GA 454 | Practicing Lean in a Pandemic with Sabrina McCorvey

As we start to do Kaizen events, I wanted people to not be afraid of the language and afraid of where we were trying to go. So I felt that the resistance to the change we were making would be less or lessened if I could just educate people.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Sabrina McCorvey to the show. Now, Sabrina and I were able to catch up at this year's AME conference in Dallas, and we had a really fun conversation about her journey starting a lean organization during that pandemic. She was hired at this particular company right at the start of the pandemic and had to figure out how she was going to pivot and make it work. And so we had a really good discussion on how she went about that. And then we fast forwarded and just talked about kind of just the last couple years, what they've done. They've run a lot of Kaizen events, and we talked about that and some of the different events that they've done and how they've navigated it. Towards the end of the conversation, we even talked about how she works with what we call cave people, which is a citizen against virtually everything. Sometimes we'll have cave people in our events, and you know how we're going to get the most out of them. So, really fun episode. I think you're going to like it. So show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 454. Again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 454. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Sabrina, how are you?

Wonderful run. How are you doing today?

Doing great. It's going to be a fun one, I think.

Oh, my goodness. I don't think you're ready.

I know. I hear you over there cutting it up with the ladies. I was like, what is going on over here? No. So is this your first ame?

No, this is actually my fourth or fifth.

Okay, so you're.

I went to one in Cincinnati many years ago. Toronto?

Yep.

Jacksonville Virtual last year, and now this year.

Okay. Yeah. So you've been around.

Yes.

All right, all right. Well, Sabrina, I know you know the drill. We like to get things started with our guest sharing a quote or two. Do you have anything for us?

Well, I guess my first quote, if we think about lean, what gets measured gets done. And if you think about life, if you don't have a seat at the table, pull up your own chair. Shirley Chisholm.

I love it. I love it. Tell us about your background, Sabrina. Tell us how you maybe got into this line of work and what you're up to these days.

Okay. I guess it's a natural transformation for myself because I majored in industrial engineering at Georgia Tech. And people call us the imaginary engineer, but we're really the people engineer because we're all about ergonomics, improving processes, and making the workplace the best for the employee.

So.

So I started as an IE major. Actually, the second quarter. Notice I said quarter. They weren't semesters back then of my freshman year, and I never changed my major. And I've worked as an industrial engineer or someone improving processes for several decades now. I'm not going to tell you how many decades, because a woman never tells.

Well, you look about 25, you know.

So, you know, I'm celebrating the anniversary of my 25th birthday.

Yeah, no, it's great. What? I'm curious, what were you at the. Before industrial engineering? You had a.

Yes.

What were you thinking about?

I was originally going to do computer science. And the reason why I was doing computer science is because when I was in the ninth grade, they rolled into my class a computer. And once I saw that computer, I was so excited about the computer. So I decided as a ninth grader, I was going to go and major in computer science. And I kept that major until I got to Georgia Tech the summer before my freshman year. And that summer I was in a program for minority students, and they brought some upperclassmen for a panel discussion to talk about the different majors. And as the computer science person talked about what they did, I'm sitting here thinking, no people interaction. It's just you and a machine trying to find that one missing semicolon, all day, all night, I said, no, that's not me. And then as I listened to the different engineers describe what they do and how they did it. Yeah, the electrical engineer. Not excited about that. Chemical engineer. Oh, there no friends. Always in a chemical lab. Organic chemistry had people pulling their hair out. Nope, that's not for me. And as they went through the different engineering disciplines, the industrial engineer end up being more like my personality and something I want to do. So I grabbed onto that major then.

I love it. I love it. And, and, and where do you work now?

I now work for a joint venture that was formed in 2018 where Mitsubishi Electric, a Japanese company, joined together with Trane, an American company. And now it's a partnership, a beautiful partnership. The last four years.

Okay, okay. And you're industrial engineering still?

Actually, I'm not. My title is an industrial engineering But I still do that work. My title now is Senior Director of Continuous Improvement. And I am responsible for standing up the lean organization at this company of 600 employees.

Nice. Beautiful, Beautiful. Well, what I want to talk about today, Sabrina, is maybe your journey. Starting a lean organization and a. Well, what we just came out of was a crisis like, well, we had not seen in our lifetime, at least our age. Talk about that.

