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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.
Patrick Adams 0:04
In solutions. We talk a lot about standard work being the foundation of improvement, and you you can't, you can't improve in a chaotic environment, in complete chaos, right? So you have to have some level of stability in order to improve on and that comes with standard work. Would you agree?
Natalie Howden 0:23
Oh, completely. I don't know how many teams I've worked with, and everybody's doing something a different way. So how do you even know where to start? So having a standard in place is even if it's not the best way, it's the best way we know how to do today lays the foundation for everything moving forward and make sure that at least we're all doing the same thing consistently, and if we're all doing something consistently, even if we're doing it wrong, we at least know that it's all being done the same way, and then We can work to improve.
Patrick Adams 1:01
Hello and welcome to this episode of the lean solutions podcast. I am your host, Patrick Adams, and I have the opportunity today to talk with one of our newest team members, Natalie Howden. Natalie is joining me here in the Lean solutions studio, so I have the opportunity to say hello and invite you to the beautiful studio. Yeah, it's great to be here. Well, for those that are kind of new to the show or maybe haven't met you, can you just tell them maybe a little bit about your background and what brought you to where you are today at lean solutions, yeah. So I got a little bit of
Natalie Howden 1:36
a weird start into lean. I was working in over the counter pharmaceuticals, and they said, We have to send somebody to this training who wants to go. And I raised my hand, and it changed everything about my career. So I moved from being a scientist into I went through yellow belt training, then went through green belt training. Fell in love with it. They paid for me to go and get my Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. And then I decided that's what I wanted to do full time. So I went from pharmaceuticals, I started working in lithium ion, which, if you like data, it's a statistician's dream. We had data at our fingertips all day long. So I did that. Then I moved into office furniture. And love that, and that's where we actually we met, yes, so many years ago now.
Patrick Adams 2:22
Yeah, one of one of our clients, actually, Natalie, was one of the CI professionals there at the client locations, yes.
Natalie Howden 2:30
So we met, and then we started doing some work together. I was instructing some classes, and kind of always thought maybe someday, and just this past year, it worked out, so I've been able to join the team full time now this year, which has been, it's been a great year. It's flown by.
Patrick Adams 2:44
Yeah, it has flown by. And if those of you who are listening right now, if you have not connected with Natalie out on LinkedIn, she's sharing a ton of really, really good content. And actually today, you made a post today about some personal, lean application at your own house, right?
Natalie Howden 3:02
Yes, yes. I walked into my daughter's bedroom. She just turned 11, and she had organized her entire dresser. It was labeled with what the contents of the drawer were. It had the frequency that she would refill them. Some of them were very funny, of whenever I want to, or else, it was the weekly day that I did laundry, that she would refill them, and it just, it made me laugh, because I'm like, she's picking up on some of the things she's hearing mom say around
Patrick Adams 3:30
the house. That's awesome. That's obviously like, you know, as a CI professional, as a CI nerd like myself, I mean, we commit ourselves fully to not just to teaching and to coach others in process improvement tools and techniques and application, but also like in our own personal lives and everything that we do. You know, we really believe in it that much, and it's kind of it's super cool to see like your even your daughter sees the value in what you're doing, and she's watching and starting to do some of the same stuff. That's super cool,
Natalie Howden 4:05
it is. It's funny, I tend to stay out of the barn, though, because my husband's not quite bought in on things. He being organized a certain way, a little bit of
Patrick Adams 4:12
change management, yes, a lot of change. Nice. Well, Natalie, I'm super happy to have you on the show as a guest for the first time. We've spent a ton of time over the last few months working with different clients, and as I mentioned earlier, I had the opportunity to work with you at one of our client locations, and I saw the level of knowledge, the skill that you bring. And obviously that's why I wanted you to come on the team with us here at lean solutions. I'm super happy about but, and we did not steal Natalie from a client. Okay, we got to I got to be clear there. So she actually left. And then eventually things worked out to where she could come here to lean solutions. So anyways, what I wanted to say was, watching you work with. With the the team members out on the floor and just coaching them. And one of the things that became very apparent in our time together was the importance that you put on standards. And you know, at lean solutions, we talk a lot about standard work being the foundation of improvement, and you you can't, you can't improve in a chaotic environment, in complete chaos, right? So you have to have some level of stability in order to improve on and that comes with standard work. Would you agree?
