GA 529 | Living Out Your Beliefs with Kurt Sears

Even within the scientific thinking model and really value stream mapping and all of those things. If you start with the idea that we're doing this for someone and really our ultimate goal is to make their work less frustrating, to make them feel more valued in their work, then I think you're going to get better results than just starting with a model or starting with a system and hoping people will buy in.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Kurt Sears to the show. Now, Kurt actually has a really interesting background. He has a background in psychology, but then he's got a strong continuous improvement background. He's been in various manufacturing positions, and today he works for the Dollar Shave Club, which is a pretty cool place to work. And so today we actually spend quite a bit of time talking about beliefs, belief systems and how those could impact a continuous improvement culture. Spend quite a bit of time talking about change management and what are some of the things that we, as continuous improvement practitioners can be doing to sort of get the best out of people. And that seems to be right up Kurt's alley. So it's a really fun conversation. I think you're going to get a lot out of it. Show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com look for episode 529 and also be sure to connect with. With Kurt over on LinkedIn. He's pretty active over there, so just scroll down on your app, whatever you're listening to, and you'll see the link to go connect with Kurt. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the. Kurt, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm doing well. Thanks for having me, Ron.

Yeah, man, I'm excited. So where are you calling in from today?

So I'm calling in from Columbus, Ohio.

Nice, nice. Well, I'm a big Ohio State guy, so what about you?

Well, I'm. I'm actually a transplant, so I moved out here probably a little over 10 years ago, and I'm more of a Syracuse fan myself.

Okay, all right. All right. Well, it must be difficult for you because the Columbus fans can be a little intense.

Yeah, I learned that early on. I've watched grown men cry when they lose, so it's definitely a different experience.

I'm not that bad. I grew up in Ohio, so that's why I am my legion.

Sarah.

But I used to be really awful. Like, nervous before games, couldn't eat. Now I'm. I'm much, much better now. But I. I still like them, but, you know, not as obsessed as I used to be, so. Good stuff. All right. Well, Kurt, as you know, we like to get things going out of the gate with our guest sharing a quote. So what do you have?

Yeah, so my quote is one that I've had on my whiteboard in my office for a couple of years. It's by an economist named E.F. schumacher. And the quote goes, any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

Wow, what's that mean to you?

So I spent a good portion of my career, I would say, on the quality side of things. And one of the things that always frustrated me a lot was when we would have a problem that was very customer facing and the solution was just add complexity to the process. And it always would frustrate me that I would know that there needs to be more done, but the easy thing is just to add a band aid. And so as I've gotten more into continuous improvement, my. My belief is the fewest interventions possible. The simplest change to accomplish the results is always the best. And so that's really been kind of my focus and my belief and really why I love that quote. It keeps me focused on that where I'm not trying to just throw band aids on things, but I'm actually trying to solve the real problems.

Got it. Love it, Love it. All right, well, hey, I'm excited for today's topic. Sort of a mind over subject kind of maybe beliefs like so more on the behavioral side of things. Right. So I thought maybe we could start with the whole idea of change management because, you know, when we're invoking changes, any kind of change, not just, you know, continuous improvement, any kind of change is difficult. And sometimes, you know, the places that we're doing it may not have everything together and so it makes it even more difficult. So how do you go about that and to invoke change in a maybe a chaotic environment?

Yeah, so I've had the opportunity to be a part of several startups, specifically within the 3 PL world distribution. And those are always chaotic. And more recently, I would say with my time with dollar Shave Club, we came into a situation where we were trying to mature. So going from more of a startup type environment to a more mature environment. And so I've really got to see operations that are just dysfunctional across the board. And so really what I've noticed within that is if you try to go in and implement a system, if you try to go in and figure out, okay, I just need to copy and paste this solution onto this problem, it usually doesn't work. And so what I've come to realize is you almost have to do triage, and a lot of that involves more wisdom than analytics, because a lot of times when you start out, you don't have a lot of clear data. And so as you approach the change, you have to really listen to what people are saying and then really identify what's the most valuable thing to focus on right now, and then say no to everything else because you really have to take a systemic approach to addressing the problems.

