Lean management is known to be a very positive factor in the work of many organizations. And yet, many leaders seem largely unaware of its positive implications and don’t understand why they need it in their organizations in the first place. And while it’s true that the exact benefits of lean management can be a bit difficult to point out at a glance, it’s not actually that complicated once you dig in a little.

• Improved Efficiency

One of the most noticeable effects you’re going to see over any period of time is an increase in the overall efficiency of the organization. This can be reflected in various points of its work, depending on how you’re measuring success and progress in the first place. But any way you cut it, efficiency is going to be on an upward trend soon after integrating lean management into your company.

This is easy to measure with various tools, and doing so is actually crucial for the long-term success of your organization. In-depth analytics and evaluation of the company’s work are going to prove critical for its performance in the future, and you’ll want to get these points sorted out as quickly as possible if you haven’t already.

• Better Quality Control

Quality control is directly tied to productivity in most circumstances, but it’s not very easy to improve one without affecting the other. When working under lean management, you’ll quickly realize that quality control will become one of the top priorities of the organization as a whole, and something everyone will be striving for on different levels.

And when you’ve improved the quality control within the company, you’ll inevitably get to a stage where you produce less waste. But more on that below.

• A More Personal Approach

Lean management is frequently associated with a more personal approach to professional development and growth, and there’s a good reason for that it just works. A good lean manager will know when it’s time to get down on the level of the common employee so they can get a better overview of their current concerns with the organization.

This is something that requires some level of humility though, and it’s not something that every leader is capable of right off the bat.

• Reduced Waste

Waste is a big problem for many organizations. But what’s more problematic for some of them is that they may not even realize that they have any issues in this regard in the first place. This is especially common in industries where waste is treated as a part of the standard way things work.

This kind of mindset can not only be very harmful, but it can be difficult to defeat if it’s already deeply entrenched in the organization. Waste reduction can be approached in many different ways, depending on the specific work of the company, but it’s something that has to be taken very seriously by people on all levels.

• Better Morale

It’s no secret that lean organizations tend to enjoy higher levels of employee satisfaction. Do you know why though? It’s not actually that hard to point out some potential reasons for this phenomenon, looking at the typical lean company out there. Promoting a better interaction between employees and their managers can obviously improve the way both see each other, and can lead to better trust and more openness.

That, in turn, will inevitably lead to better productivity across the board, while also improving employee morale on an individual level, as well as across entire teams.

• Strong Future Prospects

Lean is one of the hottest topics right now. And that doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Quite on the contrary, as more and more people keep discovering the benefits of lean management, we’re likely going to see even more organizations jumping on board of this trend and adopting these principles in their own work.

And that’s a great thing for everyone. Especially companies that make it a point to adopt lean methodologies in their work early on. Those who pay attention to these trends right now will be in a much better position in the near future, and when the whole market revolves around lean methodologies, these companies will already be in leading positions in their own respective fields.

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The Power of Leading by Example

Every good leader should understand the power of setting a good example and following it yourself. Unfortunately, it’s not rare to see leaders going more along the lines of the motto do as I say, not as I do. It’s true just take one look around most industries and you’ll quickly find numerous such people mismanaging their organizations to no end.

If you want to lead your company the right way, you have to always strive to set the best possible example, and then make this a point to your employees. Sometimes this will require significant effort on your part. But if you value the idea of growing your company and seeing it flourish into something amazing, this is one of the most critical points that you’ll have to work on.

Words Are Cheap

Anyone can make big promises in fact, many leaders have a nasty habit of doing that too often. But few understand the implications of not living up to those promises and know how to prioritize their work effectively in order to make good on them. If you start saying too much without actually backing it up, people are going to notice this trend sooner or later.

And when they do, their trust in you is going to start going down rapidly. This is something you can’t really recover from once it’s started, and you have to be extremely careful with the promises you’re making. If you’re not confident in your ability to make good on something, then don’t bring it up at all.

Teaching the Right Way to Do Things

People sometimes need a little extra guidance in completing their tasks. Especially those who’re still transitioning to higher positions that involve more responsibility. They might not show it directly, but many of those people will be looking up to you for guidance on what to do and how to do it best. So you have to make sure that your actions make the right impression.