Natalie Howden 5:32
Oh, completely. I don't know how many teams I've worked with, and everybody's doing something a different way. So how do you even know where to start. So having a standard in place is even if it's not the best way, it's the best way we know how to do today, lays the foundation for everything moving forward. And make sure that at least we're all doing the same thing consistently. And if we're all doing consistently, doing something consistently, even if we're doing it wrong, we at least know that it's all being done the same way, and then we can work to improve.
Patrick Adams 6:01
That's right together. It also becomes a kind of a stop gap too, for going backwards, because, you know, when in Lean environments, we want people to feel comfortable to experiment or try new things or look for better, two ways to improve, right? So a stand when standard work is in place for any process, it shouldn't be the end all you know of how you do things. We should always be challenging our team members to get better. So they should look at that standard work as a starting point. And then, okay, how can we how can we improve this process? And then as we improve, we update the standard work. We retrain the team to the new way of doing things once we've proven it out. But if we experiment, try something within, you know, a controlled experiment, and it doesn't happen to work out, we can always go back to that, that standard work that we had before, that will give us that, you know, standard result, that baseline, that that we that was necessary. So I think that it's such an important concept that I think so many organizations miss it. You know, they have this big, thick book of work instruction stuck away somewhere that nobody touches. And it's such a it's such a huge miss. I mean, what, what have you seen over the years in the value that visual standard work, or the ability to train to a standard, or the ability to have everyone following that same standard. Do you have any examples of where that has been super valuable?
Natalie Howden 7:29
Yeah, so working on a line, we had a team where, especially between the shifts, things were done drastically different, and we noticed that the quality output was decreased on one shift versus the other, and that really helped our team understand when we went back to and we said, here's the standard, here's the best way. This is just the best way that we know how to do it today, and it's giving us better quality results than we're seeing, maybe on a different shift. So can we all align to this one way? And when the team aligned on that overall, the department out output improved because we were making it right the first time and not having to rework. And then we were able to refine within the teams across both shifts, because each team kind of had a different idea. And we said, All right, well, let's test it. Test across both shifts. We'll see what works best, and we'll make a decision. So we were able to actually accelerate the learning once we both teams, are able to be like, yep, here's the way we're going to do it today, and we could work together to make the improvement so we saw their quality just increase, which helps increase the output, because now we didn't have to rework.
Patrick Adams 8:32
Yeah, that's right, yeah, such an important concept. One of the other things that I've seen, which is kind of interesting to me, is when you talked about getting everybody doing it the same way, even, even if, you know, maybe somebody thinks that their way is better than the other ways, if we can just all start doing it the same way. And I think, like, I think about an example where one person felt like they had the best way of doing things, and when we all kind of collectively decided it wasn't that person's way that almost felt like to that person. It was a step backwards, but once they saw the value of consistency across all the shifts and everybody doing it the same way, that's when things started to change, because that particular person, then could challenge the standards and say, Okay, can we at least run an experiment of this other way that I think is better? And of course, then we were able to run experiment. And I can't remember if it ended up being better or worse, but either way, it was better, great. We can update the standards. If not, we can go right back to the old way and then try something different. So super valuable. And I think again, just so many organizations, don't they hear, Oh, yeah, of course, we need to have standard work, but how are you utilizing it? But now I want to go to a another important concept here. So we're talking about standard work and the importance you. What we as leaders and organizations, we expect our teams to be following standard work most of the time. It's like at the well, in manufacturing, I know we have a lot of others that aren't just in manufacturing listening in, but in manufacturing at the floor level, really, almost 100% of work content should be standardized. Pretty close, pretty close. Yep, like normally they're, they're following some level of standards, right? And then as you work to different levels within the organization that that those standards start to reduce a bit. But as leaders, I mean, should it be zero standard work? As executive leaders, as mid level managers, as you know, supervisors, group leaders, team leaders. I mean, should it be zero standard work at our level?
