In lean, you learn by doing. Our leadership team is no exception. When we first decided to begin our lean transformation, we knew we would have to change the way we operate also. We had a management team meeting that happened once every two weeks. Since part of the team is in Southern California and the rest of the team is in Northern California, we would meet via video conference. The meeting was pretty loose and mostly consisted of an update on some items and some discussions around things people needed to or wanted to talk about as a group.
After going to Fastcap and seeing their morning meeting, we were excited about the idea of doing something like that at our office. We decided to start with our leadership team. Nick (our COO) created a standard agenda for each meeting. We then decided to meet every week. Each week, a different person runs the meeting. The person who will run the following meeting takes the notes. The agenda has changed a bit since we started but here is what we cover each week:
- Meeting leader picks a core value or something from the vision statement and talks about what that means to them. So, maybe I pick one of our core values like “Passion to be the Best” and then I would expand on what that means to me. This keeps the mission, vision and values front and center for our group.
- This week’s video. Everyone on the team is required to make one improvement each week and do a “before and after” video of what they improved. We then upload them to youtube and watch them in the meeting. If you don’t do your video, the next week you owe two! This has helped us understand the idea of Kaizen and Continuous Improvement. Since you have to do something every week, you are constantly looking for things to fix. Since we are also asking our teams to do this, it shows that we are willing to do it also. As a company we have over 1850 videos posted of improvements.
- Next, we cover over budgets. This was an idea to look at defects. An over budget is issued any time a PO pushes the actual cost we have incurred to exceed the estimated cost. These are issued automatically and we compile the ones that happen each week and bring an explanation to the group on what happened. This keeps everyone aware of what is happening on the projects and forces us to find the root cause of the defect.
- After that, we cover any projects that have been closed. We go over all the cost information and the outcome of the project.
- This week’s compliment. Each manager sends out a “thank you” email to an employee for some specific thing that they did that week. They also copy all the managers on the email. This gets us focused on positive feedback to our team and people really love it! Maybe someone worked late to get something completed on time or they worked hard to help you with a project. It really helps all the managers to see the great things that are going on every day in the company.
- We then have an open mike section where each leader talks about what they are working on that week or can bring up any issues they want to address with the group.
- Next we have our lean learning. We pick a book to read and our whole group reads a chapter each week. We then write a report on two ideas or pearls we found in the chapter and how we could apply it at Walters & Wolf along with what value it would bring. These books so far have been on lean since that is what we are trying to learn and implement right now. We have read “The Toyota Way”, “Two Second Lean”, “Lean Thinking”, “Stories from my Sensei” and we are working on “The Lean Turnaround” now.
- After this, we track specific issues or projects we are working on. These might come out of our off-site or maybe legal issues or longer term items that someone in the group is working on.
After this, it’s back to work.
We also have a decision tracker on the back of the notes where we can document any specific decisions we arrived at. We found that sometimes we would make a decision then 6 months later there was some confusion on the issue. This keeps the decisions front and center.
I have to say that these changes we made were transformative. First, it gets our whole group on the same page. We are reading the same books, discussing our ideas from those books, focusing on our mission and values and improving something each week and seeing what everyone else has improved. It also forces us to have discipline. I have deliverables for every week that I need to work on. We hold each other accountable and you don’t get to skip a week. Everyone learns to run a good meeting and take good notes. Since we alternate leaders, everyone gets practice running a meeting in front of their peers.
I can honestly say that I look forward to this meeting every week.