Got it. So I totally messed up this podcast. I normally ask people to tell us a little bit about their background, and I totally skipped that part. I was so excited about asking that first question. So let's take one step back, Kurt, and you mentioned dollar Shave Club, but tell us a little bit about your background and your continuous improvement journey and then maybe what you're up to at Dol Shave Club.

Yeah, so I would say I have kind of the Robert Frost approach to getting into change management, which, you know, the poem says way leads onto way. So I started out really in operations, and I. My background is really. I've been in manufacturing and logistics environments, starting out in my career, and I started out in operations and then moved into more quality management type roles and was working my way up, very ambitious. Got to a corporate quality role and just realized I hated compliance. And it was one of the things that I wasn't really sure what my next move should be. And as a result of that, I got involved with kind of a chaotic startup, which was one of the. One of the sites we were working on, and I was asked to go in for a month and just help out, document processes, try to figure things out, just help wherever I could. And in the midst of that, I was like, man, I love this. This is great. I. I don't know what it is about this, but it's. There's something I really like within this. And I had a good friend who was an engineer at the time named Mike, and I asked him, I said, hey, is there a job where you could do this all the time? He's like, oh, yeah, it's called being a process improvement manager. And so I googled it. I started looking at, you know, what I needed to do to get into that field. I made a lateral change in my career into a more process improvement, focus, quality role, and then ultimately wound up in focused improvement with dollar Shave Club for the past few years. And it's. Honestly, it's been the best job I. I've Ever had, mainly just because I found what I'm passionate about. And it's really just solving problems, making things better, and really helping people reach their full potential in their careers.

Nice, nice. I am curious dollar Shave Club. Like, what kind of continuous improvement, you know, environment do you guys have?

So the funny thing was I asked that question when I interviewed. I said, you know, where, where are you guys at on your continuous improvement journey? And the response I got back was non existent or barely off the ground. And so over the past couple years, we've really been working on, I would say, stabilizing processes and getting more, I would say, scientific approaches to things within how we collect data, how we address problems within the site, and just overall how we've built out more of a culture of change than where we used to be, which was just, hey, we got everything out, so everything should be good, you know, that's. It's fine because all the orders shipped as opposed to what are we really capable of?

Yeah, yeah. So I know in sort of talking before we started the podcast that you've got a sort of a unique background, background in psychology and, and so maybe you look at things from a people side more than most continuous improvement practitioners. Is that a fair statement?

Yeah, I would definitely say that's fair. I've really appreciated like Mike Ruthers work with Toyota Kata and also the Shingle Shingo model. Those things especially for me, that are very people focused and addressing real issues with people. I think those have been things that have really shaped a lot of how I view continuous improvement. But I've always had a really a philosophy around continuous improvement, which is just two statements. It's our people matter and their work is important, but it's in that order. And so you take care of the people because they matter and their work is also important. It's not just meaningless. It's not just something that, you know, we can get a robot to do. Their work has value. And so you lean into both of those things within continuous improvement to make change last.

What about. So when we think about people, then everybody comes in with a bias. They come in with, you know, different beliefs, that sort of thing. Like how do, how does that play into continuous improvement in, in, in. In a culture in particular?

Well, and that's the interesting part, that's the part that I think I spend a lot of time thinking about, is every context is unique. And I think in any company you go to and every company I've been to, you always have what I call the company historians. They're the people that within a process or within some sort of part of the work, they tell you the story. And, you know, we tried this four years ago, we did this thing, we've done that. And a lot of times it's just telling you how change hasn't worked and so how what you're doing isn't going to work. And so wherever you go, you have to deal with the beliefs that people have specifically around change. And you have to address it from a standpoint of, you know what, I'm just going to start with small things to show you that change is possible. And then as we stack that on and as you trust me more with that ability to make change work, where it's not just I'm changing things and everyone's losing their job, it's I'm changing things and things are getting better for you, that's when you start to see real improvement in a site. From a culture perspective.