Natalie Howden 10:50
What do you think? Not at all. Not at all. If a leader, if absolutely nothing of my day or week was standardized, I'm probably not going to be accomplishing the important things. So I think no matter what level of the organization you're at, even when I've worked with the executives team, executive teams, there have been a certain level of standards that we wanted the team to be following through on some frequency. I'd say the higher up in the organization, maybe less of the day or week is standardized than the front line, but there is still some standards that should be done on a regular basis, right, right?
Patrick Adams 11:23
And even, even if it's again, it might not be 100% of the work content that standardized. In fact, it really shouldn't be the higher you go in the organization, because leaders have, sometimes they have to have some open capacity or flexibility built into their schedule, knowing that there are going to be things that come in that are outside of their control. Now, obviously, if we can standardize our day, that's great, but many times that's not possible to standardize every minute of the day, and usually not recommended. But to your point, what are the important things that we do need to standardize within our schedule? And one of the things that I like to think about is airline pilots, you know, or astronauts or you can there's a lot of jobs out there. And I think about,
Patrick Adams 12:12
I'm in the process of training to be a pilot right now, so I know the importance of checklists as a pilot. And the cool thing is, is that no matter whether it's me, who's a brand new trainee, you know, as a pilot, or a 20 year, 30 year veteran that's getting into, you know, a massive jet. They're pulling out checklists, their standard work, and they're going through to make sure that they follow every single point that that is necessary in order for them to deliver the results that are important to them, the results being a safe flight, right? So if they want a safe flight, they have to have certain inputs, the result that outputs, or the results, come from certain inputs. This checklist covers those inputs that becomes their standard work. When it comes to the importance of standard work at the leadership level. I'm sure you've heard many people argue whether it's necessary or not. What are your thoughts? I mean, given the story that I just mentioned about pilots or astronauts or whatever,
Natalie Howden 13:13
not life and death and most of the organizations that we work with, but I find it very hard to imagine a level of leadership that should not have some standards, whatever type of company you're in, if it's manufacturing, if it's something related to the office, there are processes that are going to be taking place, and how, as a leader, are you making sure that those processes are operating as intended to deliver the results that you need? So even in nonprofits, there are certain processes that are in place to make sure that we're getting the outcome that we want. And as leaders, we need to be actively monitoring those on some frequency to figure out, are they working the way that's being intended and delivering the results that we're looking for?
Patrick Adams 13:54
Yeah, that's so key. I love, I love that you said that because the results are, that's the key is, what is the result that you're looking for, and then backing into it from there. So what would you say, like, let's just, let's go to the executive level. I don't know, because I'm sure there's executives that are listening, or someone that works for an executive and an Executive leader in an organization, whatever position or level or title you want to put on. That is give me an example of what would be on an executive leader's leader, standard work, right? What would that look like? What kinds of things would you see? Yep.