That experience, Ron, it was a scary experience. I was introduced to Metis, that's the name for Mississippi selector train via LinkedIn. And they had me to come over for an interview in February. And then from there I turned in my notice the Friday that the world shut down. So I was working for international paper and I was a little scared. I'm thinking, am I really gonna quit my job? I had just flown into the Atlanta airport. I called the human resource director at Medicine, said, is this offer still on the table because it looks like things are different right now. And she said, yes, of course. Because of course she was thinking, and I was probably thinking that this was just a temporary, it wasn't gonna last. Turn my notice in. Worked two more weeks for my previous employer, took two weeks off because one, I was going to do spring break with my only child, his last year of high school. And I sit at home for two weeks during this global pandemic trying to figure out what am I going to do. I start putting together my 30, 60, 90 day plans because still I'm thinking, this is temporary, it's not going to last long. Well, it wasn't temporary because those two, those two weeks became four weeks, those four weeks became two years. So I started work with Mitsubishi on April 13, 2020. And I walked into this office space, it was basically pretty much empty because most of the people were at home. Our warehouse people were there at work, but the office people, customer care, order management, marketing, they were basically all at home. And the people who were in the office and coming in every day were the leaders of the company. So I was sitting there thinking, okay, what am I going to do? How am I going to start up this lean organization? And how do I prepare myself for when this pandemic is over? So I start putting a plan together, thinking on and reflecting on what I experienced at previous employers and with my Sensei's. Plus looking at this book about lean transformation, put an entire plan together, thinking that, oh, we're going to launch this the end of April. Well, didn't quite happen the way I had planned it out to be because still we weren't coming Back into the office, we were still virtual. So I had to really reach back into my memory banks from the past. And I said, you know what? How can I start to educate and expose people to lean while they're at home?

So one quick question. Sorry to interrupt. Like, what was the lean environment? Was there any nothing? Like they couldn't spell lean.

Well, I shouldn't say nothing. The CFO at the time had come from Train and he had been exposed to lean through Interstellar Ran.

Yeah.

And he brought the A3 and also strategy deployment Matrix. But they had not done any other training and they were doing it as they go. So they brought me in to start it up. So my job was to educate, engage, and show people how to sustain. So I then said, let me think about what I've been exposed to the past. And that's where you come in. I reached out to your people at Gimbal Academy to see how could I use your technology, your training, to start to educate the 500 plus employees that we had, particularly the salespeople. Because now I had over 50% of our population of sales. They weren't calling on customers. They had all this free time. They were looking for things to do and they were excited about the movement of what we were going as a company.

Yeah.

So I had salespeople just chomping at the bit and ready to start taking these classes. So there were some. My early adopters were really getting involved with the Gimba Academy, the sales organization. Wow.

Wow. So thank you, first of all, for your business talk about those early days though. I mean, so, okay, Genba Academy is a part of it. But like, what were you trying to accomplish? What problem were you trying to solve?

So in the beginning, I was just trying to expose and educate. That was the first problem. Because then as we start to do Kaizen events, I wanted people to not be afraid of the language and afraid of where we were trying to go. So I felt that the resistance to the change we were making would be less or lessened if I could just educate people. So the training was to make people feel comfortable about what we were doing and why we're doing it, and to give them some knowledge as we start to do Kaizen events. Once we start to come back into the office.

Do you remember what you watched? I'm curious. Just from Gilbuck at me perspective, I.

Watched a lot of videos to try to figure out what I wanted people to watch, because I was trying to curate the learning. So I remember watching, looking at the 5s suite, the intro and then the whole series of how to do a 5s, the eight ways. The introduction to the eight. Actually, you had the seven ways and you had the eight as a separate one.

Yeah, yeah.

So going through all of those standard work, leading teams. Yeah, I listened to and I watched a bunch of videos.

I heard you do a pretty good Ron Pereira too.

I'm gonna be good today, so I don't know if I'm gonna do that now, but. Yes, yes, yes. After you've watched Run and maybe five times, you get that voice down and the facial expressions as well. Sir.

So good. That's so good. All right. So where are you guys now? Like so fast forward.

Oh my goodness. So where are we now? We started with the Gemba Academy, I think in May. May of 2020. And then we did a. We did some other training using GoToMeeting and GoToTraining with breakout rooms, virtual whiteboards. Then from there, people started coming back into the office. July, okay. And of course we were all masked up. This is now three months and four months into the global pandemic. And once people start coming back in, then we start trying to do Kaizen events. And we had our first couple of Kaizen events.