Yeah, it's interesting just from like a tactical perspective. Like you mentioned Mike Rother and like, you know, the Toyota Kata, but even before that, you know, learning to see he. He brought or really introduced value stream mapping to the world. And one of the first things that we do in a process is we map the current state.

Right.

Like what's actually going on right now. What's interesting about what you just said is maybe what we should be doing is like, what's the current state or the current condition in Kata terms of this individual that I'm trying to work with? Like, where are they? Right. And maybe that's something that we're not all really good at. I think I could improve a lot in that.

Is that.

Is that sort of what you're saying?

Yeah, I would say that's a fair assessment. I think one of the things I liked about Mike's work is the idea of a target condition. And I really believe that your first target condition should be the values of the organization, because values are not things that are actually tangible within a site at all times. And so what you really have to start with, and especially in a, in a Western context where people are very individualistic, you have to realize that you need a shared set of values that people commit to up front as just really the first target condition. Because if you don't have that, if you don't have something that people are bought in together, you're going to have a really hard time building a team. And, and that's something that I think is interesting about Toyota. And really, if you look at what Toyota says is their mission, it's producing happiness for all. And you would think for a car company it would be something about cars, but it's not. And even their first statement underneath that, and this is on their website, we make the happiness of others our first priority. And so even within the scientific thinking model and really value stream mapping and all of those things, if you start with the idea that we're doing this for someone and really our ultimate goal is to make their work less frustrating, to make them feel more valued in their work, then I think you're going to get better results than just starting with a model or starting with a system and hoping people will buy in.

Yeah, it's interesting. I would like to dig in, get your thoughts on, on the, the happiness topic, you know, as Toyota, you know, Lincoln mentioned, thinks that's very important, which obviously it's good to be happy. What do you think? Like, my friend Richard Sheridan wrote a book many years ago called Joy Inc. And he sort of contrasts joy and happiness and different things like that. Like from your like psychology background and whatnot, what do you of. Of happiness? And is it different than joy? And like, is it a choice? Is it something that's thrust upon another person? What do you think?

I think happiness is driven a lot by what we value and what we believe. I, I think happiness is a really subjective word, so it varies from person to person. The thing that I really got interested in with Toyota in particular as I went through the Toyota Kata, is at the end of the book there's this statement about how Toyota is trying to roll it out in other places and how it can have varying effects or varying results. And so they try to get people directly from Toyota to go in and help. And one of the things that it made me think is, is there something that the people in Japan believe that we don't necessarily understand here in the west because our belief structures are different. And one of the things that I thought was really interesting is the founder of Toyota, Sakichi Toyota, he had five founding principles and one of the things he said within those principles, and again this is on their website, is always have respect for spiritual matters and remember to be grateful at all times. And I think happiness is really a lot more about contentment. It's a lot more about being grateful. And I think a lot of times we get more into the mindset of if I just do the right thing as far as put in the right system, if I, if I do it the right way, then everything's going to be perfect and everyone's going to be happy. But if that was the truth, I think, you know, somebody would be a billionaire because they wrote a parenting manual that, you know, here's the system, here's all the things that work. But I think every parent knows that every kid is different, every kid requires something different. And even my two kids, I mean, I can't approach them the same way. And so it's, it's something that I think around this idea of happiness. We have to start understanding how do we actually become grateful for the things that we have. And I think in, in really looking into the Japanese history really and their understanding of how life works, they were influenced a lot by Buddhism, Shinto, Confucianism, Daoism, and all these things are about harmony. It's about order. It's about making sure you have duty and responsibility to your family and to your society and even to your companies that you're working for. And within all of that, that's where you derive your happiness from. And so I think it's really interesting when, when Mike talks about talking to engineers or people at Honda who are Japanese and they just kind of, you know, tilt their head a little and they have kind of a confused look at the questions we ask because we're very goal oriented here. And within Buddhism itself, there's this idea of the perfection of wisdom. And it talks about the world is change and the world is unsatisfactory. Meaning even if you're happy right now, it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be happy tomorrow or the next day. Life is constant change. And if you embrace that idea, then what ends up happening is you flow with the change. And that's why things change all the time. At Toyota and in, in the United States, I think we think happiness tends to be a fixed point that we can potentially reach. And so when we get to that happy spot, we try to hold on really tight to it and then it just slips out of our fingers. And so we then end up going, well, what, what's the new thing? What's the new system? What do I need to try next to get to that next thing? Whereas I think really the Japanese have a great view of it from those religious traditions that are thousands of years old, that it's really more about embracing life as it comes and going with the flow of things and finding happiness in being able to maybe solve the little problem that's right in front of you, rather than trying to reach a per. A state of perfection within any area of your life.

