This week The Management Brief presents the second installment in our series on coaching across the lean community and the benefits of mutual learning — senior leaders with external and/or internal lean coaches as well as peer-to-peer relationships. These connections can deliver more value and open avenues of understanding and growth not possible when leaders try to go it alone.

Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, is joined by Desh Edirisuriya, General Manager, New Zealand Manufacturing and Business Excellence with Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, and Jim Luckman, LEI Coach and Partner in Lean Transformations Group. Fisher & Paykel is a manufacturer of respiratory care products based in Auckland, and the company is driven by an objective to improve care and outcomes for patients.

Desh was instrumental in setting up the company’s Business Excellence function. He was first exposed to lean during an extraordinary growth phase at the company, implementing tools and processes to solve the problem of scaling up. Desh has been with Fisher & Paykel for 25 years, along the way learning how to better understand his role as it has changed and where he must focus. Desh says Jim has helped him with that by “being sort of a mirror [to] get good feedback, reflect, and also help me see my role, my gaps, and then help me through developing a way to bridge those gaps.” Desh adds that he often does not know he’s being coached by Jim, but inevitably he ends up changing his behavior as a result of their conversations.

Jim spent 30 years with General Motors, including time at Delphi as a Chief Engineer, director of a site with 600 R&D people, and learning and practicing how to apply lean in R&D. He got involved in coaching after Delphi, and he sees coaching as a means to help individuals solve fundamental problems inside of their businesses from top to bottom, with “the right people solving the right problem at the right time.” He describes his experience with Desh as a “co-learning experience, it’s not one way. I don’t feel like a coach as much as a co-learner.”

Topics that Mark addresses with Desh and Jim include:

• Experiments run by Desh at Fisher & Paykel with leaders, direct reports, and shopfloor teams to build social connections and create respectful dialogue among respective groups, and the challenges Desh has encountered with those experiments.
• Asking good questions that get people to think about what’s actually going on instead of focusing on their own thinking and not listening to the person you want to do the thinking.
• Learnings achieved by Desh and Jim in their work together and their future plans.

Interested in bringing a coach to your organization? Learn more at lean.org/CLP

This week The Management Brief kicks off an extended series on the coaching and co-learning that is occurring throughout the lean community. We’ll be exploring the benefits of mutual learning in all its forms — senior leaders with their lean coaches, be they external or internal to the organization, as well peer-to-peer relationships — that deliver more value and open avenues of understanding and growth not possible when going it alone.

Most if not all leaders are looking for guidance tailored to their positions, and that’s especially true of lean leaders seeking to transform themselves and their organizations. Effective coaching and co-learning relationships offer a “follow me and we’ll figure this out together” association that enables both partners to navigate a lean journey, establish a path for lean transformation, and achieve sustainable results. We will examine what makes lean coaching and co-learning relationships effective, and, in the process, provide insights into how to establish your own co-learning opportunities.

Our initial installment in this series brings together Marco Lopez, CEO Dreamplace Hotels, & Resorts in the Canary Islands, which embarked on a lean “never-ending” journey 15 years ago, and Oriol Cuatrecasas, coach with the Instituto Lean Management in Spain and a lean practitioner for decades. Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer, Strategy, interviews the duo who discuss co-learning and the Dreamplace journey, including:

• In 2009, Marco says he and others in the company asked, “What can we do to be more competitive,” and realized they had to do something new and that lean was an option. He is grateful they came to the decision to pursue lean, now seeing it as “the only way,” despite not recognizing early on that the journey would not be easy or fast and takes continuous attention and effort to sustain.

• Marco recalls directors working on the first A3s with Oriol, with them being instructed to go out to the gemba and solve real problems. He realized this approach was going to take time, and he and directors would need to be patient and support people every step of the way. Marco recognized that lean was not a “plug-in solution.”

• Oriol recalls what attracted him to working with Dreamplace. Around 2010, he was speaking at a public conference and, at the end of the event, advised attendees to take a problem, take a team, learn, apply lean, and share successes (as Jim Womack often advised). Five years later he received an email from an operations manager at Dreamplace who described doing precisely what Oriol had suggested, wanted to share with him what a team was working on, and asked, “When are you going to come?” Oriol went to Dreamplace and met the manager and Marco. A Dreamplace team had begun breaking down silos (lodging department, kitchen, housekeeping, etc.) that prevented flow in serving hotel guests better, and also was working to have a majority of business decisions made by frontline employees. “Immediately I fell in love with these people, and said ‘When do we start?’”

• Marco and Oriol discuss how lean was meant for the hospitality industry, an environment that is purely value-added and in which every customer requires a customized experience. This environment requires a reliance on cross-functional teams to seamlessly support the customer’s journey throughout all aspects of their stay.

• Coaching has helped Marco and managers within Dreamplace learn how to set goals, manage and empower people, and be honest and open with teams. For example, Marco learned to show up at the gemba and support staff without dominating the situation. Dreamplace started its lean journey internally, working on its own for five years. In hindsight, Marco advises others to ask for professional help from the beginning: “You will save at least two or three years.” Oriol says it helps to be coaching “the right executive,” someone who can make real decisions to change things, own the transformation, and accept that there will be moments of frustration that must be worked through to avoid failure.

Interested in bringing coaching and co-learning to your organization? Schedule a call today.

In this special edition of the WLEI Podcast, hosts Lex Schroeder and LEI President Josh Howell sit down with former product development executive Jim Morgan to explore the lasting impact of The Toyota Product Development System: Integrating People, Process, and Technology, the groundbreaking book he co-authored with Jeff Liker. Two decades after its release, the insights that revealed Toyota’s unique approach to product development remain a cornerstone for any organization striving to become a great product company.

Together, they examine:

• The story behind the research that inspired The Toyota Product Development System, what drove Jim to uncover Toyota’s secrets of innovation, and how to apply them today
• The enduring principles engineering leaders still rely on to build teams that consistently design products customers love (and buy)
• How Jim translated lean product and process development (LPPD) lessons into practical action across his own career as a product development and operations executive, adapting them to diverse challenges and contexts.
• Common hurdles companies face when putting core LPPD ideas into practice—and where to begin the transformation journey.
• Why so many organizations hesitate to take those hard, necessary steps to develop their people and achieve genuine enterprise transformation.

Whether you’re new to lean thinking or deep into your own transformation, this conversation offers both history and insight into how timeless principles continue to shape the future of product development and provide the key to a lean enterprise.

Learn more about lean product and process development at lean.org/LPPD