GA 343 | The Role of Ops Leaders in Integrating Lean with Jamie Parker

There's a very different learning experience when I go and I help people change their work than when I do it in my own work. And so when I'm doing this in my own work, my learning experience is really different. My skill level just grows tremendously and now I can better teach and coach others.

Today I'm excited to welcome my friend Jamie Parker back to the show. Jamie's been on four previous times and we're gonna link to all those episodes in the show. Notes I really encourage. She actually came back on episode 41. This is episode 343, so, yeah, quite a while ago. So I've known Jamie for many, many years, obviously, and we had a lot of fun today. So Jamie's actually started her own podcast and she's going to tell you about that at the beginning of the show. And her podcast is really focused or targeted, I should say, towards operations leaders. And so it's a really cool, really cool idea and really, really nice podcast that I encourage you to go check out, especially if you're an operations leader. And so but what we about today on the show was as ops leaders, you know, they play a really critical role in organizational culture. Sometimes an ops leader doesn't always have really awesome senior level support and sometimes there's no support. But what are they supposed to do? They still play a really important role and Jamie's going to actually argue that it may not even matter if they don't have that top level support. So we spent some time talking about that. And then Jamie walks us through several pitfalls ops leaders new need to avoid as they work to practice lean thinking. And there's several really interesting pitfalls. And even if you aren't an ops leader, the pitfalls that she shares I think are gonna be very applicable to really anyone who's trying to practice lean. And then we spend a little bit of time talking about how to shift our approach to lean from one of implementation to integration. And so instead of trying to implement lean, Jamie's gonna talk a little about how to integrate Lean and there's actually some pretty important differences. So really, really fun episode. I love, love talking with Jamie. She's so, so smart when it comes to lean. And so, yeah, so check out the show notes over@gembapodcast.com this is again episode 343, gembapodcast.com, look for episode 343. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Jamie Parker, welcome to the show. How are you?

I am great, Ron, thank you. For having me back.

Yeah, well, yeah, I was going to say welcome back to the show. So I was just looking it up before we hit record. You've been on four times, so this is number five. And we'll put it in the show notes. I'm going to give it like a little tip for folks, because there's an annoying thing. And I know you just got into the podcasting world, Jamie, so I'm going to give you a heads up and we'll talk a little bit about your podcast here as well. But a lot of people who have iPhones use the podcast app, you know, to listen to podcasts, and they get this weird deal to where and it might be something that we're doing wrong, but it cuts off Gemba Academy's podcast like the first couple hundred you can't even get to anymore. So I don't know what the heck's going on there, but the best way for folks, if they ever want to go back to hear old episodes, is to go to GembaPodcast.com and it's like just kind of generic landing page where we have every episode. And so your episodes, and we'll put them in the show notes for today were episode 41. When was that? My goodness, Jamie. Oh, my gosh.

We're going way back there, Ron.

September 2016. Yeah, that's when you first came on oh my gosh. And then episode 120, you're investing in people with Jamie Parker. Then we were talking about teaching TWI in episode 149, and then how to coach leaders to coach others in episode 245. So, yeah, lots of fun over the years, Jamie.

Yes, and it was fun every single time. Still is.

Yeah, exactly. All right, well, so hey, listen, before we jump in with the quote and all that kind of good stuff, I want you to definitely tell folks about your podcast. And I understand my episode may be coming out relatively soon. I don't know. I mean, by the time this one comes out, maybe it will have already come out, but tell us about it.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So the podcast is called Lean Leadership for Ops Managers. So you can find it on all the platforms, whatever your platform is, or you can go to, you can find it at my website, which is processplusresults.com and the podcast is really designed to provide support and encouragement and teaching and new ideas and reflection and all of that for folks that are in operations, leadership roles who are integrating this, you know, they're integrating this whole lean thinking and working, but they're not full time lean practitioners.

Right.

And so it may not, you know, it may not be that they need to go out and become the experts on, you know, run charts and statistics or even on some of the lean tools.

Yeah.

But it's really more of that thinking and the leadership and a lot of that people leadership side is okay. So. So I love this stuff, but how do I actually turn it into reality for me when I have this day job?

Yeah. Yeah.

So that's what we're talking about in it and it's super fun. So. Yeah. So we actually just did an interview together and I would suspect it'll be out before this episode is out.