Man, I was so interesting this morning I was listening to this reflection. It more from a Christian perspective. And. And the. It was. Father Mike Schmidt is a Catholic priest, and he was talking about joy, and that's why I was mentioning joy. This has been on my mind, this. And sort of like talked about the opposite of it is sadness, right? Like in a way, like happiness sadness. And he actually proposed an interesting idea that in a way, sometimes sadness, when we're sort of entering into that, it's.

It's.

There's almost a selfishness to it, right? Like, kind of like not necessarily a victim mentality, but, you know, in a way, you have to. You have to choose. Even the Stoics talked about that, right? Like, we have a choice. When you, when you arrive at a stimulus, a good thing or a bad thing, it's up to you to determine how you're going to react to that stimulus. Right? And so much of our attitudes and our, Our happiness or our joy or our sadness really is up to us, right, as individuals and how we're going to perceive that.

That.

That stimulus. What do you think about that? Have you looked at the Stoics at all?

Oh, yeah, actually reading. I was reading the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius at the beginning of this year, and I think his philosophy and his approach is really interesting because he's talking to himself. And I think that's something that we all have. We all have that internal dialogue about what's working, what's not working. And even within the Christian tradition, the proverb is it's better to go into the house of mourning than the house of mirth. Like, there's this idea where sadness informs us of something deeper. Sadness informs us of there's something missing. And we can either take that as a cue, we can either take that as something that we respond to and address, or we can just try to pretend that everything's good, that we're just happy all the time. Or, you know, there's. And really that's not beneficial because we're missing a part of life. And I know a lot of people who are engineers. I, you know, I roomed with all engineers in college. They tend to think about stuff like this is. Is it was, you know, the soft stuff. This is. Oh, you know, this is all well and good. People have feelings. It's great. But at the end of the day, I just got to get the work done. And. And what you miss within that is the reality that your emotions actually inform your work. And one of the best things that I've found within work as far as a leading indicator about what needs to change or what needs to be addressed is listening to people's frustration. Because when people are frustrated, they'll say a lot of really interesting stuff. They'll say, I really hate this thing. Or they'll say, isn't there a better way to do this? Or they'll just, you know, really vent to you about something within a process which is really just tedious and annoying. And if you have the awareness, if you actually listen to people when they're frustrated, one, you can bring in some positivity to it and actually, you know, maybe stem off a little bit of, let's say, disunity or unhappiness within your team. But the other thing you can do is it gives you a great direction of, if I make a little change to this, I can make somebody's work less frustrating. And isn't that the point?

Yeah.

And so it's really one of the best indicators that I've seen in order to know where to direct my focus within change efforts. Because it really makes the most benefit to the team now, and then ultimately they'll buy in later if we need to do something more complex.

Another. My buddy, Paul Akers, he's.

He's.

He loves to ask people, you know, what's bugging you? Fix what bugs you. Right. And maybe that's another way of looking at it. It's pretty straightforward, like, are there things that are. Are bugging you or bothering you, annoying you, frustrating you? Let's fix them and then they won't bug you anymore. And that will be a good thing, Right. That won't necessarily make you happy, but it's that one thing there won't bug you anymore. So if you do that.

I never tell anybody that change is easy. Like, I never tell people that I'm going to make your job easier, because I think that's false. I always say I'm going to make it less frustrating because maybe what I do is I actually make it a little bit more difficult. But at the end of the day, I'm not there to make your job easy. I'm just there to make it more rewarding.

