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This podcast offers business solutions to help listeners develop and implement action plans for lean process improvement and implement continuous improvement projects, cost reductions, product quality enhancements, and process effectiveness improvement. Listeners come from many industries in both manufacturing and office applications.
Shayne Daughenbaugh 00:05
What else can you add to that? You know, other places where most organizations might misunderstand. You know how to do culture change.
Dan 00:12
You know, the leadership of the company needs to create almost a culture of professional four year olds, you know, and curious questioning four year olds. You have to have a culture of people that are are willing to celebrate a success for a little bit and then look at each other say, Okay, what else
Catherine McDonald 00:34
we need a culture where all of our teams are able to spot opportunities for improvement, and we need all of our teams to be able to have that those skills, to come up with better ways, because that's lean, right? That's continuous improvement, where we have all of our teams doing this.
Shayne Daughenbaugh 00:59
Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the lean solutions podcast. My name is Shane, one of your co hosts, and we have the lovely Katherine joining me today. Very excited to have you here.
Catherine McDonald 01:09
Hello, Katherine. Hi, Shane. How are you today?
Shayne Daughenbaugh 01:14
I'm doing I'm doing well. I am. I have a quick question for you as we get started, just kind of beyond that. How are you doing today? But what is a fun experience you've had recently?
Catherine McDonald 01:25
A fun experience? Oh, do you know what I have been loving playing my GAA. So for anybody who's not in Ireland who doesn't understand what that is, it's it's the Gaelic Athletic Association. So it's a bit like for anybody who's never heard of it, it's a bit like soccer, except we pick up the ball and we run and we solo it on our foot, so we hit, hit the ball off the foot and catch it back in our hands, right? So I play GAA with an over 40s team, and it's a lot of fun. It's non competitive, but we play other teams, and we have kind of like a bit of a social club within the sports club. So I've been absolutely loving getting out about in the kind of the summer months. It's just lovely. And they're a great group. So that's what I do for fun every Tuesday night.
Shayne Daughenbaugh 02:10
I love that. I did not know this. Ladies and gentlemen, this is NEWS, breaking news for our podcast audience. No, I did not know that. I'm going to go a little bit you went personal, I'm gonna go a little bit professional. Something that that has been a fun experience for me recently is working with a brand new team on a improvement project, and what I've loved to do is gathering. Right now I'm in the process of gathering voice of the customer, you know, ask, talking to the people, interviewing them, about what their experience with the process is, and it's been great fun in hearing them kind of describe the process, but also by the end, after they have felt like they've been listened to and affirmed in what they're doing, they're getting super excited about the process as well, about the project, about finding the improvement. So that's always fun to see people kind of catch that excitement when it comes to being able to improve the things, the great work they're already doing. But can we make it better? I think so. So that's that's been super fun.
Catherine McDonald 03:08
Aren't you lucky, Shane, to actually, you know, see your work as fun. How many people get to say that, that they see their work as fun? That's just such a great thing for you. I'm delighted for you. Well done on the new job as well. Well done. Well. Thank you.
Shayne Daughenbaugh 03:22
Thank you very much. Very excited about it today. It kind of kind of like transitioning into the topic for today is leading the change innovation culture and the Lean leaders mindset. And when I was looking at that topic here, preparing for this, I really appreciated that, because what that told me is the concept of change equals innovation plus culture, and without those two things, you're going to have a really hard time. We talk a lot about managing change, and, you know, bringing that up and how we can, how we can make change happen, but until we understand that, change includes not just innovation, but it also includes culture, because change is all about people and the respect for people, then I think we may miss really the the impact and the bigger effect that change can have. So tell us a little bit about the guest we have a very excited about this. And I will, I will start off with saying he is undoubtedly the smartest man in this room. Tell us
Catherine McDonald 04:24
about it, I would be delighted to so our guest today is Daniel Walker. So Dr Walker has been developing his skills in problem solving, innovation and culture change for several decades. He is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt. He holds a BS in plastics Engineering Technology, an MS in management strategy and leadership, and a PhD in business management. His doctoral research focused on organizational change and innovation, which is the topic we're going to be talking about today. And he has a real passion. For facilitating the learning process focusing on leadership development and cultural innovation. So welcome to the show. Dan.
Dan 05:08
Thank you very pleased to be here. Thank you for the invitation. It's always, it's always fun to talk to like minded people and this and and also have some conversation, you know, with your audience about, you know, some of the areas. And if, from my perspective, if your audience picks up one or two key thoughts or mind changing ideas, I'll consider, I'll consider the time successful.