Yeah, very cool. Well, it was fun to do and I've enjoyed listening to them and I really do like how you, you're kind of honing in on that particular niche, you know, for ops leaders, because there's a lot of ops leaders out there who, you know, are trying to figure this stuff out, you know, with a so called day job. Right. And yeah, it's tough. It's tough. So. Well, listen, you know the drill, Jamie. At the beginning of all of our episodes, we like to have our guest share a quote. So do you have one for today?

I do and I will. I full transparency. The first two that came to mind, I was like, I shared those in previous episodes, so I want to make sure I'm sharing something new. And I was really reflecting on, you know, what's a quote that really speaks to my core values and purpose and things like that. And it might be from a source you're not expecting because the quote is actually from John Harbaugh, coach of the Baltimore Ravens. Right. Yeah.

Who knew we were going to go from the Michigan. You know, I'm Ohio State guy, so I can't be hearing the Jim Harbaugh quotes. I'll allow. John Harbaugh is fine.

Yeah. Well, this is actually, there's a video on YouTube. It's a smart CEO magazine video on leadership. And John Harbaugh is being interviewed in this, in this video. And as part of this interview he says if you want people to feel like you care about them, then the best way to do it is to actually care about them. And I mean, I think this is like so like core. Right. I mean, we want to talk about strategies and tools and skills and how do we. How do I better give recognition, which is something I teach all the time.

Yeah.

But all of those behaviors and systems aren't really going to be authentic and meaningful if you don't have that belief first.

Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. That's great. You know, I tell any of these football coaches, man, a lot, and not just football, but coaches in general, but have a lot of wisdom. You know, like, again, I'm a. I'm, I grew up in Ohio, so I'm a Buckeye fan, but the Nick Saban, you know, for Alabama. And I'm trusting me, I'm no Alabama football fan, but that dude got some stuff figured out as far as, you know, teaching people and this whole call, the process that he talks about, you know, there's a lot of, like, stoicism built into it and there's a lot of wisdom. You know, John Wooden, my goodness. You know, if you just read a couple John Wooden books and you're just like, whoa, what? Yeah, so lots of wisdom.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I'll tell you. So my brother is a high school basketball coach and I am continuously in awe of him because as this coach, he comes about it as like, you know, the basketball is really kind of secondary. He views his role as, you know, building young men. Right. Like building. Building these boys to become men and, you know, men who respect people and who treat people well and all of the big people. Human stuff.

Yeah, no, exactly. I actually helped coach one of my son, my. My older son's football teams and the same thing. You know, it's like we're preaching character, virtue, hard work. Right. And, you know, if you do all those things, the wins will come as a result of all those other things. Right? So, yeah, really good. Really good. All right, well, hey, Jamie, real fast. I know a lot of people know who you are. Listen to the previous episodes. But for those who may not have met Jamie, virtually tell us just a little bit about yourself and what you're up to these days.

Yeah, absolutely. So I am a recovering command and control manager. I grew up in operations management back in that whole authoritarian style of get stuff done, hit your numbers, hit your numbers now, and actually kept getting promoted because of it. Because I would get short term successes quickly. I would typically leave fast enough, get promoted fast enough that I didn't have to deal with any of the fallout from it. Right. And through, you know, that was. That was like going okay in the sense that I was getting promoted, but it was miserable. Like, I hated it, my team hated it. I had complaints filed against me, the whole nine. And so when I actually was introduced to lean back in 2011, that's what began my leadership transformation. So, you know, like, digging into the whole respect for people Part and what does it mean to have continuous improvement where it's process plus results, not just results only. And so I went through this whole big, you know, transformation personally and professionally while learning how to practice lean and integrate lean into the operations that I was responsible for. So, you know, with all that, that's really like what, you know, like, just doing the day job is. Hey, my day job is I'm a region ops manager and director, and I've got responsibility for PNLs and hiring and all of the things. Right. We got to deliver the results. I have full accountability for that. But then on the side, I was also doing leadership development and continuous improvement for the division. So that's where I found my passion, because I realized that one of the biggest things standing in our way of a continuous improvement culture was leadership. And so I just really dug into the leadership side and how are we developing plant managers and department managers to better lead with lean rather than try to implement lean.

Right, exactly.

So that's my background. And then now I actually work independently. So I have my own practice called process plus results. And I now work with organizations specifically, usually with operations management teams, helping them to do that same thing.

