reduce the steps

Lean Management white collar

When it comes to Lean Management in general, there is a lot of mis-information and mal-practice out there in the world. After all, Lean Management and operational excellence sound good at face value. If it’s been well defined, it will look like “Quality, Delivery, and Cost” – improving quality and tasks being first-time-right, improving delivery times and getting things to customers (and team-mates) faster, and reducing cost. But most companies and leaders don’t even get that far.

Add to this another challenge – that being a manager often involves many parts of a business, not just manufacturing.

These are areas in your business that need Lean Management too – like technology, software or website development, customer service, sales, administration, human resources, quality assurance, projects, training, change programs, communications and much more. They can all benefit from the right approach and start to improve on those Lean Management measures of “Quality, Delivery and Cost”. But it just can’t be done using the old Lean Manufacturing way.

So buyer beware – Lean is traditionally a manufacturing methodology, and few (if any) leaders have gotten it right when applying it to the other important parts of a business – parts that are considered “white collar”.

Every company, even if they are primarily in manufacturing, has these white collar areas to be managed and apply true Lean Management to. Sales have to be made, scheduling has to be done, items have to be handed between departments, customers have to be served.

So how do we adjust this decades-old approach to a white collar world to achieve real success? Simple – we strip the principles of Lean and operational excellence back to their core, to the outcome they are trying to achieve, and take the parts that give us a meaningful result as leaders and applying true Lean Management.

Five Steps to Lean Management for White Collar Work

Before we define Lean Management for white collar work, traditional manufacturing Lean is based on a handful of solid principles, most commonly shown like this:

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Leadership Card 29 – Reduce The Steps, Lean CX Model

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There’s an old saying that goes: “The journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step.” It’s a great saying, and it’s a nice way to remind yourself to keep going and keep taking those steps when things get tough.

The only thing is, let’s say you’re a company selling software and you make your customers take 1000 steps to get what they want. They might do it for a while, especially if you’re the only one selling that software.

But then another company comes along, and it gives your customers what they want in one step. One single step. Not 1000. Just one. Pretty soon, all your customers have gone to your competitor for the simple reason that it was easy to do so. Nobody really wants to take that “journey” of 1000 miles or 1000 steps.

I bring this up because this is what many companies are doing in real life – they are making their customers jump through hoops, take extra steps, and take extra actions just to get what they want. And they are doing this, of course, until Amazon comes along, gives customers one click ordering and ridiculously fast delivery and the other company falls apart.

Reducing the steps to people getting what they want is the master key to huge success in business. It’s success with your customers, and it’s success in your teams. The simple fact is that most companies and teams have not clearly articulated what they do, the outcomes they give, and how to get to those outcomes. After all, that’s too mundane, right? Why should they write down the steps they take to get customers (internal and external) what they want? And you might think that way too, until you hear that nearly 50% of workers actually aren’t sure on what is expected of them in their job. In other words, 1 in 2 people probably aren’t doing what you need them to do, because they simply don’t know what it is. Why write it down? Because you can’t reduce what you haven’t articulated in the first place.

Uber gave customers one-tap ordering of a ride, and now it’s a 70 billion dollar company. Amazon Kindle gave you one click ordering of eBooks, and it has all but decimated physical book stores around the world. Microsoft gave you Windows so you could click on what you wanted, when DOS (typing into a green screen) was still a thing. Most of you won’t remember DOS because it basically disappeared from view once Windows was released.

Also, have you ever noticed that complicated things tend to break more often? That complicated system, complicated code, complicated buying process, complicated risk review or complicated creation of the annual shareholder report – where things are complicated with too many steps, hand-offs, rework, and waiting, then things tend to break.

Reducing the steps is one of those keys to making things more robust, making things easier to do, easier to use. And when things are easier to do, people tend to do them. That means the people in your team, and helping them to do what you want.

So many leaders, when I speak to them, blame the people for not doing what they want them to do. But when it comes down to it, it’s the complicated and uncertain process that causes their team to flounder.

Simplify things, and you will see incredible rewards.

Chat soon – Dave

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