Natalie Howden 14:31
So one thing, and one of my favorite things, there should be some sort of Gemba walk on an Executive leader. So, like I said, no matter the type of organization going out to the place where the work is happening, in seeing what is happening, I think that helps teams understand, like, hey, these executives find what we're doing important. And the learning that an executive can have from doing that is very profound. It can also help build the culture, oh, yeah, having the executives out on the shop. Or out in the work area to really see what the day to day is like. Yeah. So for sure, gambo walks of some sort, executives should have some sort of strategic planning follow up as well. So I know a lot of the executives that we worked with, with doing Hoshin Connery, there was a monthly bowling chart review to make sure that everything was staying on track during the course of the course of the year, because we don't want to get to the end of the year and find out we missed our strategic initiatives. We also, I've also recommended having some sort of follow up, like one on ones with their teams, kind of just to help build as an Executive leader, part of the job should be developing others, so developing their skill set, so some sort of regular touch point with some of their team to have just to see what's going on, see what they can do to help grow and develop the team. So those are some of the common things that I would see at an executive level. Yeah, I
Patrick Adams 15:54
think that makes sense. The other thing that I've seen is, if you have a layered audit in place, which you should be inspecting, what you expect, right? So if, as a as a senior leader in an organization, if you're expecting certain things to be happening, then you need to involve yourself in some of those audits or inspections out there on the production floor, end or where, again, not just manufacturing, but out in the office or wherever it might be, everyone has a GEMBA. So going to the gemba, whether you're doing an audit, whether you're doing coaching, whatever it might be, that should be something that's built into your Leader Standard Work. And I would say that the ones that you mentioned just now are probably not just at the senior leader level. Those ones would probably also fit into a mid manager or director level position, something like that. Would you agree? Definitely.
Natalie Howden 16:39
Yeah, I typically see those. And sometimes you'll actually see it happens with more frequent See, then maybe an executive level, at a director level, maybe there's more frequent GEMBA walks that are happening. There's more frequent kind of strategic initiative follow ups, since they're closer to that front line of the folks that are doing the work. But it should be on all levels,
Patrick Adams 16:59
obviously, yeah, that's that's a good point where, what else would you say on a mid, mid manager level, what types of things would you see that might also, in addition to that, that you might see a little different, because obviously the frequency is a big deal, so you would see that those people doing some of those a little bit more frequent. What would be some other activities that you might see
Natalie Howden 17:20
at the executive there's, there's process metrics review happening, but I'd say much more kind of at a mid level manager that we're looking at process metrics on a more frequent basis to see what's happening, right? So we can understand and we can course correct quickly, so that we're not waiting all the time. So I definitely see some process metrics starting to get into some of like the training and education. So what training and education do your teams need? That's right, especially right. We love lean. We teach lean all the time, right? So especially around the continuous improvement program, what types of training and education is the team needing? But also what type of training and education maybe are? Do we as leaders?
Patrick Adams 18:01
Yeah, yeah. Time for your for personal development, building that into your your leader, standard work. That's a that's a great
Natalie Howden 18:07
call out, even if it's not related to lean, right? There's lots of new things industry. 4.0 that's happening. AI is obviously becoming really huge. So how are we growing our own knowledge as leaders and keeping up with what's happening in the world, or what's happening within the business that we're in. So I think it's really important, especially at that mid level manager, to really understand kind of what's happening, what are the trends within the industry, and are we staying up to date and frequent on that?
Patrick Adams 18:36
That's so good. I love that. Okay? And then lastly, let's just talk about the kind of team leader or direct supervisor, kind of level, what types of things might you see, different, probably some of the same, but more frequent any other things that you might see at that level
Natalie Howden 18:54
tend to see a lot more audits starting to happen at the frontline leaders. So we talked about kind of layered audits a little bit, and I've seen that really broke down to what safety audits are we going to look at? And yes, that's important at the mid manager level as well, and sometimes the executives right out there, but definitely at the front line leadership level, we want to see some of those safety audits are we engaging in making sure that our employees are safe? Standard Work audits, 5s going and looking at 5s so making sure that the area is maintaining the standards that we've set, and maybe, if you're not great at it right now, looking at what's the next opportunity for how we can get just a little bit better at it. So having those audits on more frequency, typically, you'll start to see more of the tier meetings and items like that. Leading tier means, or attending, starting to see those on those frontline leaders, but then also just kind of follow up directly with the team members, and having GEMBA walks at the frontline leader, I think are almost every day. And it's not management by walking around. It's a true. True GEMBA walk of going and seeking to understand,
Patrick Adams 20:03
yes, yes, absolutely. And, and that's a that's a really important point. So because I do see that a lot too, where leaders get out on the at the gemba, wherever, whatever your GEMBA might be, they get out there and then they don't know what to do. Like, what would be your suggestion for someone that's listening in right now, it's like, yeah, I'd like to get more active with gamble walks. Or, you know, I'm going to go do my first one today. What would you say they should do? Like, how do they how do they do a proper GEMBA walk? If that's part something that they want to add to their Leader Standard Work?
