to reduce essentially quality in process. Right. If we do this in the first part, we'll be able to have a much smoother operation downstream.

It's also similar maybe to like quick changeover, right. Internal, external. Right. Do, do the, do these things before the patient's on the operating table. Right.

So, yeah, and very, very much. You know, something that we talked about is like having an intake model. So even before they request, you know, before they request an open position, can they already answer some of these questions for us so that even this, you know, this conversation, this strategy conversation can be much quicker?

Got it, got it. So I know it's not easy. I mean, lean's not easy anywhere, right? I didn't matter, you know.

Oh yeah.

I remember hearing people talking to this person one time and they said, well, if only I could build cars like Toyota, it'd be so easy. I'm like, yeah, because building a car every 60 seconds is easy, you know.

No problem, no problem, you know, but.

So, but, but let's dig it a little bit to the some of the challenges that you face introducing, you know, these continuous improvement concepts within an HR environment. What's tough about it? And then maybe what kind of tools or approaches are you using to, to counter those obstacles?

Yeah, I'll say. I think I might have hit on it a little bit already. Is kind of this legacy of people not being used to kind of anything Lean, not just Lean itself, but kind of the context of Lean thinking about things as operations, thinking about things as process. That's probably universal truth for a lot of people, whether you're in manufacturing or not, but it's particularly acute in the human resources area. Maybe some of the things that I've done to help that is one of the big things is to cut back the Tools. So lean people, lean practitioners love talking about the tools. Right? I use the Ishikawa diagram. I did a 5Y analysis. This will fall flat on the audience that I work with. It's so much more important to get buy in. It's so much more important to get people to believe in what we're doing, even if it comes at the expense of that project. Would have been a lot better if we, I don't know, did a cause and effect matrix or something like that. It's so much. We're playing the long game, essentially. We're trying to, we're trying to build that foundation, build that culture, and then we can start adding the tools. Once we have that culture in place, the tools are just a means to an end. So specifically, some of the things that we've done is we've cut it back to three things. Waste identification. Can we teach people to identify and attribute waste to one of the eight wastes? Standardization. Are we running a standard operation? And can we hold people accountable to the standard that we've set for them? And then finally, visual management. Can we visualize the value stream? Can we visualize the value that we're delivering to our customer? So with all those things, if you think about it from like the house of quality, right, those are right on the bottom. That's the foundation. So we're not building the house yet. We're just laying the foundation.

Yeah, well, golly, you know, if everyone understood waste and just constantly work to eliminate it, you know, you'd be, you do be in pretty good shape. You know, I mean, just that alone. So, you know, you talked about holding people accountable. So how do you, how do you balance that with the whole idea of, you know, respect for people where obviously respecting people just because you're holding them accountable, you also, you probably are respecting them because you're holding them accountable. But how do you balance that? You know, to not look like a tyrant or not look like the, you know, you got a big hammer and if you don't follow my rules, you're in trouble. Right. How do you, how do you go about that?

Yeah, I think you're right on that. Setting that standard is respecting people, right, is because you're, you're letting them know how. You know, we don't work at a country club, we work at a business. So we're, we're trying to hold people accountable to some level of achievement. It's not really fair to not tell them what that is or for it to be based on intuition, which is kind of how it was running before. Concretely, when we run some of these projects and as we're trying to roll some things out, is we've worked in to have a weekly meeting. We call it a cadence of accountability, where what they're doing is they're running an A3. So we tell them each week that you have to have this part of the A3 structured and done, and if you need any help, we can set up touch points. But this is what you're accountable to each week. And what we like about that is one, it imparts the lean wisdom that we want. It imparts the lean methods and the lean thinking of saying, we really need to identify what the problem is, what we want to solve, understand what that problem is, and then finally, much later on, do the analysis phase. So we lay out the formulation of the project that we're going to follow. We tell them explicitly how we're going to hold them accountable to it. And then we've got this weekly cadence of saying, okay, did you do it? If not, why not? What was in your way to kind of remove some barriers for them?

Yeah, I find that the weekly check in, you know, here academy, we've got various certification, lean practitioner, green belt, black belt, various certification programs, and all of them. The one thing that's consistent is our coaching. And. And we essentially insist now on. In the past, we were more kind of loose about, oh, you know, let us know when you need help. But yeah, it didn't work so good. So now we're like, listen, we need to talk every week at a minimum, every week. And then some folks we talk to, you know, several times a week depending, you know, if they need the help. But just having that regular, like you called it regular cadence, regular check in makes all the difference in the world. And while we don't preach it as an accountability thing, I've. I can't tell you how many times I've heard, you know, people say, you know what, Ron, I'm so glad that we do these calls because it does hold me accountable. Right. And we always say, even if you had a rotten week and you didn't get anything done, I still want you to come onto the call. We're not going to beat you up. We're going to just try to learn, learn from it, and then, you know, make a plan for the next five days. So for us, it's always, all right, what's the next step? What do you think is going to happen over these next five days? And. And then. And we go from there. So yeah. Having that regular check in process is so, so critical.

Yeah. And like you, you kind of laid it out too is I'm just telling you the finished project product of it. You know, we stumbled along and finally figured out that that's what was going to work for us.

Yeah. Yep. Very good, very good. So, you know, there's a lot, I mean, obviously Lean and Six Sigma is being applied now the world over in just about any industry you can imagine it's being used. So what, you know, but I would still say, I guess the non traditional areas, maybe it's safe to say. Well, maybe it's not safe to say anymore, I don't know. But you know, it can be sometimes a little harder.