On what, like what were you doing?

We had a Kaizen event in our credit department on how do we streamline that process and help get rid of disputes where you know you need to pay us, but you're not paying us because you're saying either we did not send you what you wanted or we sent the wrong quantity or the wrong product or whatever. So we had one around that dispute process. We had a Kaizen event around product registration. So you bought a new piece of H VAC equipment and you want to register that. How can we make that seamless so that you can get your warranty registration paperwork as soon as possible? We did. We also did a value stream mapping event the beginning of August that year. So we. It was kind of like most people. We had this really big room because we had to have six foot space in between everybody. And people were masked up. And then whenever you got up to go to the paper, you had your mask on, etc. So we did some value stream mapping around our commercial sales channel to try to understand how do we get that order to flow through from. I got a quote. It's an order, it's a shipment. So we did that as well. So we had events in different areas. We also started doing some 5s. We had a 5s event. So because we were a new organization, we didn't have a home, we didn't have a place. So we had this mail room slash copier room. It was actually two rooms. The front part was the mailroom. The back room was the copy room and kind of like the boneyard where people would store stuff. And we knew we wanted to have a place to call mission control. So we had a 5s Kaizen event, almost like a stream home makeover. And we took those two rooms and just made the mail room copy room one and made the back room our mission control. We had some people to come in and do the dry waste race. Wall painting.

Yeah.

And painted the wall and created a place where we can go and have our stand up meeting and see in a heartbeat what's the pulse of our transformation. So that was like from I guess July of 2020 until March of 2021 where we did the Kaizen events and did some training. Then we came back and said, okay, we're ready to ratchet it up now. April 1st of 2021, so we really start to do more Kaizen events and do what we call boot camp training. So for some of the boot camp training again, we would leverage our Gemba Academy training to help us do the pre work and some of the prerequisite for that training as well. And we were all alone doing strategy deployment. So we kept refining what we did with strategy deployment and have teams working on those breakthrough objectives and the annual improvement priorities as. As well. Well, yeah, so it's been busy. It's been busy. We've had a lot of training, a lot of Kaizen events and we just continue to move on because we're now two and a half years into our starting up a lean organization. I was the first employee, full time employee. Then I had a part time and another full time and then I got another full time and then one of the full times is no longer with the company. And then I now I have like a. A student. So it's three, four of us in the organization and we'll continue to grow because we now have a lot of pool and a lot of work that we're doing based on our strategy deployment.

What was the hardest thing or the hardest part of the journey early on? Was there any sort of change management issues or any kind of resistance to change or was everything just hunky dory, easy peasy?

This is probably going to sound very Pollyanna, but didn't have any resistance to change, I would say with air quotes. And part of it was a lot of people were at home and they wanted something to do, so the training made them excited. The newness of the training came out with purpose. Came out with a purpose. Then our CEO at the time, the first two years and three months, I reported directly to CEO. He was bought into what we were doing and why we were doing it. And he was willing to let me try different things and to understand, hey, it may not work the way we we're expecting it to do initially because of what we're going through. We're doing this in a unusual environment, but let's try it. And he was very receptive. And then once people start coming in, a lot of people wanted to get involved. I have more people who want to be on Kaizen events than I actually have Kaizen events. And some of the reason is I don't have the physical skill space to do all the events that I want to do. But we're working around that as well and putting flexibility in how we do events. All events don't have to necessarily be three consecutive days. Can we have one day this week and one day next week and one day the following week as we have people available because of schedules and or space just to get a team of people together.

Talk about one of your. It's just maybe a standard Kaiser event. What's it looking like? You come together, do some. Some training or what do you do? Like just walk us through. Maybe high level.

So. So we had about a month ago. I'm used one is probably easier for people to understand. About a month ago, we had a Kaizen event around the hiring process.

Okay.

And the HR director who was the owner of that process, she sent the agenda out that I helped her to formulate. I also gave her the prereqs of what her team should watch in Gimba Academy before coming to the Kaizen event so they can understand what the Kaizen event is and what's their role and how they should beh. Then once they come together, we'll have a little bit of training in person around standard work.