Natalie Howden 20:36
Well, first, I think you've decided on what the agenda is of the Gemba walk. So there's multiple types of gimbal walks that we can do. We can go and do a waste walk. We can go and do a five us walk to look at are we meeting the standards that we have in place? I I like to think the first place we started talking about standard work, and I think it's so important go and grab the standard work for an area and watch what is happening and see what is the team encountering. Are we following the standard? And if we're not, why? So I think that can be one of the quickest ways to one understand what your team is encountering on a day to day basis, but then also as a leader, how can you remove those barriers to make things go easier? So it's probably one of the simplest GEMBA walks to do, but I think it's one of the most powerful as well, right?
Patrick Adams 21:27
Yeah, absolutely. And to your earlier point, I mean, just getting out there and seeing your team and and being actively involved in listening and asking questions and just really seeking to understand there's a ton of value in just that alone, right? Huge.
Natalie Howden 21:44
And then, I mean, if you really want to build that rapport with your team, though, you have to take what you've heard and take action on something. Yes, yeah, that's a good point, like I've seen before. And leaders like, Yeah, well, we've heard that. And I'm like, Well, why didn't we do anything about it? Right? Right? If you can remove that barrier, your team's well, and then they're like, well, then they just keep bringing up more issues. And I'm like, That's awesome.
Patrick Adams 22:08
Good when you open that, that floodgate, though, you need to be ready, you know. But that's the whole point, is being able to respond properly, you know? So just be real as a leader, if you if you don't have the capacity, then you just have to be honest with them and tell them. But I mean, I used to tell, you know, younger supervisors or managers that I was coaching like always have a notebook in your hand no matter what, because you're so busy, you have so many things going on. As soon as you leave this workstation, someone else is going to throw something else at you, and you need to be ready in your mind to be genuinely listening and in that conversation. So write things down so you don't forget about them. Because I would get back to my office and then I'd just be like, Man, that's like five things that were thrown at me, and I can't remember. I only remember three. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Natalie Howden 23:00
So, yeah, that's a good point, and that's why I love Leader Standard Work. And this might be old of me, but I've always found that it's helpful to have Leader Standard Work in some sort of a physical format, whether that whether that physical format was a piece of paper or an electronic notebook or the tasks in the calendar, so that when those items are brought up, you have something right on hand that you can just jot down. What that follow up is, yes, right? So then you can make sure, even if you can't take care of it today or tomorrow, you make sure that you're following up with that person that brought it up, because, you know, it's captured and written down,
Patrick Adams 23:37
yeah, that's so key. Having having something physical is especially like you said, like a like a printed standard. So there's and there's lots of templates out there, and we have our own template, and I'm sure others have their own templates, but you can also search online Leader Standard Work, and I'm sure you can find yourself a template or create one, and then print it. And one of the things that I really liked about one organization I was with is they would actually have the supervisors would have one for every day, and they would date them, and then they would put them into a notebook, and like a three ring notebook, and they would keep them at the supervisor's desk. And then anytime there was a question about, you know, what happened three days ago? Or what was that one thing that I was supposed to do that I wrote down, that I forgot to transfer into my tasks, or whatever it might be, they could always go back and flip to the that day's Leader Standard Work and see the notes that they had taken on that right?
