Podcast: Lean manufacturing Q&A—Industry pros review their wins

Dave Rizzardo, associate director of the Maryland World Class Consortia, helped develop the Lean Peer Group service. He facilitates multiple groups and works directly with organizations in helping them on their lean journeys. Carl Livesay is the general manager at Mercury Plastics MD and has more than 40 years of senior operational leadership in manufacturing. Carl is a lean practitioner and serves on the BOD for the Maryland World Class Consortia. Sarah Tilkens is a senior operations manager of operational excellence at GE Healthcare and the CEO and founder of The KPI Lab. She has over 15 years of experience in lean, six sigma, strategy execution, and project management. Dave, Carl, and Sarah spoke at IndustryWeek’s Operations Leadership Summit in June. During the panel, “Sustaining Your Lean Gains,” the three explored methods of embedding lean to minimize transformation stalling or backsliding. In this episode of Great Question: In this episode, Robert Schoenberger, editor in chief of IndustryWeek, shares audience questions and expert answers from the session.

Below are some excerpts from the podcast:

Sarah Tilkens: I just think it's so interesting because I've been part of so many initiatives. We're like, OK, we're going after OEE, and we're taking a top-down approach, and every different part of our process is going to follow these rules, and we envision evolution in this one specific way. But, like you guys know, that doesn't work because every process performs way different. Measuring first-pass yield for one might be their secret sauce. Measuring uptime for another might be more valuable.

But what's interesting is, again, when you think of the way that we deploy leadership programs, we are still taking a very blanket-style approach where you're going to learn from this weird e-learning thing with this really diverse cast of people that we've put. And it's just like, that's not what actually creates next-gen powerhouse leaders. I mean, maybe it works for some people, but I think the opportunity is in thinking about talent development and talent optimization in the same way that you would think about optimizing a process. It’s slow and methodical, and one person at a time, and you get people like me, and you have these ripple effects, and you start a damn revolution.

But if you're not willing to innovate in that space, you're going to get what you've always gotten. So, it's like, who owns talent optimization in your organization? HR? Lean? The people leaders? Nobody? If that many people own it, who owns it? So, I think it's just worth challenging the ways that we're thinking about doing this because, again, you can have the best CI talent in the world, but if you can't keep your people and if you can't use your people well, that's a bummer.

Carl Livesay: One of the things that's often overlooked is the mutual respect that has to occur for people to be on the team to start with. So the first thing you have to be before you can be the all-star on the team, you've got to be the team member. You've got to be accepted by the team. You’ve got to be part of the team. That means in order to get respect, you have to give respect, and the same thing works with trust and all of the emotional criteria. You’ve got to pay attention to that. You can't form a team from a collection of misfits, It doesn't work. I would rather have 10 average people that worked really well together because we can teach them the skills.

I would rather have 10 average people than eight good people and two superstars that just couldn't work together. I just wouldn't want them. The team is the team. Mutual respect, mutual collaboration and frankly, they just have to treat each other like human beings. We insist on that. Where I work, we insist on it. If you don't fit in the team, you don't fit in the company because the company is the team.

Now as far as “how do I get the most out of them?” That's what the team leader, that's what the person in leadership, that's their job is to cultivate the strengths of the people that are on the team and recognize who does a better job of sorting or fine motor skills, or who solves problems quicker and put them in positions. You find the best second baseman, put them on second base. Don't put them at first. But the first baseman and the second baseman, they’ve got to work together because they’ve got to make that double play. So you can't have them antagonizing one another or not collaborating. It just physically doesn't work.

I'm not trying to diminish anything that you get from the report. Maybe you can get that same information from the reports, but you can also get it by getting those people together and just having a conversation. It really doesn't take that long.