Right.

So what do you think's the potential for Lean and Six Sigma and just continuous improvement in general to be applied in these so called non traditional areas?

Yeah, I think there's a lot of potential. One of the things that I really liked about HR is there's a willingness to change and to try things new that I didn't quite find in my experiences with manufacturing. Granted there's a healthy amount of skepticism, but they can see the forest through the trees in a lot of areas. They've got kind of an organizational view. So there's tons of potential of getting people to think in terms of Lean and Six Sigma and operations management and applying that to their disciplines. I think one of the things that really excites me is innovation and product development. And I know that that's kind of a buzzword, innovation now, but you know, organizations are continually identifying that they need some way to continually produce innovation. Continually produce something that's novel and creative and satisfies and delights the customer. I haven't seen too much out there, you know, as I read in journals and whatnot, that's talking about blending a lean approach with innovation and product development. I think that would be a great future endeavor.

It's funny, the episodes haven't even come out yet, but over the last few weeks I've actually interviewed a couple people who talked about that very topic of innovation we've had a guy on talking about. One guy was talking about how he's using corn flakes to design a texture on a ceiling tile. So it's kind of a 3P lean approach. So yeah, I think you're right. A very important part of the life cycle of a product or service to apply lean to that part of it. And I think you're right. It's not as mature as obviously like the production side or anything like that. So yeah, that's really good. So right now there's someone listening to this podcast who might be, maybe they're in HR or maybe they're in just a, you know, a non, again, a non traditional, maybe a service oriented business or job. What advice do you have for them as they get started with their, with their lean journey?

Yeah, I, I would say, you know, kind of some of the best practices that I've developed is cutting back the tools. I think that's one of the first things that I would do is throw out the, the entire suite and you know, look at the house of quality. Start at the bottom and until you've perfected the bottom, don't work up. I've looked at a couple case studies and I think some other things that are really good best practices out there is creating a flagship process. Really, you know, if you think about Lean as delivering customer value and your own value stream, right. What are people getting value from you and how are you demonstrating that? Maybe it's in an HR organization, maybe it's in some other organization. I think having a flagship process and being able to point back to that and say we took that organization, that department from point A to point B and we did it by using this Lean Six Sigma playbook. I think that is really, really helpful to demonstrate your value, to show the worth and to show why other people might want to join in. Because like I did say, there is a little bit of that healthy skepticism which you're going to find everywhere.

Yep, yep. For sure, for sure. Very good. You know, one thing I was going to ask you about, but I'll ask it now, it's a little bit out of order, but have you gotten into. Because I know there's some folks within, you know, what they would call the lean HR movement. Now there's a lean, insert a name movement, right. But folks, HR professionals who are really into lean, they're also, they seem to be going down the road of the leadership side, right. Not just the tools, but just developing lean leadership type skills. Have you kind of gotten into that yet or are you planning to, what do you think about that?

Are you saying for me personally or are you saying as we roll that out for the organization?

Yeah, well, maybe both really, I don't know, but for sure the organization, right.

I think at the end of the day that's really where the value is added is it's not, I guess, almost to make it full circle. Right. It's not on putting the tools in place. It's not on doing little projects. It's about creating a leadership culture. One of the big difficulties, I don't know if it's a difficulty, but one of the things that we need to get in place in my organization is we need to get the line leaders involved. We need to get the recruiters, you know, doing and on and saying, hey, you know, submitting Kaizens, things like this, where they're empowered by their leaders who they themselves are empowered up the chain. That is something that has not happened yet within the organization. That, that would be absolutely transformative is if we could get that, you know, all the way from the senior vice president on down where it's not just the buy in, but it's, it's the activity, it's the involvement. So that's very lean thinking and like I said, it's. We're kind of going at a more of a crawl than a walk at this point. So that's part of my vision. That's, that's something I'd love to get to, but I think that might be, you know, in the distant future, maybe a three year plan or something.

Yeah, yeah. No, I think it sounds like you're going about it right, though, in my opinion. You know, I mean, kind of starting at the foundation and working your way up the outpost. Right. And, yeah, and getting that buy in and you know, you know, respecting people all the way through the whole process, which it sounds like you're doing by you know, reducing the number of tools that you're throwing at folks. That's a form of respect. Right. Not trying to overwhelm them with how smart you are.

Right.

So absolutely. Yeah, very good.

Absolutely. They'd be underwhelmed too.

No, you sound like a smart guy. All right, well, hey, Michael, what's the best way for folks to connect with you if they want to get in touch?

Yeah, I would say I'm on LinkedIn and all you have to do is search Michael Parent. I'm sure in your show notes you could probably throw the link in there or something. But yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. That's the best way to reach me and I'd be happy to connect with anybody.

Fantastic. Yeah, we'll put it in the show notes. This is episode 339, so GembaPodcast. Just go to 339 and yeah, we'll link to Michael's LinkedIn there. So. Well, hey, it's fun having you on the show. Thanks for coming on and maybe we'll have you on down the road. And you can tell us about all the amazing endeavors that you've done there within your organization.

Yeah, it'd be a pleasure. Thanks, Ron.

All right, you take care. Thanks for listening. Whether you've been on the continuous improvement journey for many years, or perhaps you're just getting started, GEMBA Academy is here to support you. And while we're best known for our more than 1500 Lean and Six Sigma teaching and virtual tour videos, we also have a team of experienced Lean and Six Sigma practitioners available for one on one coaching, as well as a variety of Lean and Six Sigma certification options. To learn more and to schedule a demo, head on over to gembaacademy.com.