Okay, all right, well, what about leadership? What do you think the role of leadership is when we're building a culture of continuous improvement?

So I think, you know, everywhere you look as far as talking about change management, the one thing they always say is leadership is important within, I think, the Toyota way and things like that. The one thing that I've heard a lot has been, you need top Leadership buy in. You need top leadership buy in. That's the most important thing. And I think it is important. I think you have to have people on the top side saying, yes, change is important. But from my perspective, I think having real support within your middle management team as far as real leadership within middle management actually will make more impact long term than even the top side buy in. And so one of the things that I've really been pushing for within my current role has been leading leadership development sessions with the team. Because what it does is it creates a shared sense of values within the team itself. So it's really a shared sense of beliefs and it gives them something they can commit around. So what I did is I took our company core values and we made what I called values and action statements. And it was 10 statements about what we would do to align with the values of our company. And then we did a good exercise. Kind of back to the idea of mourning, where you look at that list and you can easily point out, hey, there's areas where I'm not so good, there's things that I don't do so well and being open and honest about that with the team in those moments. And you have to start as the leader yourself. If you're a change management practitioner and you look like you have everything together, people aren't going to believe you. You have to be vulnerable for your team. You have to be willing to admit that, hey, I don't have everything figured out and I need your guys help to do this in order for things to move forward. And so one of the realities that I've come to is you have to kind of be the intersection between HR and operations and quality within continuous improvement. You have to bring all those pieces together and you have to really shepherd people through the change in all of those dimensions. And so if you can effectively get on board with your HR team around leadership development and then you're one of the primary owners and champions of that development, your team's also going to buy in. And so if you have a strong leadership team, especially in the middle management area, you know, and I take it all the way down, down to the floor leads. I think floor leads tend to be overlooked for a lot of leadership development. You usually focus more on the supervisors or salaried people. But if you can put the same level of development into those leads, ultimately the day to day routines and processes that we talk about, we need to build within Toyota Kata, where it's a daily practice. Your frontline leads are going to be the Most likely people to. To be in the midst of that on a daily basis. And so if you invest in them from a leadership perspective, they're ultimately going to help drive the change that really lasts.

Yeah, it's interesting. I was almost envisioning, like the continuous improvement team member is like, almost like a bridge, you know, like you mentioned, between HR and, and the various functions. So maybe I haven't really thought of us like that, but that's a pretty cool analogy. Like be a bridge bringing everybody together and sort of, or almost the, you know, the hub, you know, of the wheel kind of thing.

Right.

Like pulling everything together. Okay, so I know you guys are also doing a lot of projects, and I'm wondering if you could maybe share some tips or some practical advice for how we as continuous improvement people can, you know, help foster a strong, you know, project success, you know, situation. Like, what can we be doing to be more successful at getting projects finished?

Yeah. So one of the things I would say I've learned over the past several years is there's always points in projects where things tend to stall. And I think it's really easy to have a mindset of, well, you know, that's that person's job or they need to do their thing. And so we, we can push or follow up or do the things that, you know, try to move those things along. But within an operations environment, what I've seen in particular is there tend to be things that get deprioritized because it's not as important. And one of the things in particular, from my perspective that we've dealt with is maybe you have some old tape on the floor and it just needs to get scraped up because you need to reorganize and relay out an area. And maintenance has 27 different other priorities. You know, you got PMs on machine, something breaks and it's just. It's going a lot slower than it should. I think as a change practitioner, you have to be willing to enter into the work, especially if it's something you have the capability to do and, and go out and just get your hands dirty. There's times where I'll just go out on the floor and scrape tape for, you know, half an hour, hour, just to move things along. And what I found in doing that is usually other people will join in. And that's. It's been really funny to watch because we've had points where I do that and they go, why is. Why is he out there scraping tape off the floor? And it's because I Believe that this project and the thing that we're doing is important. And I want to do whatever I can to help. And I'm not afraid to just do the little things to make sure that it's going to be successful. And what I've noticed in doing that is now people will come to me and it won't be their job, but they'll say, oh yeah, I scraped some tape and now this area is set up and it's great. And, and it's really interesting to see that just that real tangible leadership, if you're willing to enter into it, really just spreads. That's, it's contagious.