Catherine McDonald 05:34
No, it's great to have you here, and I'm so sure that they will. So I just have a question, Danielle, just to start us off, your PhD, your research, it sounds so, so interesting. I would have had a background in all that area as well, organizational behavior, organizational change. And I'm dying to know what is your research on, and what did it show?
Dan 05:59
Well, what I found in prepping for dissertation research. You know that one of the main steps is you got to go into the current literature. I'm going to get a little academic and boring here, but you go into the current research space and spend a lot of time looking for what are called gaps in the research, right? You know? So in what, after looking through all the research on change, innovation, more in the area of psychological empowerment, the area I got into, I discovered a very significant gap in the research on middle management right, lot of research on executives, a lot of research on frontline workers, ton of stuff, but very little research in this space, in middle management, well, in the world of Lean Lean transformation, one of the main groups we're working with is that middle management team, because they're the ones that are going to actually guide the execution of these projects. So what my research really demonstrated is there are good and bad ways to empower, bring into the bring into a process, and bring into a conversation, and empower middle managers in a way that allow you know, gives them confidence to make changes of their own, change the organization, and then take the risk of innovation right because, because within change and innovation, there's always some risk that we're going to get it wrong. And what I found is that when executives have a culture of that creates a safe space for that middle management team to experiment with and and do it, you know, trial and do the things that are needed to be done to make innovations and change and but also in a safe enough space where they know they're not going to effectively lose their job. If something doesn't go right, they've become a lot more bold and actually making, you know, the driving the change, you know, relative to the Lean environment. You know, I appreciate you sharing your information. You know, the in the intro and all that about you know, voice of the customer is a great topic. That's where I cut my teeth in Six Sigma. You know, voice the customer. But what you have to understand a good friend of mine, Dean that I've known for a lot of years, really shared with me in a manufacturing environment. He shared with me very simple observations. Brilliant guy, simple observation. He says, you know, when you think about it, a manufacturing operation, if it's not running on the weekend, how much money is it making? Zero, $0 right, right? He said, what's the only variable that has changed between the weekday and the weekend? And that's people, the people. Yeah, the people. And that was a revelation he helped me discover many years ago where I thought, Okay, this is something I that's kind of, in a roundabout way, kind of led me through my dissertation research. And that is like, if you don't have good leadership for people, it doesn't matter what kind of lean transformation you're trying to do, it's probably going to fail. We've, we've all seen it, you know, you'll get an initial, the initial reaction to kaizen event or something. You know, it's where people can say, oh, yeah, I see the problem. Yep, I can see the weakness. I see the inefficiency. Somebody needs to fix that right as soon, as soon as you hear somebody, you know, it's done, yeah, so what, what we're, you know. So where that the research really showed me is involving people, you know, a lot of Lean experts know, you involve the practitioners in the middle management, in the you. Development of the understanding of what's going on. You bring them into that project early enough that they essentially buy into it, right? So, you know, they develop this, they understand the problem, they develop solution, they own it, and then again, setting up the leadership organization so that when it comes time to actually take the risk of making the changes that are necessary. They're willing to do that, take that risk and go through, you know, the agile methodology, if they need to continually just keep refining and refining so a long wind, a long winded answer to a very short question.
Shayne Daughenbaugh 10:39
No, I, I appreciate that in in in one of the things that I really appreciated having you on Dan and having the scholarship that you have done, how recent would you say, because you talked about your research and doing PhD, is looking at the research and trying to find gaps, and then pursuing those gaps to get a more complete picture right, how the things you're talking about, they make sense to me, they make sense to Catherine, like, that's that's how I was trained as well, where in, in our adoption of lean and and kind of like bringing that up to the forefront, where Did those that the things you just mentioned with thinking of the people, where did that start coming in? How, how new or old is that in the world of lean?
Dan 11:27
I don't know how new or old that is. I will tell you this. When I and I was trained in the domain methodology, many years ago, that was 2000 I was certified in 2005 so I think my training was probably in 2003 I know in that environment, it was with a company I worked for the first of five weeks of training. The very first week was dedicated completely to leadership,
Shayne Daughenbaugh 11:58
interesting, so not tools, not how you can make things better, but who you are.
