What We Love About Lean and Operational Excellence — And Our #1 Frustration

Do you know the number one frustration that most lean and continuous improvement practitioners face? It’s something that I bet you’ve felt too, no matter how passionate you are about the work. Today, I’m gonna take you deeper into the top three things that make us love our role as change leaders. Our number one frustration that holds us back from the impact we envision.

Welcome to the Chain of Learning where the links of leadership and learning unite. This is your connection for actionable strategies and practices to empower you to build a people-centered learning culture, get results, and expand your impact so that you and your team can leave a lasting legacy. I’m your host.

And fellow learning enthusiast, Katie Anderson. We love this work of leading change, continuous improvement, lean and operational excellence. We’re kind of crazy evangelists about it, aren’t we? But sometimes we can’t fully articulate what it is that we actually do, and as a result. [00:01:00] Many people outside our world of lean and opex often assume that we’re just about process improvement, operational efficiency, reducing waste, process mapping, or cost cutting.

If you’ve been listening to this show or following me for any period of time, you know that our work is continuous improvement. Change leaders is about so much more than tools or frameworks. It’s not just process improvement. But sometimes we don’t always know how to explain why it matters or how to describe the deeper value of what we bring or are trying to create.

And that’s a real problem because if we can’t explain it clearly, we won’t get the buy-in. We need to lead the transformational change we envision. Earlier this year, I decided to dig a bit deeper and to go to the source, to you to understand more about what it is that we love about this field and what the biggest challenges we face in our work.

I put out a call with an invitation to operational excellence change leaders in my network to provide input on a [00:02:00] qualitative survey, and over a hundred leaders from internal and external improvement consultants, operations executives and leaders, directors of internal change teams, and more responded.

My goal to better understand what draws us to this work, whether we call it lean, continuous improvement, agile, DevOps quality, what fuels our passion and what holds us back from making the bigger impact and transformation we know is possible. And then to use these answers to share insights here on the podcast and inform some upcoming projects that I’m undertaking to help all of us be more effective continuous improvement change leaders.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to share your experiences, their answers, your answers. Reveal something powerful. What unites us in our passion and our mission for creating high performing learning cultures, what we’re up against and try to lead change, and how we can better advocate for the impact we want to make and help others to do the same.

Before we get started in diving into the insights from the [00:03:00] survey, I want you to reflect on your own experiences. Hit pause for a moment and reflect on these two questions for yourself. What lights you up about your work as a change leader? As a lean practitioner, as a continuous improvement enthusiast, and two, what’s the challenge you keep running into?

Now let’s dive in to explore why we love lean and continuous improvement and what’s holding us back. First, let’s start with the three things that we love the most about this work as continuous improvement. Change leaders of creating people-centered learning cultures, whatever you label it. There were three consistent themes across all responses, regardless of official role or title.

And these themes were consistent across several different questions that I asked about what drew you to this work? Why does it matter, and why do you care? So here are the top three things that light us up and fuels our passion. First, [00:04:00] we love solving problems that truly matter. The number one reason people said they got into this work and care about it.

Problem solving, we all love solving problems, but not just any process problems. We’re drawn to the problems that happen at the moment of truth where employee and customer experience meet where real value is created. And it’s not just about solving problems generally, but the problems that get in the way each and every day of meaningful work.

We love solving problems that directly impact people’s ability to deliver quality, to serve the customer, and to do this work meaningfully. We want to make systems work better. We wanna reduce delays, rework, confusion, and we want those improvements to have a meaningful impact on real people. It fuels our growth and intellectual curiosity for learning and improvement.

Here are just a few examples of what people said in the survey. I love seeing unnecessary effort eliminated through good design. I love learning and applying [00:05:00] scientific thinking. I love finding and solving process problems that improve performance and make jobs easier. I love driving improved ways of working that reduced waste and free up capacity.

Every problem is a new puzzle to solve. That’s what keeps me going. Continuous improvement satisfies my curiosity and desire to grow, and this interest in solving problems in learning has always been true for me too. In my first career in academia and public health, I researched the impact of population level initiatives, but something was missing for me.

The work I was doing, the research was looking into the past and maybe informing new policy decisions of the future. It wasn’t until I joined the performance improvement team at Stanford Children’s Hospital almost 20 years ago that I found my calling. I was helping solve problems that mattered right there in real time.

And I loved the intellectual challeng of discovering the root causes of process challenges and putting in place new [00:06:00] ideas that had real, tangible impact. I love making that tangible difference in day-to-day challenges that were getting in the way of great patient care. So number two, we love empowering people to solve problems.

The second most common response about why we love this work was all about people development and empowerment. It’s not just about fixing problems. It’s about who’s solving them. What gives us energy is helping others take ownership, teaching people how to solve problems for themselves. We love seeing those light bulb moments when someone realizes that they have the tools and empowerment to make things better or solve a problem that they thought was out of their hands, or when we teach them the problem solving skills and develop the capability to continuously improve.