Otherwise, people are going to follow suit on whatever you do. And when it’s bad, this has some obvious negative implications for the company as a whole. If you keep coming in late, underdelivering on your tasks, and trying to shift the blame on others, don’t be surprised when these become the default reactions to problems of most of your employees.

You’ll Learn Something, Too

Leading by example is largely about challenging yourself in new ways. Sometimes you’ll feel uncomfortable approaching a task, mostly because you realize your own low level of competence about it. But confidence is something you absolutely must display as a leader, and many people will look at you under close scrutiny to figure out if you really are living up to your words.

Along the way, you’re going to learn a lot. Especially if the examples you’re trying to set are supposed to challenge your employees as well. By working together, you’ll all develop some new skills and will gain a new perspective into how you should best use them in your daily work.

You’re Creating Better Future Leaders

And remember sooner or later you’re going to have to move away from this position. Hopefully, it will be because you’re moving up to something even better. But someone will have to fill the void left behind you and you’re likely looking at that someone on a daily basis right now, perhaps even without realizing it.

If you work hard to set the right example at every step, you’re going to do a lot to ensure that whoever comes after you will truly be fit for the job. Many leaders are struggling with this on a regular basis. Choosing a successor is not as straightforward as it seems. But if you play your cards right, you’ll know exactly who you need to hire in the very near future.

A company is largely represented by its leadership, and setting good examples means that people both inside and out of the company are going to see it in a very positive light. Even if you don’t enjoy the public relations game, you still have to maintain your image from time to time, because the company’s own image is tied to that. And there’s really no good way to go about that other than honest, hard work.

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While many organization leaders recognize the importance of quality control, it’s rare that proper measures for that are in place across the entire company. More often than not, quality is only put to a real test towards the end of the production cycle, before the product is delivered to the market. And looking back through history, that rarely leads to good results. On the other hand, running the company in a way that everyone is always striving to produce high quality results can lead to great improvements on every level.

This is where Total Quality Management or TQM for short comes in, and the sooner you familiarize yourself with the core principles behind it, the better results you’re going to see in the long run. Implementing TQM in an existing organization is rarely a complicated task, but it does require attention to detail and knowledge of the company’s internal processes on a deep level.

Involving Everyone on an Equal Level

One of the most important things about a successful TQM implementation is that everyone in the company must be equally concerned with the quality of the overall work being done. From the high-level executives, down to every employee on the ground floor, quality control has to be propagated correctly from one level to the next in order to get good results.

How exactly you’re going to go about this depends on the specific structure and style of work of your company, plus its size will be relevant too. Naturally, larger organizations are going to face a bigger challenge in this, but it ultimately comes down to having a well-structured approach and getting everyone involved in the implementation of TQM.

Prioritizing Customer Satisfaction

Considering that TQM is a results-driven approach, it makes sense that the strongest criteria in determining the success of its implementation should be customer satisfaction. Indeed, every organization that implements TQM should prioritize their ability to meet the current demands of the market, and align all of their work with that goal.

This may sound trivial, but a surprising number of companies seem to realize the importance of this factor all too late. When too much work goes into the initial setup of the company and working on tasks that ultimately don’t improve the quality of the final output, the company finds itself starved of the resources that it needs to fulfill its primary goal. And by the time this happens, and the leadership realizes that they need to re-prioritize, it’s often too late to change its course in such a major way and everyone ends up affected negatively.

Adapting to Change

The biggest change that will occur from one period to the next is the current set of demands of the market as a whole. A successful implementation of TQM should include a control structure for verifying that the current goals of the company are properly aligned. In other words, if your customers want something different this year, your company shouldn’t be pursuing the same goals as in the last one, and you should reevaluate your current direction.

Again, the exact implementation of this idea is highly dependent on the company and the way it works, but every industry seems to have a somewhat standardized way of evaluating its current market conditions and determining the main requirements of its customers. Figure out what the applicable measurement points are for your specific field, and build your system according to that. You may need to tweak it a little of course, but those needs will present themselves along the way.