Dan 12:03
What that organization understood was we as Six Sigma people have zero power, right? We can't hire fire. We have zero direct power. All we have is the ability to influence people's behaviors. And the other thing that Six Sigma people do, in some regards, it's kind of like being a consultant. I heard this about consultants years ago. You know, consultants are actually paid to tell the companies that hire them that their baby is ugly. I mean, that's and as Six Sigma people, as lean people, I mean, that's pretty much we have to help help the people we're working with understand that what they're doing is not as efficient as it could be. It has defects, but we can't directly change it for a number of reasons. Number one, we don't have positional authority typically. Number two, we can't be there all the time, right, right? And, quite frankly, the teams we work with outnumber us. There's there's more of them than us, so we can't eat. You know, there's really no way for us to effectively make the changes. So What? What? What the leadership training I received, which kind of got me really going on this whole path. It really made sure that we understood that if we don't develop the leadership skills to truly influence the people that we're working with, we're ultimately going to just generate a lot of 80 page, 80 slide, PowerPoint slides that never get looked at after we deliver the report. You know, right, right? So that I will say, and then in the round the before the 1980s going back to the academic thing, prior to the 1980s transactional leadership was a very common way of doing things. And that goes back into the 1800s transactional leadership. Obviously, you do work, I pay you. You don't do work, I fire you. You know, everything is the idea in the 80s and 90s started to move towards what's called transformational leadership. You know, we're empowering leadership is a derivation of that, but transforming, transformational leadership really comes from the perspective I as the leader need to first focus on correcting and adjusting whatever's preventing me from leading, and then that gives me the chance to inspire others to go on this journey, right? So that that, you know, maybe my training might have just kind of fallen into that, you know, you know, pattern. In hindsight, it was a lot of it was transformational.
Catherine McDonald 14:42
I think it's great. It sounds great. I mean, I think I've said before, well, definitely somewhere else. I'm not sure if I've said it on the podcast, but there's a lot of courses out there that that you go in to learn lean or agile, and you come out the other end, and you could have spent 369, months a year learning about the lean to. What lean, lean is, but never actually have looked at your own leadership or looked at anything to do with yourself. It's all about what Lean is, but it's removed from yourself as a leader, which I mean, maybe some of the assignments touch on it, but definitely it's not prioritized enough. And I'm hoping that's changing, but I really like your story there. I think it's the right way. It's most definitely the right I always say the belts are backwards. You have to get to the black belt before you start doing leadership. And we work up through the belts on, you know, white belt, yellow belt, green belt, and we barely touch on leadership. They're backwards.
Dan 15:36
Honestly, when I, when I, I was about a it was about a year after I got my register, my certification as a black belt, that I finally kind of clicked exactly what it was that Lean and Six Sigma and all this is because a lot of people look at it as a whole bunch of tools. You just do the tools and things may have miraculously change what I what I found, and I've shared it with a lot of black Six Sigma people in it. Nobody has argued me out of it, yet. Maybe you two will. Six Sigma is more of a philosophical approach to things, rather than a bunch of tools, right? It's a philosophical approach to things backed up by all the tools necessary to execute the philosophical approach. The philosophical approach, as I see it is, if the customer is not writing checks for it, don't do it
Shayne Daughenbaugh 16:27
simple.
Dan 16:29
I like simple. From a lean perspective, if we are doing things the customer is not paying for, we need to find out how to stop doing that. Okay, so I'm going to tie it into your voc. Do if we're doing more than the customer expects, they're going to take it, but they're not compensating us for it. So over over producing, over supplying their needs is almost as bad as under supplying. So where the voice the customer? I'm glad you brought that up in the beginning, because that's a topic I love. What the voice the customer does is it allows us an opportunity to better understand what the customer need is, and then we developed a solution that meets that need. Number one, they have to buy it because it solves their problem. And number two, we don't deliver more or less than they need. When the reason we over deliver, in a lot of cases is we don't have good voice to the customer. You don't have a good understanding what we're solving. I can bring, I can bring the same philosophical approach into the plant, in the manufacturing plant, from a lean perspective, right? What does this what does this process really need? Right? What are the absolute 100% you know, in the more better we understand the needs of the process, or the voice of the process, BLP, you know, the voice of the process, the better we can tailor the what we how we handle that process, to meet just the needs of the process, and then we can eliminate a lot of the waste in excess production and all that.
Catherine McDonald 18:07
Yeah, that's I think that matches, I don't know Shane about you, but the matches what I understand about lean as well, in terms of the importance of the voice of the customer in in everything, and it has to come into every single conversation when it comes to value adding and waste and all of that. So, very, very relevant. And can we go back just to the whole idea of innovation and culture? Because I know they're your speciality areas. I'm actually some I really want to get more into this topic on innovation and culture and the Lean leaders mindset. We're already talking a little bit about Lean here, and we're diving into that, but just let's go backwards a bit. I want to understand the whole area of innovation, because when in Lean, I don't know if Six Sigma is similar. I wouldn't do a lot of Six Sigma, but I would use DMAIC. I know that's more of a Six Sigma tool, but we often talk about problems and problem solving more than we do innovation. And I know with problem solving, obviously it's about coming up with, you know, solutions in an innovative way. But do you think there's a difference between innovation and problem solving? And is that important?