Nice, Nice. All right, well, let's jump in a little bit about just ops leaders in general. Obviously, you got a lot of background there, and now you're helping these folks a lot with your consulting work. So let's just talk about the role that they play in organizational culture and really just the way that folks are working.

Yeah, I really think that. And I feel like I've heard this before. I just don't know where I heard it from, to give any credit. But this idea that culture is local. Right. So, and especially, you know, I worked at FedEx, which is a massive organization. You don't have a FedEx culture as much as you have local culture. And not just culture as local as far as a location, but even so much as a group. Right. Like the group that's working together. And because of that, I think that our operations leaders really have some of the most influence in guiding our culture. You know, I mean, I've had situations where the C suite had best intentions, but operations, you know, operations leaders weren't carrying it forward, and so it didn't matter. And I've also had situations where the C suite really couldn't care less about this whole people improvement stuff. But because operations leaders did, it actually changed those local cultures and changed how they were working. Right. Because, you know, your team, leads and supervisors and, you know, manage plant managers and value stream managers, these are the folks that have the most interaction with our team members who are creating value, the folks who are making product or delivering service.

You know, so funny that you said that. I wanted to throw one of my, I don't want to throw a previous employer under the bus by a sword on. I guess I'm about to. I won't name their name and get my LinkedIn figure it out probably. But gosh, I had a boss in a previous role and the fact that we was in a manufacturing organization and I was a director of manufacturing, a continuous improvement for one of these divisions, I swear to you, the fact this person had a sales background and the fact that we had to actually produce something was annoying to this person. You know, it was like bookings, bookings, bookings, sales, sales, sales. And then it's like, well, of course, just make it and make it right quickly, you know? You know, and I'm like, yeah, make it right and make it quickly, you know, that's what we're trying to do here, you know, but boy, so many leaders out there. There's a lot of folks out there, a lot of operations managers out there on an island, you know, and they don't always have that senior level support. Now I was lucky enough that this person didn't get in my, which was cool. He let me do my job, which I appreciated. Right. And we were able to do some good stuff, but they could care less. Right. And yeah, it's really frustrating, can be really difficult when you're in that situation.

Yeah. And you know, it's actually one of those things where I disagree with a lot of the kind of things that people will say out in the lean community where there's so much emphasis on, you know, it's the top, right. The top has to be bought in, the CEO has to be committed, all of that. And you know, I think, okay, yes, if I'm going to have an organizational wide transformation, that probably needs to be the case. But for most people, our lives are not based off of the organization. For most people, our work lives, and therefore, by the way, as an extension, our personal lives, our work lives are based off of our immediate work teams. Right. And so you, absolutely, you can be that like as Simon Sinek would say, kind of the Johnny Bravo of the world who says, you know, I know that my boss is, is giving more of this command and control management and I can take it, but I'm not just going to pass it down as if I'm just this pass through entity. I'M going to change the way I'm leading and have a massive impact on my local culture on this team right here.

Absolutely, absolutely. And it begins with yourself, right. I mean, lead yourself. Right? And improve yourself and keep learning and keep practicing and then. And then. And then, you know, pass that on to the folks that you have direct contact with, so.

Absolutely. Yep.

So I want to also talk a little bit about pitfalls, you know, because. Especially as it relates to lean. You know, when we did our podcast and you were interviewing me, which was fun, I think I used the analogy we were talking about. I use the analogy of that. The fish story, you know, one where it's like, I can't remember the exact. There's a video, YouTube video you could probably find. I'll probably mess it up. But there was something to the gist of a couple fish swimming along in the water, and another fish swims by and goes, hey, how's the water? And all of a sudden, other fish looks at the other fish and says, what's water? You know, it's like they didn't even realize they're in water. Right. And so I. I'm of the opinion, and I think you probably are, too, Jamie, that the best way for operations leaders to really make lean work is to not try to do lean, but just let it permeate the way that you do your. Your work. Right. It's not extra. It's just kind of like how you do things. And even if you're practic, that's, you know, that's just kind of how we do our jobs. Right. So with that said, what about pitfalls? Like, where does it go wrong when ops leaders are trying to practice lean?

Yeah. And I think that's so important is this idea of integration rather than kind of implementation. Right.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I think there are several pitfalls. One in particular I want to call out today is this pitfall of delegating responsibility for improvement. Right. Where we kind of say, hey, oh, the CI team, or that CI person or the consultant that came in, they're going to lead this lean stuff, and I'm just going to keep running operations. And so it's something that we see too often. In fact, I'll often hear the lean folks, because lean folks are saying, how can I get the ops manager to take control? And the ops manager said, hey, it's not my job, it's your job. Right?