Conclusion

Implementing TQM in your organization can lead to huge benefits in the long run, and if you’re also able to evaluate the current market condition accurately, you’re pretty much all set in terms of ensuring that you’re always pursuing the right goals. Considering the relatively low complexity of implementing TQM, it makes no sense to go on for too long without having it as a major part of your company’s infrastructure and style of work.

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5S is a versatile system commonly applied in various production environments in order to boost the productivity of the facility as a whole, and ensure that everyone is working together towards continuous improvement. It relies on a set of five principles Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, Sustain and every good leader should have at least some rudimentary familiarity with the system and know how to apply it to their own company’s work.

Using 5S on a More Individual Level

However, something that’s often missed by many leaders is the fact that 5S can have a huge potential when applied on a more personal level the system can work wonders in helping you organize your own tasks and projects in various ways. You can even use it to handle specific subtasks, such as the dreaded organizing of one’s emails.

It’s a common problem for many leaders, especially in larger companies you get so much mail on a regular basis that it becomes impossible to keep up with it and still do your regular job. At some point, you have to draw a line and decide which messages are truly important, which ones can wait, and which can be tossed straight in the trash. And as it turns out, 5S can be very useful in helping you sort out this huge mess.

How Does 5S Work with Emails?

Pretty much every aspect of 5S can be applied to the organizing of your emails if you abstract things enough. Sorting is the most obvious one make sure that you deal with irrelevant emails quickly and put them out of sight. You can also take this one step further and prepare folders for each type of email that you receive, and organize them there.

Setting your emails in order is a bit trickier, and it mostly depends on the email client you’re using. The important point is that you should have immediate, convenient access to every aspect of your email that you need. If you frequently need to send invoices, for example, you should prioritize that template above others.

Shining your email is basically dealing with junk as soon as it arrives, and also ensuring that you don’t leave anything unanswered for too long. Unanswered emails can pile up quite quickly, creating a lot of waste in your work when you have to drop what you’re doing and focus on them exclusively at some point, so it’s better to remove them from the process as quickly as possible.

Standardizing is where things get interesting. Most modern email clients have powerful functionality for sending pre-made templates, sorting your emails according to complex rules and filters, and much more. It’s up to you how you’re going to use these systems, but the important thing is that the final result is something that allows you to easily send and receive messages of certain types without having to think about the process too much.

Last but not least, it’s important to do all of this in a sustainable manner. It’s no good setting up complex filters if you end up ignoring them for your future emails because it’s too annoying for you to deal with the extra rules. Likewise, if you prepare templates but don’t use them, this is a waste of time and effort.

Conclusion

This might sound like it’s going overboard a bit, but any experienced manager will tell you that there’s no such thing as putting too much thought into the organization of your emails. As long as the final result is that you get to spend less time dealing with emails, and more time on your actual project-related tasks, your whole company is going to be more productive.

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Miscommunication is one of the most common problems that hinders the progress of an organization, and resolving with that issue at its root is a good idea if you have plans to expand significantly. It will only get worse in the future if these issues are allowed to fester, and one of the areas that requires a truly masterful level of communication is client meetings.

Listen Actively

When you’re face to face with a client regardless if they’re a new one or if you’ve already worked with them before you must make it a point to actively listen and understand what they’re looking to get out of this project in terms of value. This is the key first step to ensuring that you’re on the right track to understanding the requirements of those clients better, and it will save you a lot of trouble in having to explain the motivation behind certain features to your developers.

That’s a common problem that some less experienced leaders face when they still don’t have a lot of experience in talking to clients and understanding their needs. The inexperienced leader will hear a set of requirements and translate them to a list almost literally, without putting any real thought behind the true meaning of each of those requirements.

What Is the Client Trying to Achieve?

Ask the client what their vision is. What is their intended use case for this particular feature? Why do they need the product to be designed this way? What are they expecting to improve in their own company’s situation by contracting you for this work?

The key here is to ask a lot of questions that dig down to the core reason for the project’s existence. Unfortunately, this is something most clients are notoriously bad at expressing, leaving things in the hands of the hopefully experienced leader.

This will save you from producing huge amounts of waste when it turns out that your team has to redo a certain part of the project because you understood the requirements incorrectly. What’s worse, depending on how fundamental a specific requirement is, a failure like that could require you to start over nearly from scratch. This is certainly not an ideal situation when deadlines are involved, even less so when you throw the hit to your company’s reputation into the mix.

