The blog post

Halloween might be about ghosts, zombies, and monsters -- but those same creatures sometimes show up in our organizations all year long. They lurk in old processes, mindless routines, and fear-based management habits. Here's how to spot the spooky stuff in your systems -- and how Lean thinking helps us drive the fear out of improvement.

Halloween monsters are fun when they stay in movies. They're less fun when they show up in your workplace.

• Ghosts of outdated processes.
• Zombie routines that waste energy.
• Monsters born of fear and blame.
• Frankenstein systems cobbled together without purpose.

The blog post

Too many organizations treat Leader Standard Work (LSW) as a scheduling tool — a calendar filled with Gemba walks, meetings, and routines. But Lean leadership isn’t about how you plan your time — it’s about how you show up.

In this episode, Mark reads and reflects on his LeanBlog.org article, “Leader Standard Work Is About Behavior, Not Just Your Calendar.” He explores what it means to make leadership a daily practice of intentional behaviors — listening, asking, thanking, reflecting — instead of just checking boxes.

You’ll hear about:

• Why a color-coded schedule doesn’t make someone a Lean leader

• How mindset and presence define real Leader Standard Work

• A behavior-based checklist for leaders to use as daily reflection

• The connection between psychological safety and consistent leadership habits

Read the full post: leanblog.org/2025/10/leader-standard-work-is-about-behavior-not-just-your-calendar

Learn more about Mark’s work, books, and speaking: MarkGraban.com

#LeanLeadership #LeaderStandardWork #LeanCulture #PsychologicalSafety #ContinuousImprovement

In this episode, I revisit a classic post—Coaching vs. Berating: Lessons from Football for Better Leadership.

⁠The blog post⁠

With Brian Kelly recently fired as LSU’s head coach, it’s worth contrasting his sideline outbursts with the calmer, teaching-oriented approach of Northwestern’s Pat Fitzgerald. Years ago, Kelly’s tirades at Notre Dame raised questions about what real coaching looks like—and those questions still matter today. Whether it’s football or the workplace, leaders who coach build confidence and learning; those who berate only create fear.

The blog post

In this solo episode, I explore the contrast between two powerful management cycles — PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) and its dysfunctional cousin, PDCYA (Plan, Do, Cover Your A**).

Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s PDCA framework was meant to bring the scientific method into management — to help teams learn, experiment, and improve. But in too many organizations, fear and blame have quietly replaced learning and accountability. That’s when PDCYA takes over.

I share examples from healthcare and beyond that show how psychological safety, not heroics or perfection, determines whether PDCA thrives or dies. Leaders who react to mistakes with curiosity instead of punishment create systems that learn. Those who don’t end up with teams who stay silent and stuck.

If your organization seems to be running on PDCYA, this episode offers a way back — one safer question, one better response, and one small cycle of learning at a time.

📘 Related reading: The Mistakes That Make Us

#Lean #Leadership #PsychologicalSafety #ContinuousImprovement #Deming #PDCA #LearningCulture

The blog post

In this audio edition of the Lean Blog, Mark Graban revisits a 2014 case study co-authored with Gregory Clancy about Allina Health’s early Kaizen journey. What began as four pilot units became a model for engaging everyone in improvement—from nurses to leaders. Mark reflects on concrete examples that still resonate today: reducing wasted motion, improving safety, and building psychological safety so staff feel safe to speak up with ideas.

Ten years later, the lessons endure: small ideas create big impact, leaders must coach not control, and improvement thrives only where people feel respected and safe to experiment.

Learn how Allina’s story connects to enduring principles from Healthcare Kaizen and The Executive Guide to Healthcare Kaizen, and how psychological safety remains the foundation for continuous improvement in healthcare today.

The blog post

In this episode of Lean Blog Audio, Mark Graban reads and expands on his article, Leader Standard Work Is About Behavior, Not Just Your Calendar.

Too many organizations treat “Leader Standard Work” (LSW) as a scheduling exercise—a calendar full of gemba walks, huddles, and recurring meetings. But true Lean leadership isn’t about where you go or how often you show up—it’s about how you show up.

Mark explores the deeper intent behind LSW: to make leadership behavior intentional, consistent, and aligned with the principles of respect for people and continuous improvement. He contrasts superficial routines with authentic engagement, drawing on a real complaint from a hospital employee who saw a painful disconnect between a CEO’s Lean rhetoric and their daily behavior.

The episode also introduces Mark’s Behavior-Based Leader Standard Work Checklist—ten daily reflection questions to help leaders practice curiosity, humility, and genuine respect, from “Did I listen without interrupting?” to “Did I follow up on yesterday’s concern?”

Whether you’re a frontline supervisor or a CEO, this reflection-driven view of LSW will challenge you to think less about your calendar and more about your conduct.

Lean leadership isn’t a set of appointments—it’s a set of habits.

Listen now and consider: what does your behavior say about the kind of culture you’re building?

The blog post

In this episode of Lean Blog Audio, Mark Graban reads and reflects on his recent article, From Know-It-All to Learn-It-All: Leadership Lessons from Mistakes.

Drawing from themes in his Shingo Award–winning book The Mistakes That Make Us and interviews with leaders Phillip Cantrell and Damon Lembi on My Favorite Mistake, Mark explores the transformative shift from being a leader who must always be right to one who is willing to learn.

You’ll hear stories of humility in action—from Cantrell’s reinvention of Benchmark Realty after the housing collapse to Lembi’s recovery from near-bankruptcy during the dot-com bust. Both leaders learned that progress doesn’t come from certainty, but from curiosity, reflection, and the courage to say, “I might be wrong.”

Mark also connects these lessons to healthcare leader Dr. John Toussaint’s evolution from “all-knowing” executive to facilitator and coach—showing how psychological safety, experimentation, and evidence-based learning drive true continuous improvement.

If you’ve ever felt pressure to have all the answers, this episode is a reminder that the best leaders aren’t know-it-alls—they’re learn-it-alls.

Listen, reflect, and consider: how might humility strengthen your own leadership practice?

The blog post

In this episode, Mark Graban shares a small but revealing story from a local post office — and what it teaches us about bad metrics and broken systems. When a clerk tapped the “green smiley face” on a customer feedback device for the customer, it raised an important question: was this about genuine service, or just gaming the system?

Mark explains why the issue isn’t the clerk, but the system around him — a system that encourages scoring over substance, compliance over improvement. Drawing on Lean thinking and Deming’s philosophy, he explores how poorly designed metrics push people to protect themselves instead of serving customers.

You’ll hear why:

• Metrics without context mislead more than they inform

• People naturally adapt to meet incentives, even if it means gaming the numbers

• Most performance is a function of the system, not individual effort

If you’ve ever wondered why “customer satisfaction scores” or other simplistic measures don’t always match reality, this episode will resonate. Leaders everywhere — in healthcare, government, and business — need to ask not “why did they do that?” but “what about the system made that behavior the best option?”

Because when we fix the system, we don’t need people to game it.