Dan 19:16
I The only the link that I could draw between them, because they are unique. You know, they are unique in certain respects. Problem solving requires a deep understanding of the root of the problem, right root cause. And once a root cause is understood, the problem is typical. You know, that defines the problem, then the solution of the problem quite often is pretty obvious. Sometimes it's not right. So in the way I could tie, I think I could tie innovation and problem solving together, is sometimes the solution is going to require some level of innovation to actually respond to it. And again, that's where. Goes back to really, I'm going to keep going back to that, because it's passion. That's where the leadership skills are going to really come in on the Lean practitioners. Because if innovation is required, there's a whole nother set of processes you'd have to follow in order to create that innovation. Okay, right? And, and in part of that, it's helping people not forget but put aside some of the conventional ways they've been doing things. Again, that's very scary, right? Innovation means, number one, I have to acknowledge the way I'm doing it isn't optimum. And then also, again, as we was talking before, we have to take the risk of innovating something new in order to solve the problem, you know, so that that I could draw that connection between problem solving and innovation.
Catherine McDonald 20:57
That's really great, because I think we're linked. What we're doing here again is we're going further into our topic, and we're not just, we're not just looking at innovation, remember, we're looking at innovation and culture and the Lean leaders mindset. So I'm still going to keep leadership on the outskirts here for a minute. Yeah, I think that's going to form so much of our discussion in this, in this session, just on innovation and culture. I want to I want to make sure I understand it and the listeners understand it. So what we need to be a lean, agile organization. We need, let's say a culture that supports that, that supports the, let's say pausing to understand an issue, and the ability within our people to see problems, but not just that, to actually come up with, understand the problem, come up with solutions to that problem. That's the innovation piece. So we need almost whole teams, and we need a culture where all of our teams are able to spot opportunities for improvement, bearing in mind the voice of the customer, what the customer wants. And we need all of our teams to be able to have that, those skills, to come up with better ways, because that's lean, right? That's continuous improvement, where we have all of our teams doing this. So is this where am I missing anything? Is this where innovation and culture, and obviously the leader's role in all of this? But is that what we're looking for when we talk about the culture that supports Lean and Agile and Six Sigma and all of these things, yeah,
Dan 22:26
in a sense, you almost need, you know, the leadership of the company needs to create almost a culture of professional four year olds. You know, curious questioning four year olds, and excuse me, to a certain respect, a whole bunch of people that are never truly happy with the way things are. You have to have a culture of people that are are willing to celebrate a success for a little bit and then look at each other without leadership prompting right to look at each other and say, Okay, what else? What's next, right? And that also takes a tremendous amount of humility on the part of the team to acknowledge, no matter how good we did, it's still not optimized, right? You know that that's it's could be better. It could be better now on at a certain point, you know, the point of diminishing returns does come into the conversation. So that, you know, I would prefer to have an organization where the leader would actually come back to the team at some point and say, move on to something else, because any new innovation or optimization of this is likely going to cost more than the actual cost of this wasteful process, right? You know. So I'd almost rather have a leadership culture that had to throttle back enthusiasm for change and redirect it. You can't stop it, but, you know, redirect it. And again, that's where that leadership, of the culture of the leadership is. The leaders are the ones that are going to kind of keep a really high level view of what's happening in the organization, because the practitioners are in their own little area of specialty, and they're only going to see that pretty much so then the leaders can be able to pull that team back at some point and say, good enough for now. Here's another hotspot. Go there.
Shayne Daughenbaugh 24:25
So So I love how you brought up. Hey, this is a place that that just be aware this. This could be a pitfall, or some someplace to be aware. What else can can you add to that? You know, other places where most organizations might misunderstand. You know how to do culture change, or how to manage that, instead of just going full throttle with one thing and then, like you said, point of of diminishing returns. But there are there other pitfalls or misunderstandings when it comes to culture change, if you can tolerate a. Little bit of an extended illustration.
