An efficiently organized workplace is the most fundamental step to guaranteeing the organization’s productivity and preparing it for major expansions in the future. Of course, actually knowing how to set things up in the most appropriate way for your current type of company is a different story, and it’s something that takes a lot of experience and time spent practicing as a leader. But in the end, there are still some fundamental principles that any lean leader should strive to follow, as they can ensure a sensible foundation for most types of companies.

Appropriate Sorting

Nothing can frustrate workers in a production plant as quickly as having to spend a lot of time searching for each piece of the puzzle.” Materials and tools should be clearly organized in a way that allows anyone to find what they need quickly and efficiently.

Moreover, you’ll want to think about the sorting system not only on a local level that is, in each separate department but also on a global one, looking at the big picture of the whole production plant. Figure out which resources are shared between which departments, and make sure that nobody has to spend an unnecessarily long time to get to the corresponding part of the plant.

Sorting can also prevent resource starvation when multiple units of the organization are competing for something, which is not only a common occurrence, but a difficult problem to resolve as well. In many cases, employees aren’t directly inclined to share these issues out of fear of stepping on someone’s toes elsewhere in the organization, leading to poor and inefficient communication as well.

Maintenance and Cleaning Matter

Some leaders see cleaning and even maintenance procedures as purely cosmetic, things that are just done to make the place look pretty. But that’s a very wrong approach to keeping a facility in proper working order, and not maintaining a clean workplace can lead to a quickly deteriorating working environment.

You have to put solid procedures for keeping workplaces clean right from the start and ensure that everyone is following them to the letter. Unclean working environments are among the most common causes for workplace accidents, which in turn can lead to a severe reduction in the company’s current output.

Don’t postpone regular maintenance procedures until it’s too late! They’re supposed to be regular for a reason! The last thing you want on your hands is a set of machines failing because they haven’t been kept in proper working condition, and this actually happens more often than you’d expect. Once the organization gets too large for you to personally oversee this aspect of its operation, you will want to hire a dedicated maintenance expert or multiple ones as soon as possible to minimize any future problems.

Everyone Should Contribute

Constant improvement is one of the core ideas you’ll want to follow when running your organization, but one of the critical details about it is that it has to be spread evenly across the whole organization as best as possible, instead of only coming from the top.

It’s great if you’re constantly pushing for an improvement in all aspects of the company’s work, but if the same can’t be said for the majority of your employees, this will quickly lead to a deteriorating working environment. Everyone must be equally motivated to propose improvement ideas and solutions to current problems, and if you can figure out a reward system that promotes this style of thinking even further, then you should see a lot of development in the long run.

It’s also important to ensure that these ideas are drilled into new employees as early as possible, so you’ll want to spend some time evaluating the company’s current recruiting and training processes. Sometimes making small changes in these areas can have surprising results on the efficiency of the whole organization.

Conclusion

Organizing your workplace efficiently from the very beginning is a crucial element to ensuring that you’re running a smooth, lean organization that’s built on a solid foundation. As long as you manage to give everyone a proper motivation to contribute to the process, and ensure that the company’s rules are being followed on all levels, you’re on the right track to building something sustainable.

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Self-development

This is one one in a series of 4 articles about Toyota’s Stages of Leader Development

Being a leader means that you’ll be responsible for driving the company forward or at least some part of it and helping those below you grow. However, a critical component of leadership (that often gets ignored by those comfortable in their positions) is the need to develop your own skills.

This is a critical component of Toyota’s kaizen as well, and it should be one of your top priorities when pushing the organization towards constant improvement. Just remember that this improvement starts with you.

Streamlining your own work

One of the best ways to ensure that you’re always on the right track to self-development is to avoid cluttering your workflow with unnecessary details. Ideally, you should have a completely standardized working environment, where you always know exactly where everything is. That way, you can occupy your mind with only what’s truly important, attaining new skills and distributing them down the chain.

Another way to look at this is that you should always strive to apply lean principles in your own work. Look for waste and remove it. Is there some process that you keep repeating on a daily basis, but can be automated or where waste can be removed? Are you wasting any time on daily communication that can be summarized in weekly or even monthly e-mails? It might only take a minute or less each day, but those little struggles can stack up incredibly fast and leave you cluttered with senseless details, never able to look up to the big picture.

Learn from others

If you’re not at the highest position in the organization, there is someone above you who can teach, coach and mentor you. It’s important for you to show an active interest in those coaching sessions, and take as much as you can from them. Ideally, you’ll want to establish a mentor-like relationship with one specific person.

Even if you’re the top leader of the organization, you can still find someone to guide you through the mess ahead of you, and to coach you how you can do something truly good with your current potential.

Don’t forget that those useful tips don’t necessarily have to come from someone above you either. Sometimes, an employee sitting below you in the hierarchy can give you some surprising insights. Don’t disregard them, and make sure that you always take as much useful information from the world around you as you can.

Challenge yourself

Last but not least, it’s important to remember that you’ll never be able to truly grow without challenging yourself constantly. If you never get out of your comfort zone, you won’t learn anything significantly different from what you already know, and you’ll stagnate. And with you, the organization will suffer as well.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should take unnecessary risks, or put yourself in a position where you can’t complete a task because you “bit off more than you can chew.” But by adding onto your work in appropriate increments (like training at the gym),  you should see some noticeable results in your ability to grow and learn.

Another way to challenge yourself is to ask others to rate your performance, and actually take their feedback into consideration. Many leaders let these comments slide past their ears unless they’re positive. Often the negative remarks from people who report to you can open your eyes to something critical about your way of working that you might have missed before. Never underestimate what you can learn from those below you, as we pointed out above, and always show them that you respect their input and value it.

Conclusion

As long as you’re willing to sweat and struggle along with everyone else in your organization, you’re going to see obvious results in your self-development. And as each individual makes improvements, the whole organization is going to grow and move in a positive direction.

Don’t ever fall into the trap of thinking that you’re in a position where you can’t improve anything else about your way of working. That’s a surefire way to limit your career. When you’re in a place where an entire organization depends on your thoughts and decisions, it’s a completely irresponsible attitude to have.

Read about the other stages of leader development at Toyota >>>

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