Is your business struggling to keep up with the changes in the marketplace? Do you need to improve performance but don’t know where to start? You may be an executive, supervisor or manager who is feeling stuck. Or you may be a member of staff who is stuck and needs to learn new ways of working. With the demands for lean performance in today’s competitive environment, having a coach can help you to maximize your potential. This blog post will introduce you to lean performance coaching and how it can help your team members get back on track.
Lean Performance Coaching
Lean performance coaching is a concept that has developed in response to the increased speed of business and how it affects employees who are not only managing their own work, but also working closely with customers. The impact of lean performance coaching can be both short-term and long-term, providing your team members with the means to help them achieve goals while also fulfilling their own personal potential. If you want to reduce costs or improve quality, you should consider what this type of coaching can offer your business. Lean coaching relates to the different strategies and activities that can be used to improve performance, based on an assessment of your team’s strengths and weaknesses.
Lean performance coaching is highly interactive and requires your participation. The role of the coach is to develop techniques that are specific for each team member, which are then implemented in a variety of ways. If you’re looking at lean coaching as a way to develop new skills or behaviors in your team members, it can be broken down into three steps:
Identify where improvements are needed
Develop solutions together with the support of the coach
Implement appropriate changes
As part of this lean performance coaching process, you’ll have access to high-quality tools that will help your team reach their full potential. The process also helps to develop a coaching ‘culture’ that encourages learning and performance-based conversations, which can be beneficial for both you and your employees. It’s important to recognize that lean performance coaching is only effective when it involves the participation of everyone in the organization.
In order to achieve success with this type of coaching, you have to apply appropriate techniques using the best tools available. Your coach needs to understand how your business operates, so it’s essential that they’re familiar with strategies such as SMART goals, stretch targets and KPI monitoring. There are various activities that can be carried out in lean performance coaching sessions, including goal setting workshops and action planning workshops. This means that if your team members feel stuck, this type of coaching could help them make significant improvements to their working lives.
If you need to develop strategies for your business growth and development, lean performance coaching can be highly beneficial. By implementing these activities with the support of a skilled coach, you’ll transform the way that you operate and increase your chances of achieving success. Lean performance coaching could provide your team members with the motivation and inspiration they need to achieve their full potential and become high-performing individuals throughout all areas of their roles. Using this type of training will improve job satisfaction levels as well as increasing productivity levels within your business.
Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) Cycle
In Lean, the practice of incremental improvement comes from the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle. The PDCA cycle is a management tool that encourages continual process improvement by acting upon the outcomes of action and reflection.
Plan – involves setting organizational and employee goals to meet certain standards, called Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
Do – involves actively engaging in activities to meet these goals.
Check – checking progress against planned actions and using the results to plan new ones; it specifically emphasizes learning from mistakes or setbacks rather than purely focusing on success or failure.
Act – making any necessary changes based on what was learned during check; this may mean modifying plans, processes, or even goals themselves.
The PDCA cycle should be applied at all levels of an organization, from local teams to top management. The cycle itself can be visualized as a series of steps that is repeated over and over again for each project or goal. At the beginning of a cycle, a team identifies a problem or an opportunity for improvement within their organization. Through research and analysis, they set incremental goals to solve these issues.
Through this process, employees will develop new skills to help them work towards these goals while growing in self-awareness about how their behaviors impact the overall success of the organization. It should be noted that employee involvement is an essential part of Lean thinking; because if left untransformed, employees can actually slow down productivity through wasteful acts such as hiding mistakes or making excuses. The act of continuous improvement requires all employees to be engaged in improving processes and finding new ways to better serve the customer.
The PDCA cycle is most effective when paired with another Lean concept known as Kaizen, which means constant improvement in Japanese. Kaizen focuses on small incremental changes over time that are both manageable for employees and effective for achieving goals.
Lean thinking maps out how your organization can use these concepts of Kaizen and the PDCA cycle across every department to work towards sustainable change, gradually moving towards becoming a high-performance business.
The key behind implementing lean is identifying areas where improvement can be made through the creation of SMART targets (specific, measurable, assignable, realistic and time bound). Once these targets have been set within an employee’s department, employees can come together to create a plan to reach these goals and improve their department’s overall effectiveness.
Executive Coaching and the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) Cycle
As organizations implement Lean principles, they become more likely to seek professional coaching support. You can use your lean coaching time to help employees to improve their performance by following the PDCA cycle. As part of the coaching session, you should follow the activities below:
Plan – coach clarifies goals to ensure that they are SMART targets
Do – coach encourages employee to take appropriate action using the PDCA cycle as a guide
Check – coach questions progress to ensure milestones have been passed and appropriate learning has taken place
Act– coach helps employees plan next steps towards achieving long term goals, including what needs to be done differently this time around.
The PDCA cycle is often used by organizations to aid in the continual improvement of their processes. It can be used across all departments within an organization and even at different levels, with top management setting goals for teams or individuals below them that must be achieved through the actions described by the PDCA cycle.
Lean thinking uses this model as a guide for achieving long-term goals over time through small incremental changes; however, it should not be viewed as an overnight fix to problems, but rather as a sustainable method for change. Despite how straightforward it may seem, implementing the four steps of lean (plan, do, check and act) can be difficult without coaching support. Organizations often seek out leadership services to improve overall performance within their organization and to achieve goals that they may not have been able to accomplish alone.
Since everyone has different motivations for improvement, coaching can help individuals or teams identify what needs to be done differently and clarify their personal goals for the future – whether it is to become a high performer and take on new leadership tasks or simply stay motivated and refreshed in their current position. Implementing lean within an organization requires employees from all levels of management to be involved over time as companies seek continuous improvement across every department.
Areas of Lean Coaching
Lean coaching focuses on three primary principles: developing leadership, implementing continuous improvement, and cultivating a learning organization. Lean leadership training teaches leaders and managers the skills they need to develop more effective teams and equip them with the tools needed for each stage of the PDCA cycle. With this knowledge, managers can transform their businesses through lean principles, resulting in increased employee satisfaction as well as better performance within individual roles.
Lean organizations encourage every employee from top-level managers to entry-level workers to participate in kaizen activities that result in small changes over time. This encourages all members of an organization — especially those on the front line — to think creatively about how they can contribute to the process of improving the work environment and their individual processes.
Lean coaching typically begins with debriefing sessions that allow both parties to discuss and identify areas where improvements can be made. This is followed by a commitment from each party; lean coaches commit to reinforcing organizational change through leadership, while employees commit to applying what was learned during everyday activities. It should be noted that Lean coaches are not there to manage or supervise employees, but rather to guide them in making changes themselves.
The goal of these activities is for lean leaders and managers to encourage team members to question norms and make small changes over time, all towards achieving greater efficiencies within their department as well as achieving better results for the organization as a whole.
Conclusion:
Executive coaching is an ideal way for organizations to accomplish goals that they may not have been able to achieve with their own employees. This method is a sustainable way for developing leadership, increasing individual role performance, and creating a learning organization with lean principles.
Lean coaching is an ideal way for organizations to accomplish goals that they may not have been able to achieve on their own. From increasing performance within individual roles to developing leadership, lean coaching helps employees work towards long-term goals in a sustainable manner.
If your organization is looking to improve current processes, increase employee retention or take on new opportunities, reach out today to see how DVELUP can help you get started.