Dan 24:57
This is one I've used in several different settings. This will be, I think, only the second time I've used it publicly, in a larger setting. And the illustration, and I like to make illustrations in something that doesn't appear to be related to it, just a way of illustrating, okay, so in the world of rockets, the traditional rocket we see is a chemical rocket. It loaded up with fuel, they light the fuse, and it burns, typically, nine minutes or so, and it's out of fuel. And that rocket is going to just coast, typically, until it, you know, for where you know, forever, once it gets out in space, what that means is they need to accelerate that vehicle from zero to whatever speed it needs to get to in nine minutes or less in order to get it wherever they want to take it, right? A lot of GS, a lot of G's, right, very noticeable. You know, a lot of your people on the rocket are going to notice it. There's a there's another propulsion technology was actually invented in the 50s and 60s, but it's starting to gain some popularity, called the ion drive. And what the ion drive does? You still have to get it into space with a chemical rocket, but once an ion drive is in orbit in space, it uses, typically xenon gas as a fuel and an electric exciter motor that drives those Xenon atoms out the back of the rocket at very high speeds, very low pressure, very Low force, but over a very long period of time, Newton, Newton, Newton's laws of conservation of energy, you know, of motion in every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Which means, if you're accelerating Xenon atoms very light, very low pressure, at 100,000 miles an hour out one end of a vehicle, if you do that long enough, at some point that can, can be going 100,000 miles in the in that direction. The key and the key on that one, I'll tie it together here in a second. The key on that is there. The amount of force that is felt on the rocket is in the matter of grams, typically, like paper clip, right? If, some if, okay, so if somebody's on that rocket, and they would not even notice the acceleration until they were going really fast and they had a frame of reference by the time they noticed they were going 100,000 miles per hour. Stepping and turning around and coming back would be painful, but it takes a very long time on the I could be for months it would take to reach that the approach I used in the last company I worked for, because it needed some culture change, was very similar to that. I knew that if I walked into a situation, and this is for your leaning practitioners, it walked into a situation like a chemical rocket, and I hit the culture really hard, really fast. We got to change. We got to change. I knew I was going to get a lot of resistance to that, because people would feel the change. But I knew that if I apply gentle, quiet, constant, consistent pressure over a very long period of time, the culture change was going to happen before they noticed it, or it was too late when they noticed it. Case in point, one of the first employees I worked with there, after about five years of using this technique, after about five years, he finally caught up with me one day and said, Something's different, and I don't know what,
Catherine McDonald 28:38
Dan, can you give us an example of something you did to change your culture using that approach that might help.
Dan 28:46
Yeah, thank you. That's helpful. So one of the things we knew when I walked into the company of the small, 35 or so employee company, it was growing. The owners knew they were going to grow out of their capability to run it as owners. So we had to convert it to professionally managed organization. So one of the first things we did, we had to basically document the business processes at a large at a high level, right? So we started just documenting, you know, and we and we utilize the people that were doing the project, you know, doing the work. You know, we talked to them and have them involved in developing the process documents, you know, with an understanding that this document is never going to be done, right? We're just going to, at some point, you got to publish it, but we'll change it. So we started with, you know, really basic was ended up being what we call the five phase process, whereas, you know, from the time the customer contacts to ship the last part and everything in between on a macro scale, and then we started developing sub processes that, you know, help support that. So had I just gone in and written down the process and presented it to them, that's the chemical rocket, right? It would have been quick. I could have done it in a matter of a couple of weeks, and I had so much resistance, it never would have happened. It took us several years to really get that know, those base process documents really well defined and in place. It took us several years to get that in place. It took us almost eight or nine years to get all the business processes documented in place. But because we use that method where the the practitioners, the users of the process, were defining it, I was just documenting it, right? I was just writing, you know, writing the words. It gave them a chance to absorb the change that was naturally going to come through, that at a at a rate that they were able to accept it without significant resistance.
Catherine McDonald 30:47
I think, sure the rocket example is great there, because in my mind, and I actually saw a rocket go up once in in Miami, it was very interesting. It goes really, really slow to begin with, doesn't it? I mean, it's as in, not really slow, but it goes a lot slower when it's lifting up off the ground than when it does when it's out in space. And I think your points here in terms of bringing people in and especially not seeking perfection, seeking progress, seek let's see what we can get done. Let's not push people over the top. Let's challenge them to see what they can get done. You know, give them the feedback, keep encouraging them. And I think once you once people see the outputs over the first few weeks and months, no matter how small they build on that, and that's the job of the lean practitioners to help other people explain it.
