I have had a bit of a rough week. Work has been fun, but personal things this week have left me in a bit of a knotted up state. I have been in Independence, MO this week working with a team going through some kaizen to help address some problems within their processes. While there I received some not good news from my family. Dealing with health issues as a family is something that happens in life, however hard that will be. The Manager of the site I've been working with, Brian, invited me to go to the Krav Maga (Israeli "contact combat") class he helps teach. I appreciate this invite from Brian more than he can know, and have actually drawn some parallels between what he taught us in Krav Maga to Lean Leadership.
Krav Maga is not easy. I've never tried any martial arts before, I've played lots of sports but never anything as disciplined as one of the martial arts. This is really the first parallel I can make with Lean Leadership - Discipline. Whether it is karate, taekwondo or even krav maga, each requires a discipline and dedication to the skill being developed. Discipline requires knowing what to do, and constantly practicing how to do it. It is your own self development and it is wholly up to you as an individual to keep up with the development. The second piece is accountability. As a team, in this case a room full of other learners, we hold each other accountable to that discipline. Since I had not ever experienced this before, others in the class helped me to understand how to perform the different tasks we were learning. To start the class, they practice warm-ups such as a push/pull exercise.
When I started, Brian partnered up with me, placed his hands on my shoulders and told me to do the same to him. Then he said "try to push me." Needless to say, I was pushed around the entire room. He let me experience not knowing what to do, the frustration of no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't push him back. This is where Brian went into teacher mode. He showed me that I needed to get leverage by putting my hands on the inside of his shoulders. When I did this, it was much easier to push him back. This lasted all but a few steps when it grabbed my arms and pulled me down. "And that's where the pull part comes in. When they try to push, and you can't get the leverage, pull them down. They will either fall or stop pushing." Instantly I understood the concept and instantly we put this into practice.
This method, one of trying out the skill, developing the skill, and mastering the skill is a key point of a Lean Leader. Brian's ability to recognize where my skill was lacking, and being able to address it directly with me with the clear and genuine attempt to develop me is exactly what it takes to be a Lean Leader in the business environment. Translate that to the workroom floor and you have leaders constantly striving to develop their teams' skills, participating in the action to see where each team member's skills need developing, and instantly driving in to afford them practice and coaching.
We have been calling this the "I do, We do, You do" method as we coach others in Operational Excellence. Another example from my first night of Krav Maga exemplifies this. We were learning a close combat fighting exercise where we had to punch three times (jab, cross, cross) and then duck before we got hit in the head from an oncoming counter-punch. We had to do this over and over again until essentially it became muscle memory. In doing so, I became fatigued. Brian, my leader, pushed me to keep up. "You better duck faster, the punch back isn't going to stop!" Sure enough I didn't duck fast enough and BAM!! I was knocked on the side of my head by the pad Brian was holding. "You need to prepare for the punch you know will be coming! Let's go! Try again!" Brian's motivation kept me going, even though I was pretty tired - I also realized at this moment how out of shape I had become.
"Wrong! Let's get better!"
In our work lives, we all know that punch is coming. As a Lean Leader we must recognize that the best teacher sometimes is letting that punch happen. Often we talk about letting people fail, but in reality we never want that failure to occur. So in those failure situations, as a company, we might say "give them corrective action!" or "they need a letter of warning for failing to follow orders!" Taking this experience I had with Brian, that should be translated as "I know this failure is happening, so I will be there to instill the lesson to be learned the moment the failure happens." We can then say with our people "Wrong! Let's get better!" Imagine if as a leader in the company we weren't tied to teleconferences all day, reporting out to people in some office somewhere far away, and instead we were with our teams, developing their skills, letting the failures occur and instantly being there to ensure our people develop skills to overcome those failures. Think about how much learning occurs in these brief moments, and how much we are missing out by not being at Gemba, the place of work, the place of learning.
Brian, in that Krav Maga class, showed me that he possesses the skills of a Leader, and this week has shown how that skill can be translated to the workroom floor. This is the skill we must develop as leaders, one of coach and teacher. Our jobs as leaders in a company are to drive constant learning so that we can build up our people's skills so they can build their own discipline for themselves, drive accountability through shared learning and practice, and be there with them to experience the failures and drive us all to be better. Without these basics, we fail without learning, we practice the wrong things, and we cannot develop excellence for ourselves, our teams, and our customers.