Natalie Howden 24:31
Or also, I find it's been really helpful too, because I liked I do an electronic notebook, sure, but it's also useful because sometimes I'm like, I'm pretty sure this has come up before, and you can kind of flip back through to figure out, like, if it did, yes, and you can start to see some patterns, and that can help, kind of lead to some of the problem solving activities. If you're starting to see the same item come up on some regularity, it might be a trigger, like, hey, I need to go and do some problem
Patrick Adams 24:58
solving on that item. Yeah. Good point, and maybe even build problem solving into your Leader Standard Work some time for problem solving each week, right? Yes, yeah. The The other thing I was going to want to mention when you said that was
Patrick Adams 25:12
the that when you're starting. So we talked about printing out a template and all these types of things, I mean, at the beginning of the day, or at the beginning of this. Do you have to have perfection? Do you have to have all the right inputs? Do you have do you have to have it all figured out to start this? Because I feel like people could get in their own way, like trying to figure out what what am I going to do today? What am I going to standardize in my work day today? And they might kind of get stuck on that. What advice do you have for that?
Natalie Howden 25:41
I always say start out small, because if you you're going for perfection right away, you're gonna get overwhelmed, and you're gonna get kind of that, like paralysis by analysis. You're not gonna know where to start. So I tell teams, what are one to two things, one to two things, that if you did them on a regular basis, it would get better. Pick one to two and start trying those, and then maybe those are going well, so pick one or two more. So I I think you should urge, like, kind of ease into it a little bit, because if you try to go from zero to 100 it's going to be completely overwhelming. You're going to feel stressed out, and you're probably not going to be getting the right behaviors, because you're going to be so stressed out or just trying to check a box, and that's not really the intent. It's really to drive the right behavior. So I'd say pick one or two. Actually, a colleague of ours, he moved into a new company, and he was working on his Leader Standard Work, and he he's like, can you share some of what you did before? And I emailed him what I did, and he's like, wow, I was way overthinking it, right? And this was somebody that had been doing continuous improvement for a while. So even also CI professionals can get in our own head,
Patrick Adams 26:51
sometimes that's so good. I appreciate that advice. So if you're listening at home right now and you're thinking, what, how am I going to start this? Just pick one or two things right at your level. What first, I guess, ask yourself, what is the result that you want to get? So what are you trying to achieve? Do you want to develop a continuous improvement culture? Do you want to are there certain metrics that you're trying to to hit, or goals? So, you know, start to think about the result that you're trying to achieve, and if, if you start there, then you can back into, what are the inputs, what are the things that are going to help to make that happen? And you have to be intentional. So to your point, having some type of a form, or a tablet or, you know, so I use my calendar, and I actually put tasks into that. And one of the things that I have to be very intentional about is I have reoccurring tasks that I do on some regular basis based on, you know, again, what the result that I'm looking for. But then I also have some drop in tasks here and there that I things that I have to do that day, or that are important that need to get done, and at the end of my day, I have to reflect, I have to pause. I have to take the time intentionally, to look back at my Leader Standard Work, and I have to look at it and say, did I get everything done that that I needed to get done today? And if the answer is no, if there's still something on that list, I have to I have to be intentional enough to either stay late that day or get it done right then or whatever. I cannot just allow that task to just keep being put off day after day after day after day. Now, obviously, if it's one that you know, maybe could get moved to the next day, and I have some open time in the morning, then maybe I can shift it into the next day, but we can't keep doing that over and over, because then it defeats the purpose of the intentionality behind the results that you're trying to achieve, right?