Okay.

Then once we do that, we'll go over the charter, our side poc, our CTQ trees, so that everybody's level set, what we're working on, why we're working on it, what's important to the customer and what's that process. Because it's important that we all know the sandbox that we're playing in and we use the side POC to help us to do that. And then after we've done that, everybody's level set know what we're working on, you know, you kind of think about it, yes, we're doing lean, but that's really all going back to old school Six Sigma days. My defined.

Yeah.

Now let's get into understanding what's the magnitude of the problem. Why is it taking us so long to get a person in that seat to fill that position? You know, how much time is it really taking, what's the variation in that cycle time as well? Then as we start looking at that, analyzing what are the root causes, what are the reasons why are we struggling to get people in the seat and breaking it down from there, getting the root causes, then brainstorming, what can we do about it? And then once they went through that, they start brainstorming solutions. What are those solutions? So they put together new processes. We realized we had the whole army trying to approve these requisitions, so that kind of delayed the process really getting kicked off and started. So they were able to streamline that. And then they created toolkits for the hiring manager so they can have everything they need in one place and they know what to do and how to do it. Once they put that toolkit together and the Kaizen event is now over, they had like a little informal one hour training session for hiring managers. Well, we all got on the. On gotomeeting and they went over what our role is and how to find a toolkit and what we should be doing in this process so we can, you know, make sure we execute what they've put together. So all of our Kaizen events are pretty much based on that standard. Where do the side pog, your charter, your CTQ tree as much as possible, do all that before and then send it out to your team before. When you get your team together, calibrate and make sure that everybody's on the same page. And if you need to need to make some changes, make some modifications. And then once you all on the same page, roll your sleeves up, get into the middle of the problem, start making sausage, then take that sausage, put it in a case, cook it. The Kaizen event is over.

Yep. What do you do to celebrate the end of the event? Do you do like a pizza party or something like that or.

Well, we do a lot of attaboys and clapping. So far we have not really. And this is probably, I take this Delta. This is my opportunity for improvement. We do a lot of thanking people and congratulating people. Our CEO typically comes to almost every single Kaizen event report out if his schedule is available. So he has a really high percentage of Attendance. And he does a good job of thanking people. Even when the Kaizen events are over, he'll walk the space and give people a lot of thank you. So we have not given anybody anything tangible yet, but we do a lot of thanking people and recognizing them for their efforts.

Well, I think that's more important than anything. You know, I mean, there's some serious neuroscience going on when you're acknowledging people, you know, in front of their colleagues and their leaders.

Right, exactly.

So that's fantastic. So what advice do you have for folks who are. We'll take it from two perspectives. The person who's just getting started with Lean, you know, coming to Ame first time, you know, whatever it is, and they're just. They're just stepping into it. They read a book, watch some videos, whatever it is, but they're brand new. What advice do you have for that person?

Oh, my goodness. For that person who's just learning, I would tell them first, never stop learning. Keep reading books, blogs, and find your good sensei. Find you a sensei who is not going to tell you what to do, but who is going to use Socratic questioning with you. That's going to help you to arrive at the problems and the answers on your own. I have a good sensei. I actually probably have a couple of good senseis. And one of my senseis, he did one of your podcasts many years ago, Cedric Brown.

Oh, yeah.

I've had the privilege of knowing Cedric since 1999. So he is one of the individuals.

That I saw him yesterday.

Yes, yes. He's one of the individuals that I use to bounce ideas off of Love. In addition, the people I used to work with 12 to 15 years ago, we were all lean professionals together. And we've all gone off in our different paths. Now we have a group text that we still text each other on. So it's about 12 of us, and sometimes when we have a question, we'll drop it in our group text and Cedric's on that text with us, and we will weigh in and give each other's advice as well. So I would say not only get you a good sensei, but get you a good support group, people that you can have as thought partners that will either challenge your. What you're thinking about doing or will encourage you not to give up.

Okay, okay. Well, you sort of answered this, but I want to go just maybe even a little bit deeper. So now someone's listening. They've been at it for, you know, 15 years. Former Danaher, whatever it is, you know, they. They know what's up, but, you know, there's always that. That next part of the journey. What advice do you have for that seasoned professional who's, you know, seen a lot and. But. But still humble and open to learning?

So I guess it's almost like talking about myself because I started Six Sigma training in 2000.