Dan 31:36
In the beginning, I had to really, I and a couple of us had to really, essentially, drive the process to start towards the end of that development, more and more frequently the users of those processes would approach me and say, I need to improve this process. I need some help documenting right? So that's when you know, the culture shift has changed from We don't need no stupid processes to the processes are valuable. You know, when they start, when they started booking time with me to actually help document the changes they wanted to make. Okay? Now we have a major shift in culture with, again, with with minimal pushback, minimal resistance, even throughout all that time, and there was resistance to beginning. Don't be wrong. You're always going to get right. And that's where, you know, a lean practitioner needs to understand people are not going to want to just change what they've been doing for 10 years, right? And that's, you know, to your point, Catherine, you got it exactly right, bringing the people into the process from the beginning and helping them discover inefficiencies and things that aren't working well, if it's all their idea, that's brilliant, right? The minute they say, Oh, I see the problem. Okay, what? Oh, there's the solution. My job as Elite is a Six Sigma guy is a lean person to say, great idea,
Shayne Daughenbaugh 33:12
right, right? So I'm curious, let's, let's continue with this. This example with with a company that that you're working with. And the question I have is, in regards to, like, leadership development and continuous improvement, or, you know, innovation, can you have one without the other? I'm with, with your example, you mentioned the the culture change. That was with the, you know, the middle layer, the people that are actually doing the work. What kind of shifts needed to happen, or did happen with the leadership were did they come along with that culture change, we took an interesting path once the company got to a certain size.
Dan 33:49
Again, a very brief story. The executive teams had read a couple of books and had conversations about a couple of leadership books and some interesting things. Leaders the executive group weren't super interested in continuing that process because I was fascinated with it. So I worked for the CEO at the time, and I said, Is there any you have any any reason I shouldn't take this same basic process out to more people in the company. And about six or seven years ago, I started recruiting, inviting managers, line workers, other other exec you know, different groups you know, and started doing leadership development based on they call they affectionate. Called it the book club. Call it whatever they want. But base, base, at one point, I had 35 or 40 employees out of 120 I think it was involved in the leadership development program. Right? What I had learned over the years? Is this, if people, if enough people at all different levels in the organization and throughout the organization, start to think like leaders, then they're going to start being more open to change and helping to drive change and to influence change in the organization. The innovation, the continuous improvement and the innovation happened a lot easier the more people were learning the same basic principles about leadership and the personal change. And you know, that goes with it. It became a lot easier to work with them, in part because we now had a common language, yeah, and a common mindset. Leaders shouldn't. Back to my one of my other comments, leaders should never really be happy with the way an operation is functioning. You know, they should never. They should be satisfied and you know, and you know, enjoy the successes again, but they should always be looking toward the next improvement, the next change, the next thing, right? And if it cannot be just the upper leaders that have that mindset again, they're going to push against that resistance too much. So again, we put that process in place, and it was going very well, where just had all these different no nice side effect. They were always cross functional people that didn't work directly together often. And they were built. They were building relationships that benefited outside of the meetings. So no, I can't separate the two, the leadership of the organization is not, I'll put it this way, the leaders in the organization are not always defined by the organizational chart.
Shayne Daughenbaugh 36:51
Yeah.
Catherine McDonald 36:52
And also, so I think what we need here also is a whole culture of leadership development, because what I see sometimes is some really good organizations who are really investing in leader development, who are picking key people and they're running them off to develop them and get them coached and, you know, bring them up. It's not enough, especially for a lead organization where we want leaders at every single level, including you mentioned earlier, frontline leaders down, we got to send every single leader to be developed, not just the few key people. And also it's about, I know we haven't really touched on it much, but the ability to coach and facilitate like their key Lean leadership behaviors. And if we don't have leaders who can't do those things, then I don't think our Lean efforts are going to go very far. So this whole approach to leadership development, and this whole idea of distributed leadership, where it's not just one or two key senior individuals who have leadership abilities, but the ability for everybody to be able to lead is just so, so important. So Dan, tell us, how do we do this? How do we get to this?
Dan 37:58
How do we get there?
Shayne Daughenbaugh 38:01
Oh, fire up the five steps that, yeah, simple, five steps gonna be in your next book.