Yep.

And so I think that's, you know, number one is, hey, if. If you're going to kind of integrate lean Thinking and lean working into how you're doing your job. That means it's yours to own. Of course we're going to use our experts. Right? Of course you're not. You don't have to be the expert in all the lean tools and system. Let's use the experts to help us and to support us, but let's not throw it over the fence and expect that they own responsibility for it.

Yep. Yeah, just use them as a consultant, as a coach, you know, as a teacher. Right, but teachers teach, right? Learners learn.

Yes, absolutely. So that's the first one I would say.

Okay.

And I say first. I don't know that they're in necessarily any sort of order other than the order I'm sharing them. So another pitfall is, is ignoring the people side of lean leadership. So we will often get really excited about all this stuff and we'll say, oh yeah, we're gonna blame the process, not the person. But then when there's like this visible customer failure, who did it? The first thing we ask is who ran the job? Right. We have these ingrained responses and so we can't, like we have to change our leadership too. So even if you start integrating things like gimbal walks and D meetings and improvement projects and things like that, well, your gimba walk isn't really effective if we don't know how to, you know, really listen and you know, not just listen to respond or if we don't know how to ask good questions, good coaching questions, then we're really limiting what kind of impact. So I like to talk about this as this behavior is really the what we do. So the action, the activity of a gimbal walk and a daily meeting and leader standard work as well as the how we do it. And that's the skill and the effectiveness. And are we incorporating the types of things in our people leadership? Because the reality is that leadership is a relationship and it doesn't happen on a visual board. Right. It doesn't happen in standard work. Leadership happens in, in interactions between people. Absolutely. So I think one of those things is we like, we jump in, we get so excited about all the cool, fun, you know, visual stuff that we forget that, hey, we have to look at how we're leading the people side too.

Yep, exactly. Exactly. Good. Okay.

All right, so I've got a couple more if we have time.

Yeah, let's do it.

All right, so third one I want to talk about is a pitfall where we do a top down push. So, right. We say, oh, we're going to use 5s. And then we go and we push down. Here's how 5S works. And you know, many times this, I did this, by the way, I was a part of this type of a thing where it was the very first time we had just been introduced to LinkedIn and we're like, oh, yes, 5s, let's do it. And you know, we had 20 plants across the country, so we got a few plant managers together and they figured out where everything should go in a plant and they made the labels and they made the signage and then we shipped a kit hit to every single plant and said, hey, this is what it needs to look like.

You had 5s police too, didn't you? Don't lie. You had 5s.

Well, then the district managers, we would fly around and audit.

I like it, I like it.

So. So, by the way, when I stand here working with organizations, it's not from a place of, hey, I, you know, have this figured out. It's, I've learned some lessons, I've done it.

Don't do what I did.

It was so awful, of course, but not just for that reason, but here we had gone to our people and said, oh my goodness, this new lean thing, you're going to love it. And then we did that and they were like, this sucks. Right. What do we love? And we lost credibility. And unfortunately we actually made that mistake. Not to that extent, but we made that mistake more than once because we're like, how do we do this? How do we have this consistency across 20 locations? Right. But then at the same time, you know, allow it to happen in the field. And it was just a balance and it took us a little bit longer to realize.

Yeah.

You know, set direction. Right. So as senior leaders, we can set direction, but we can't direct how it's going to happen. Right. We can't go and say this is what it needs to look like.

Yeah.

We need to actually have the process of whatever it is. Gimbal walks, stand up meetings, whatever it is. Right. We need to have that process, be a learning process that involves folks.

Yes.

So it's not like a top down push, go implement this.

Yep. I love it. I think everybody that's been practicing for a while can, can share a 5s horror story. You know, I know I've got a million.