Yeah.

And I did my Lean training in 2003.

Yeah.

But I'm still here at AME. I still read books. It's a thing about it. There's a quote that I found by Zig Ziglar, and the quote really talks about, in essence, I can't remember the exact quote, but the quote is all about that you continue to grow. Never stop learning and continue to grow. And I use that as my guidepost on always learning and never say that you know everything. When people tell me, oh, I know you're an expert, I'm like, no, no, no, I'm not an expert. I just, you know, I'm just a seasoned learner, a seasoned student, but I'm not an expert because I have not been in every single possible scenario.

Right.

I've experienced a lot, but not every single one. So sometimes I'll have a plan on what I think I'm going to do in a Kaizen event. But once I get in there and start working with the team, that plan is going to change.

Yeah.

Based on the data, the experience, and what I might see the process to reveal, I might say I'm going down in Atlanta. They have I20 where take you straight across east, west. But I might find myself sometimes taking a bypass.285 because of the knowledge, information I've received.

Well, Mike Tyson said a good plan until somebody come and punch you in the face.

Yes. Sucker punch. Yes. Yes.

Okay. I got to adapt now.

Yes. Because sometimes, you know, you may find I have not necessarily had that here, but I've been in Kaizen events before where someone was in there because their boss told them to, they didn't want to be there. And they were the naysayer. They were the cave person, citizen against virtually everything. And. And they're. They tend to kill the momentum of the Kaizen team. And the first time I experienced it, I'm like, oh, my goodness, what am I gonna do? How am I gonna deal with this person? I can't let them deflate my entire team because I gotta make something happen. I have a lot of money invested in this event. These people in this room. I gotta have a return. So you have to learn to Be flexible and nimble and agile and think about, what am I going to do to bring that person on and get that person. Sometimes that might mean taking a break and take that person offline and say, hey, let's talk. How can I help you? You know, what are the issues and problems that you're having? So you learn about those people dynamics. You can't learn those things in a lean class. You can't learn it in a lean book. You learn that by experiencing it firsthand.

Yeah.

Just being around people.

Yeah, well, yeah, because what you don't know about that person who's behaving like a cave person that particular day, you know, their kid could be sick and, you know, or some other personal tragedy. You just don't even know. Right. What's going on with that person. And so. But. But yeah, it's been my experience and, you know, it's very common. Right. To have a cave person, you know, in an event. But I find that just by involving them and listening to them and don't. My style is not to pick on them or push them too hard in the beginning, but eventually you'll notice, oh, what do you think? You know, Mr. Mrs. Cave Person, you know, and. And they have an idea. But I remember, true story, we had a cave person many, many years ago on an event. And by the end of the. The report out, there's a grown man and he cried in the report out, he said that nobody had. It's kind of like the. The gentleman today talking about those. Those older gentlemen who would, you know, working on that part of the process. And why haven't you fixed this? Well, nobody ever asked them, you know, and that's what this gentleman told us. Because I've been working here for 30 years, and nobody, Nobody listened to me like this team listened to me this week, you know, I mean, you can change people's lives, Right. I'm convinced we'll change the world.

Right?

Yes. Yeah.

And that's the whole thing about Lean. And I think that's what makes Lean a little bit more powerful than Six Sigma, because Six Sigma had the elite, like the Navy seal. But Lean is about the entire army, not just an elite group of people. And it allows everybody in some form or fashion to get involved and to have the opportunity to put their DNA on making their process better.

Yeah. 100%. Awesome. What is the best way for folks to connect with you if they want to reach out to you?

Oh, the best way. I'm on LinkedIn.

Okay.

So you can definitely find me on.

LinkedIn spell your last name. Sabrina.

My last name is McCorvey. That's M C C O R E as in victory. Ey.

Okay. I love it.

All right.

And we're going to link it all up in the show notes. This is episode 454 gembopodcast.com look for episode 454. Sabrina, this has been so fun. Thank you, thank you. We probably need to have back you on the podcast. Maybe not. Let's not wait till next year, Amy. Maybe, you know, six months. We'll check back in and see what you got going on.

Outstanding. And thank you for everything. And thank you Gempa Academ. Always having a tool or a resource that can help us to grow our people's people knowledge.

Thank you for your business.

No problem. Thank you.

All right, thank you. 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.