Dan 38:09
First you buy yourself an ion rocket, drive, move. You start the way it happened for me at my last company is it started with who was in front of me, right? I just, actually, I just responded to a posting on LinkedIn. Leaders influence the people that are in front of them, right? But they influence them in a way that creates additional leaders, right? And there's in it, you know, there's an exponential growth pattern that happens when you start developing leaders. That was a major function. I'm old enough, and I'm firm up along my career. I need to start. I need to really have a heavy focus on developing that next generation of leaders, because I'm not going to be doing it forever. So as a leader, my job was to inspire people to not just learn leadership, but teach leadership and coach and mentor other leaders. And we had some successes with that as well. You know where? So where do you start? You start where you're at. Now I will tell you this, depending on how deep leadership issues go in the organization, the executive team or the current leadership might have to put themselves through a bit of a boot camp. I could not have mentored leaders in the organization had I not gone through the process, the transformational process that was required to give me credibility as a mentor, a leadership mentor. So you got to start at in the it's an internal job for the leadership of an organization. If they're already there, that's great. If I was consulting, I'd say, Why are you hiding it? You. Why are you not sharing this with your team? Right? Let's get that process started. And in the program that we had, people had to kind of go through it wasn't a formal qualification process, but they kind of had to go through me. They had to go through me to qualify to be in the program. I didn't take just everybody. You're looking for certain traits and characteristics, you know, are they are are they already self starting? Are they already pursuing other things that are outside their job sphere, all that? But yeah, the leaders need to set the example, and if they're not setting the example, you got to start there. I wish it was a five. I wish there was a five step process.
Shayne Daughenbaugh 40:39
But because I'm only at two. I'm expecting three more.
Dan 40:43
Well when you, when you come up with them, email me, then also I'll give you credit in the book. And
Shayne Daughenbaugh 40:48
if you could just, yeah, just stamp, stamp your, your all your initials on that jammy jam your points are very, very valid.
Catherine McDonald 40:54
I think Dan, because if you everybody starts to hear that from where they're at, yes, but if the senior, most senior people in the organization are starting from when they're where they're at, and they're getting the support and the coaching to develop themselves to be able to do all the things we talked about, like create psychological safety and develop humility, take ego out of it, do all the things that we know matters for Lean leadership. If they're doing that, and they're learning then through their own development, how to coach other people, it's going to have a ripple effect. But I think that point of starting at the top is key here for leadership department. Yeah, absolutely. So I suppose, in terms of some of those points that we made, we didn't we so we've dig. We've dug into innovation and why it's important. We have dug into culture and the kind of culture that's needed to support, let's say, whether it's lean or agile or whatever quality methodology you use, we know that the culture obviously can make or break our efforts, and we've talked a little bit then about Lean leadership and what that looks like, and why it's so important to develop our leaders to be able to lead on these things and shape it right. So in terms of just the final piece of that, the mindset piece, what are we looking to develop when it comes to leaders in terms of mindset and maybe throw in behaviors there as well. What is it? Dan, do you think is really, really important in the people that we put in place to lead all of these efforts,
Dan 42:21
I would say behaviors are a direct result of mindset. And I don't know any other way to look at it. Mindset wise, the when we're looking for leaders, it's a great way. That's a great question. When we're looking for leaders, that mindset really needs to be somebody that has some demonstrated the willingness to develop others without getting credit for it, people you know, people that people that are already making some kind of changes without executive prompting. You know, people that are already taking taking personal accountability and action in their sphere of influence, one of the best ways to discover a leader, I'm going to attribute it wrong. If I try one of my favorite quotes, or one of my favorite definitions, a leader is, you know, the the leader is the person who's in front, right? But there's also, there's also follow up quote from another person I love, which is any person that thinks they're a leader, but has nobody following them, is merely out for a walk. So what, what you can be looking for are people who seem to have followers already. You know, even if they don't have any formal training, the I mentioned it before, you know, the curious four year old mindset usually is pretty easy to identify, it's that person is the is the person in the meeting. The leader I'm looking for as well, is the person who's in the meeting with the higher ups who's going to ask the awkward question that nobody's supposed to ask. Right? You know, this is the person that says, Excuse me, I've got a question. I've done that, and I've done that a lot of times in my career, and then somebody will try to shush me. We don't know that's, that's or this is one of my favorites. I use this all the time. Somebody says, Well, everybody knows. Insert topic, right? And I'll look at them dead in the eye. I've done this quite a few times. I look them dead in the eye. Well, I don't know, so why don't you tell me? And then truly, everybody will know, because I'm the last of 8 billion people on the planet. Apparently they don't know this little snotty but, but that it's that person that has that inquisitive mind and that level of curiosity that they're willing to act on. And are those are some of the characteristics I'm looking for in a in a leader, a change leader.