Natalie Howden 28:50
Yeah, and it's the whole kind of the urgent versus the important. You know, the Eisenhower matrix that we talk about, sure, a lot of times the urgent gets in the way of the important. And so I like to go back to the items on your Leader Standard Work are the important things to help you get from A to B with whatever you're trying to do. And if we let the urgent fall in every single day, you're never going to get to the important. So if you start seeing a task that you're not getting to on a regular basis. I think it's important to understand why, yes, and maybe sometimes that's not a test that you should be doing. Maybe it's something that should be delegated to somebody else, or maybe it's really not that important, right? So I think you really have to have a good understanding and that reflection time becomes really important. Because if it's important, why aren't we putting time
Patrick Adams 29:40
that's in the day to do it. That's right, yeah, it, that's it. That's a really good point. If you keep putting it off day in, day day in and day after, then is it really that important? Well, maybe it is. When you when you sit and think about the result that you're trying to achieve, but if you're not doing it, you're not going to get that result. So if you are trying. To develop a true culture of continuous improvement. And you know the importance of gamble walks on a daily basis. You know the importance of coaching on a daily basis, but you're allowing these, these, what you call them emergent, yeah, the urgent, urgent, urgent, sorry, the urgent things to kind of push those out of the way. You're not going to get your culture, your true culture of continuous improvement. In the end, if you keep allowing that to happen. So you have to, during your reflection time, you have to take the time to think about, why is that happening? Why am I allowing it to happen? Or why are the drop ins happening? Or, you know, like you said, Am I the right person to deal with that? Or is there someone else I can delegate that to or whatever it might be. I mean, that type of thinking has to be happening on a regular basis in order for your Leader Standard Work to give you the results that you're looking for,
Natalie Howden 30:49
for sure. And I think it's even more important the higher up in leadership you are, right? You're setting the tone for the rest of your team. Yes, that reports to you, and if they see that you, as a director level or an Executive leader are constantly pushing those important things right. You keep rescheduling your gamble walk out at the place that's gonna trickle down, even to your frontline leaders. So I think you have to be aware of that and be very intentional and make sure that those important things are getting done or else right. You're not walking the walk. And I think, from a cultural standpoint, that can be very dangerous and a very slippery slope to go down.
Patrick Adams 31:27
Yeah, no, that's so true. I'm glad that you said that, because I've seen it happen too many times where I'm trying to find out why the team leaders and the supervisors are their behaviors are not lining up with their Leader Standard Work. And it becomes apparent very quickly, when you look at the executive leadership or senior leaders at their organization, they have Leader Standard Work. Maybe they even have it posted publicly, and everyone can see that they're not doing it. It's not important to them. If it's not important to them, it's not going to be important to the rest
Natalie Howden 31:59
of the team. Nope. And it trickles down even further, right? If, as leaders, we're not going to follow our Leader Standard Work, yes, how can we expect our frontline employees to follow their standard work? So it's it's really a pattern. You have to show that, hey, we're all in this together. So yes, frontline employees are going to have standard work, and we expect you to follow it. As leaders, we have Leader Standard Work, and we're expected that we're following that.
Patrick Adams 32:22
Yes, absolutely well. So I want to kind of bring us to a close here, just so everyone knows. All of our listeners, we are trying to start to shorten up our episodes a little bit. So we do tend to run our episodes around 40 to 50 minutes normally, or we have in the past. Moving into this next year, we're actually looking to try to shorten them down to 30 minutes. So everyone at home, you're gonna have to hold us accountable to this. We're going to do our best as host to try to squeeze it down and stick within 30 minutes. And then that way, you know, people on their way to work or whatever can can listen to an episode, versus having to do like a part one, part two. So anyways, I want to pull us to a close here. Natalie, you are an amazing coach, an amazing consultant, an amazing trainer. If anyone that's out there is interested to talk with you about opportunities to bring you in, to have you coach, train, whatever it might be, what's the best way for them to get a
Natalie Howden 33:21
hold of you? Yeah. So you can reach out through our Lean Solutions website, fill out the form that you're interested, and we will you'll be able to get a hold of me that way, or just email me directly at Natalie at find lean solutions.com
Patrick Adams 33:33
perfect, and we'll actually put that in the show notes as well. So if you are interested to get a hold of Natalie, connect with her on LinkedIn, use your email or use the contact form on the website, and you can, you can reach out there. So lots of great training that that you have to offer over this next year. And I'm looking forward to hearing some more really great stories about implementation of Leader Standard Work within the organizations that we work with. Yeah. So Natalie, it's been great to have you on the show for your first I know episode here, and I look forward to many more over this next year, but thanks again for being on the
Natalie Howden 34:07
show. Awesome. Thanks for having me.