Man, that's so cool. I've been to Japan before and we visited one company, I can't remember the name of the company, but at this place everyone, including the president of the company, and it was a decent sized company, came to work 30 minutes early. Now this was totally optional, you didn't have to. But they did. They came 30 minutes early and they all just worked on 5s. And there was this, there's this famous picture that we took from the strip and it was the president of the company. He was on his hands and knees and he was literally working on, I don't know if he remember if he was scraping tape or I think he was cleaning on his hands and knees. You know, this is the president of the company. And I was like, goodness gracious, you know, like what a message that's sending that the top leader of the company is on his hands and knees, you know, cleaning the floor. So yeah, there's something powerful, especially if we think about servant leadership. And it's a big buzzword, a lot of books written, but like really how often are we doing that? So, yeah, it's a very powerful statement.

And I've heard people say before and even kind of against that, they say, well, we don't pay you to do that type of work. And that's the thing is the way I look at it is that's the wrong attitude because at the end of the day, really my goal is to get us from point A to point B. And if I get us from point A to point B effectively, then that's what matters. That's really what I'm being paid for. So whether that means I'm scraping tape or I'm sitting for two hours creating a really long term vision and plan for a project, both are valuable.

Yeah, yeah, fair enough. And it's a fair criticism, I guess, you know, if you're a billion dollar company and the CEO is out, you know, not doing the talking to Wall street, the different things that they need to do, then, yeah, that's not good. But maybe the CEO turns up and, you know, says hello to the training class to, like, and motivate them. Like, just act like you care maybe is a better way of saying it. Right. And. And truly do care with your actions, whether that's cleaning tape or showing up and saying, hey, thank you guys are doing. I'm behind you believe in this. Because I've had that as well. I had. When I worked at Nokia, Y was the CEO of the time, and he flew in from Finland for our. It was our master black belt training many years ago. And he came in and. And opened it up, and I'm like, this dude was just on CNN yesterday, you know, and he's here at our master black belt class saying, hey, this is important work. Thank you for doing it. And, man, let me tell you, that set the tone for the rest of that training class that the CEO came in and. And spoke to us.

Yeah. And I think what people discount a lot with situations like that is your behavior demonstrates your belief. You can say you believe something, but if there is no action, that shows that it's not really a belief that you have.

Right.

And so those things within continuous improvement, you can say that, oh, I believe in Toyota Kata. I believe in these things. But if you're not actually practicing them and living them right. And then admitting when you screw them up, I think that's probably even just as important. Like, yeah, if you're not doing that, people won't actually believe you. And so I think the way that you get other people to believe what you believe in those settings and in those situations is you have to live it out.

Yeah.

And if you live it out, people will. They'll either laugh at you or they'll join in. Like, those are really your two options.

Mm, yeah, for sure, for sure. Good stuff. Well, hey, Kurt, this has been a fun conversation. Do you have any sort of final words of wisdom or some parting advice that you. That you'd like to leave with the. With the listeners?

Yeah, I would just say keep it simple. You know, there's a lot of tools, there's a lot of models. There's a lot of things that it's easy to get overwhelmed with. I would say just do what works for you. Keep experimenting and keep being curious. Because if you do that and if you live that out, then that's what's ultimately going to help you make substantial change in the long run.

Well said. Well said. Hey, folks, wanted to connect with you.

Kurt, what's the, what's the best way LinkedIn? It's about the only social media that I'm on and I love it. I, you know, I'm willing to talk to anybody. And even if people just want to talk about frustrations or, you know, have things that they're going through, my psych degree and that background, you know, I'm very good at listening. So feel free to reach out and connect.

Wonderful. Yeah. And we'll link to, we'll link it up in the show notes below. So everybody go reach out to Kurt and connect with him. All right. Well, hey, thanks for coming on. This has been a lot of fun, Kurt.

Thanks, Rob.

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