Catherine McDonald 45:07
Think curiosity, and I know we've actually spoken about it a few times, and I definitely it's up there in my top, if not number one, trait of a great leader. Because I think what curiosity does is it reduces the judgment that people feel on them. Um, in every situation, when you go in with when a leader goes in with curiosity and asks a question instead of making a statement, you know, a statement that builds trust and psychological safety, and that's what everything else is built on, isn't it, when it comes to lean and development and improvement and culture and everything else. So spot on. Dan, I think Shane, I thought
Dan 45:45
I was gonna, I was gonna add one thing and it but I'm also going to watch to see, are they asking questions out of genuine curiosity, or are they asking questions to manipulate responses? Sure. So if they're genuinely curious, that means they're open to being persuaded that their position is wrong. Yeah, that's a key differentiator for me. Sorry,
Shayne Daughenbaugh 46:10
no, no, no, that's that. That is spot on as well. You know, I really appreciate that, because I think the art of asking questions is kind of elusive. And I don't know I have, I don't have as many, you know, initials after my name, I again, don't have all the plaques and everything. Haven't, haven't gone through all of that. But I, I haven't seen, and at least it doesn't register in my brain as a memory of seeing leadership training, having as a P, as a component of it, the art of asking questions, how to ask questions, you know, and how to that that that idea of curiosity, leading with with that curiosity, not just to either prove your point or to manipulate the system, but to ask the question, to truly Understand, to truly expand the table and say, Hey, what about Tell me more. Help me understand and just expand whatever those possibilities are. You know, just those doors open. I again, this is just me. You know, I don't have all of the exposure to all the great leadership training out there.
Dan 47:20
So I that's a great thing. That's a great thing. I'm I've been working with a company, consulting company, to help develop a leadership training program for their company, for their clients. I'm going to bring that question to the guy I'm working with and say, do we add some component, you know? How do we create this inquisitive mindset, right?
Catherine McDonald 47:39
I'll tell you what I had to do, because when I first started out as a leading consultant, I very quickly figured out that I had the ability to understand the process, but I didn't have the ability to coach a person, or coach the leaders who actually, when I left that day, were going to be in charge of everything. So I had to go back and I had to do a coaching course. I'm so glad I did. It was the best course I ever did, but the course I did was leadership and executive coaching, and I have to say that I probably draw on that in every single interaction as a lean consultant. And I would, I wouldn't even hesitate to say that every single leader should go off and not be a coach, but get coaching skills.
Dan 48:19
I 100% you know, and that brings us, it kind of brings us back to the beginning of our conversation. Where this all started is we always have to remember that as experts in our area, you know, in our area of specialty, lean and otherwise, we need to understand that in order to get anything done, we're going to be working with people, and the better we are at knowing how to work with people and influence their actions. Questions is a great way get them thinking, get them questioning things. The better we are at that, the better we can affect the change on the organization that we need.
Shayne Daughenbaugh 48:59
Yeah, yeah. So many great things. And I feel like we, we just started this conversation, Dan, but we learned about rockets. We so many things that, that, that we've applied, but we are, we are running, you know, really tight on time. Here is there any last things that you'd want to share, in regards to innovation, in regards to culture, in regards to leadership mindset. You know, with our listening audience,
Dan 49:26
stay curious, stay open, and never assume you have all the answers. Ask all the questions. Your job as a Lean Expert really is to ask the right questions in the right order, so that you get the people you're working with thinking about things in a way that's different than the way they have for the last 10 years. Be curious.
Shayne Daughenbaugh 49:50
Yeah, and I love I love that, because it's not I'm going to tell you how to improve. It's let me start asking questions, so you can see this process. Process, or this problem or this whatever, differently, yeah, and that's where the magic happens, because then the the wisdom, collective wisdom, of the room of the people that are doing, you know, doing the work, then that, just like engages, for them to be able to go, Oh, hey, what if being, being curious, is less threatening and it's and it also acknowledges the people's expertise. Sure, yeah, it's complimentary about you. Anything that you would add before we before we wrap up?
Catherine McDonald 50:31
I just think that has been a fantastic conversation. I just love this topic. Um, it's just so, so important. We do talk about people a lot and leadership of people when it comes to lean, and there's lots of different elements to lean, but this is most definitely lean won't be of any effect in our organizations if we don't work on this area. So it's highly important. And Dan, you've just given us some great insights there into innovation and culture and leadership. So thank you for that. It's been fantastic.
Dan 51:00
My pleasure. Thanks. Thank you for having me
Shayne Daughenbaugh 51:02
Yeah, in the show notes, we will have your your LinkedIn profile connection and anything that you've given us, so that if people want to connect with you, they'll be able to so thank you so much, Dan, for beat, for being a part of this and given us, maybe we'll be able to come back and talk again about the next iteration of rockets or Thank you, Catherine, it is always a pleasure getting to getting to hang out with you. Thanks so much as well. And to our listening audience, whether you're watching or you're listening, it's been fun. We hope you've also enjoyed it. Have a great day.