How Many Meetings Are Ideal?

Another important detail to consider is that you might benefit from scheduling more than one meeting to go over the full list of requirements, instead of trying to get them all sorted out in one go. This does not go against the idea of developing a better initial understanding of the client’s requirements rather, it splits that initial phase into more manageable chunks that will allow you to better process what you discussed in the last meeting, and integrate it into the next one.

Sometimes establishing the precise requirements you’ll be working with can be a long and stressful process for both sides, especially if it’s a larger project that will span across multiple areas of expertise. But it can also save your organization huge amounts of time in the future when you don’t have to rework various parts of the project due to poor initial understanding of what it would involve.

If you’re struggling with this now, the good news is that this is a skill like any other, and it can be improved with enough practice. Of course, you shouldn’t use actual client projects as your training dummies,” but there are plenty of resources out there that can help you gain a deeper understanding of how to extract the truly valuable information from client meetings.

Conclusion

It might sometimes be beneficial to bring more people on board in each meeting, too. They don’t even have to necessarily be directly attached to the project, but if you feel like they can contribute valuable knowledge to the discussions with your client, then by all means invite them as well. Of course, don’t make things too crowded, and ensure that there is still enough breathing room in the meeting, and that everyone can get their voice heard if they have something important to add to the conversation.

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If you’re following a system for continuous improvement, you probably always have at least one project on your hands. Juggling multiple different large-scale tasks can be a challenging ordeal, especially if the requirements for some of them keep changing on a regular basis. And on the other hand, sometimes it’s more beneficial to focus your attention more tightly on one particular project for a longer period of time, for example when that project has the potential to result in the biggest changes in the company’s performance.

The choice is not always very obvious, and it’s even more challenging when you’re still fresh in the field and aren’t that familiar with lean concepts. It might feel like a bit of a gamble, but you’ll eventually develop a strong intuition for it. In the meantime, it’s important to look at some specific factors in each situation you face where you have to decide whether your attention would be better split across multiple projects, or directed towards a single one.

Help Between Departments

Manpower is an obvious primary candidate for an important factor. Knowing how many other leaders in your organization can devote their attention to different projects is an important detail, as you must always make sure to coordinate your actions with the rest of your team members.

If you’re currently tasked with multiple projects but the data shows that one of them in particular is going to be more impactful than the rest, then you should bring that up to your colleagues and explain the situation to them. If you can share your current work with other leaders within the organization even just temporarily this could give you the time you need to figure out how to push the important one forward.

The same is valid the other way around too, though. If you currently don’t have much on your plate, but another department in the organization is struggling with its workload, this might be the right time to bring more projects under your umbrella. Especially if you’re currently not in charge of any major development work that’s critical for the development of the company’s infrastructure.

Of course, if you’re taking on new projects to assist other departments, make sure they’re always aligned with your expertise and that you aren’t just taking them for the sake of filling up your workload. You may end up doing a negative favor to those departments if you mishandle some specific aspect of their projects, dragging the whole organization down as a result!

Recording Your Progress

Make sure you track all your results, ideally in a way that allows you to easily compare your performance when you’re working on multiple projects versus a single one. Sooner or later patterns are going to start emerging, and you’ll be able to figure out which mode of work you operate better in.

You’ll likely find that you’re more adept at either one of these two styles, but not both at the same time. This is a typical case for many leaders, and learning which way you work better is a critical point that you’ll want to consider as early as possible in your career.

Sharing Data Between Projects

On the note of data collection and organization, one great thing you can do to improve your workflow is to align your data sets in a way that you can share them between multiple projects when there is some relevance between them.

This can significantly simplify the process of keeping up with projects on multiple fronts, and you may even notice some synergy between them. In this case, it might actually work in your favor to keep taking on multiple projects at the same time when you see an opportunity for this type of information sharing between them.

Conclusion

This is something that you’ll need to build up an intuition for though, and you can only do that by completing as many projects as you can successfully, and measuring the results of each one. Once you learn what the patterns of your work are, you’ll be able to organize your workload much more efficiently in the future, and you’ll complete each individual project even faster.

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