Absolutely. You know, it's the same thing with like daily startup meetings and the visual boards that people put up and, you know, they think that every department needs to look the same. Yeah, like, well, no, they actually don't because that's why, you know, they become wallpaper, right? Nobody's using them.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

All right. So the last pitfall I was hoping to share is that I see operations, we make this mistake. I made it too, right. Is that we start integrating this lean thinking and working, and we make it all about their work. The people on the floor, right? We go and we say, oh, we've got it, you know? And I know it comes from good intentions because we're thinking, well, I want to create more value for customer, and so I'm going to the processes closest to the customer, right? That's where it's coming from. I want to get flow, and I'm going to have kanbans and all of the things that we go to do to their work. The team members work, the operations, work on the floor, and then. But what we don't do is we don't apply it with the same vigor and frequency to our own work. So our work as a leader, right? So we have work that we're doing. Do I have standard work in my work or do I just expect. Standard work is something they follow, right? Do I use 5s to catch abnormalities in my work? And it might be digital, right? It may not be my physical desk. It may be my digital workflow, but am I using doing that, or am I just expecting that they are in their work? Am I looking for flow in my work and how to maximize the flow of information and remove waste so that the flow of information isn't stopped? Or is that something I just. You know what? I'm gonna go, we're gonna do that in their work. And so it presents this problem, not just from the credibility problem, right? It's definitely a credibility problem. Any team member who feels like, hey, you expect me to do 5s and then I walk up to your office or your desk and it's crazy, right? So you have this credibility problem. But it's more than that, because if we think about lean thinking as this learning process, there's a very different learning experience when I go and I help people change their work than when I do it in my own work. And so when I'm doing this in my own work, my learning experience is really different. My skill level just go, like, it grows tremendously. And now I can better teach and coach others.

Right, Right. And when you have credibility, like you said, you know, people. People respect you because you practice what you're. What you're teaching.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Great. Listen, the last thing that I want to talk about, and we've mentioned it a few times already, but I think it's, it's, it's just worth maybe just a, just a dot the I and cross the T a little bit. But we talk about, about shifting from, again, from an ops leader's perspective, shifting from lean as an implementation rollout to lean thinking as, you know, integrated, better way of working. How do you make that shift? Because it's easy. Not when say easy, but it's very common to see people, oh, we're going to implement this instead of integrating, which I think is a very different mindset. Talk a little bit about that shift.

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, so to me it's this combination of beliefs, behaviors and systems all working in alignment. Because what we normally do is we jump to the systems, right? And we put those visual management boards and those hour by hour charts up and then they become wallpaper. And so that's because the system by itself doesn't work. We actually need to have beliefs which are the, these core values, our purpose. It's also the thoughts, you know, those thoughts we think, right. The behaviors which we talked about today is, you know, the what you do as well, as well as the how you do it, your skill, your effectiveness. And then the systems all need to be working in alignment because then we're not saying, hey, I want to go and implement, you know, some sort of Kanban system to help my flow. Instead we're saying, okay, so what are our values? What is our true north? Right. How do we create more value? This is something that we're all aligned, that we're wanting to do. How am I interacting with people from the relationship side that builds commitment, that coaches them, that asks them for their involvement, where we can create this challenge that says, hey, we're trying to create more value for customers. How could we do this? And now it's really just a part of every day leadership and management and it's not this separate thing. Yeah, okay, sure. We're going to have to do some extra, not extra. We're going to have to do some work that we wouldn't have to do if we chose not to do it, but now we're choosing to do it collectively as a team. And that's a very different process than saying, go do this.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. Very good. Jamie, what's the best way for folks to connect with you? I know you mentioned your website process +results.com. is that the best place or social media? What do you got?

Yeah, I would say the two places would be my website. So processplusresults.com as well as LinkedIn. And when you go to find me on LinkedIn, I'm Jamie V. Parker, like Victoria Jamie V. Parker. There's an actor I think the same age as mine with the name Jamie Parker. This guy. So, you know, when you start googling things, that's what you're going to find. You're going to find all this actor stuff. Right, okay.

For now. That's what I'm going with for now. You know, until we overtake.

That's right.

All right, well, yeah, and we'll link to this to everything in our show notes. So this is episode 343. So gembapodcast.com look for episode 343 and we'll link again to all the previous episodes. And people should go back and listen to. I think it'd be fun. Everybody go back and listen to episode 41. FedEx's FedEx offices lean journey Journey with Jamie Parker. That's the one right there. Oh my gosh. The picture too is. You were, you were, you were a baby.

I'm almost scared to go back and listen.

That's awesome.

I'm sure it was wonderful.

Yeah, no, no, that's good one. It's a good one. All right, well, thanks again, Jamie. It's always fun and I know we'll talk again. I know you'll be on again down the road, so. So yeah, we'll, we'll catch up soon. Soon.

Okay, sounds great, Ron. Thank you.

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