I had the pleasure of attending our 3 day off-site this week. Our fiscal year ends in September so every October our senior leadership team meets to review the past year’s results against our goals and look forward to what we need to accomplish in the coming months.
I say I had the pleasure because it really is one of the things I look forward to every year. Most people hate meetings so looking forward to 3 days of meetings probably seems odd. But the reason most people hate meetings is because they don’t really serve the intended purpose. Our planning meeting is really a well crafted meeting with tons of content.
I titled the post as Nemawashi because this is really what we are doing. We are laying the groundwork and seeking consensus on the direction of the company for the next 12 months. The term Nemawashi is used in lean to describe seeking consensus on changes before proceeding. I think this is one of the keys to our company’s success.
I have worked at several different companies in our industry. One of my biggest complaints was trying to get a clear direction for growth. In some companies, they are just happy doing what they’ve been doing. In others, there were ideas but they just came and went without any follow-through. When we attend conferences on lean, this is one of the biggest complaints “No real leadership commitment to lean”. Having a leadership team that is aligned, agrees on the direction, follows through on the commitments and works together is one of the toughest things to find.
Our senior leadership team includes the COO and CFO along with the leaders of the sales, operations, shop and field departments. There are people that have been with the company their whole lives and others of us who have been at other companies and then came to Walters & Wolf. We have a diverse group and some of the best people I’ve ever worked with. We are okay arguing our points and being honest about how we really feel. Conflict is expected but it is just part of the process. The goal is for everyone to get their points across and debate the issues but in the end reach a decision that we will all support.
Our offsite begins with opening comments. Each member of the team gives an overview of where we are, where they see our company going and what they want to accomplish during our off-site. This gives us all a voice right at the beginning and gives a flavor of what the meeting will involve. After that, we review our goals by department and overall. Over the years, we have established and tuned the metrics for our company so that it is easy to get the pulse of the company in a very short amount of time. These metrics make it easy for us to go back to the team and describe the goals and the team knows what “winning” looks like. The sales metrics are shown right on the sales dashboard every day. The project metrics are shown right on the main project page so it is clear. Knowing what we are trying to achieve then communicating that back to the people who do the work is the key to getting alignment.
After the opening comments and reviewing last year’s goals and achievements, we move into what we need to work on this year. This has been a different process each year and continues to evolve. This management team has been meeting since it was established about 9 years ago. Some of the people have changed and at first we needed more specific agendas but as we have matured and the trust between departments has built, the direction of the meeting is a lot more open. We started by discussing some of the key goals we are trying to get to next year. We were struggling with what that would look like. Nick decided to try a 5 why exercise to see if we could get to the root cause of what was preventing us from reaching our goal. This was an interesting approach because most people had not done a 5 why before (we just recently learned to use them at our Kaizen event in Las Vegas) and it was a pretty high level problem. We started out struggling with the problem statement. This is typical because we all tend to state the solution as the problem. But after wrangling with that we were able to get to a specific problem statement. Now the work began to work through our “why” questions to get to the actual root cause of the problem. It took a while, but in the end, we successfully arrived at a conclusion. Since we all participated in the exercise and we all worked through it together, we all were in alignment about the root cause.
The last step is to develop a set of counter measures to correct the problem. We ended up creating a swim lane process map of our steps so we could identify processes that we need to target. We then created a “who does what by when” matrix to ensure we have accountability as we return to the office. We used several new tools this year in our process that I think made things more visual and helped create alignment.
Our leadership team faces a lot of issues. There is the looming threat of overseas manufacturing, the need to develop products at a much faster rate to stay ahead of our competition and the difficulty of finding great people just to name a few. I think that our ability to continually evolve our planning process and adopt new ideas into how we make decisions will really help us to make the tough choices required to stay competitive in this shifting landscape. I truly enjoyed our planning process this year and learned a lot in the process. We have a huge year ahead of us and I’m excited to return to the office and help set the direction for how we will accomplish our goals.