This is where. Respect for people really lives out. How we empower and equip people at all levels to solve [00:07:00] problems for themselves. It’s about creating conditions where managers can coach, and employees can lead and own improvement. Here are just a few examples from the survey of what continuous improvement practitioners and leaders had to say.

I love helping people develop their thinking and watching them grow. The best part is seeing someone’s eyes light up when they realize they have the power to change something. Being able to watch people grow in their role and confidence helping people develop is the most rewarding part of leadership.

It’s incredibly rewarding to empower people to take ownership of their work. It’s about creating space for people to think, learn, and thrive. These quotes go on and on. This is what it’s all about. Not just solving problems, but empowering others to solve problems. And this was true for me too when I was working at Stanford Children’s Hospital.

What lit me up most about this work was engaging the people who own the work and lived the broken processes each and every day. The doctors, the nurses, the staff, and solving the problems that frustrated [00:08:00] them from doing their work and delivering great patient care. It wasn. Just that I realized I loved fixing problems.

I loved helping people have those light bulb moments, and being engaged in creating the solutions, facilitating rapid process improvement workshops or Kaizen events, totally energized me because it was about creating the space and the process for empowered problem solving. From reducing wait time in the outpatient pediatric cancer center to improving flow in the operating rooms to organizing workspaces.

So nurses had the supplies they needed for each and every patient. It was about creating the conditions for people to have the capability, confidence and responsibility for problem solving. And this is what still fuels my passion today. This is the essence of the chain of learning, helping others become leaders of change themselves.

And the third most common response about what lights us up and fuels us about this work, we love seeing meaningful impact. We wanna contribute to [00:09:00] something meaningful within teams, organizations, or society. Not just in theory, not just on paper, but in reality. We wanna do something impactful and meaningful, and this work aligns with our deeper values.

This work meaningful is something I hear all the time from clients to the survey responses from the leaders who join me in Japan. This word meaningful is something that Josef Procházka highlighted as an essential takeaway in his own transformation as a lean consultant after joining me in Japan, not just once, but twice, and you can go back and listen to his story in episode 49, and then it’s about how do we make this work meaningful everyone and having a meaningful impact in society.

This word meaningful came up over and over again in the survey as well, and expresses the deeper connection to something that’s about doing good for the world. Here are just a few things that people in the survey had to say. It aligns with who I am. I wanna leave places better than I found them. It’s about creating [00:10:00] meaningful results for people in performance.

It’s about making a real difference for people. It’s about people going home with the good, tired, the kind that comes from doing meaningful work. Not battling bureaucracy. This work matters. I wanna be part of something that matters. There’s nothing more satisfying than walking through a workplace and seeing the impact of what we help make possible.

We love this work because we know it works. Lean and continuous improvement is our way to create results through people, through learning. We know that when you empower people, everything improves quality, engagement, customer service, so much more. So we love this work, and yet we’re frustrated. Here’s what came through loud and clear in the survey.

Our number one frustration isn’t about tools. It’s not about frameworks. It’s not about process improvement either. It’s the challenge of getting leadership buy-in. We know what good looks like, we know what works. We know that [00:11:00] Lean is about more than just short-term cost cutting and operational improvement, but we struggle to get others, especially senior leaders, to buy into this vision and see the empowering people to solve problems and improve, including giving them the time and space to do so.

Is the way to get results over and over again. Survey respondents said the biggest barrier they faced was ownership by leaders trying to get management to buy in. Management isn’t convinced. Leadership doesn’t believe in it or doesn’t care. Non-believers in high power positions, leadership, disinterest in transformation, just lip service.

You’ve probably felt this too. Leaders saying they support lean or continuous improvement, but then don’t show up. Or they don’t bottle the behavior or they don’t provide clarity or alignment on real priorities. There isn’t time for any improvement work. Short-term KPIs get in the way of long-term transformation.

Leaders push for results without knowing or supporting the process. They’re focused on something else other than the change we [00:12:00] know will get them the results they want. If only they could first change their mindset and approach. And I wanna be careful here not to label these leaders as resistors. It’s rather that we have not yet been successful in showing them that a different approach is possible and will lead to the very results that they want.

And we have to help them get out of short-term thinking and create capacity for leaders and teams, including themselves to engage in improvement work, not just expecting to fit it into the margins. We are frustrated that we can’t seem to get leaders, especially those senior leaders, to see what it really means to empower problem solving at the front lines and build a people centered learning culture.

We’ve proven that the technical tools work to improve processes. What stops us from leading real organizational transformation is influence. Here’s the deeper truth. We’re trying to influence a mindset [00:13:00] shift in organizations. Are built on command and control management cultures. Our impact doesn’t come from just using problem solving tools and fixing process problems.

In the short term, it’s about operating from a fundamentally different belief system about people and leadership. What we’re trying to do is to change mindsets and shift behaviors, and that’s hard. Most of our workplaces still operate from a theory X mindset that Douglas McGregor described nearly 70 years ago, where managers think they need to control everything and solve everything themselves, and that employees won’t improve.

Less forced. We’re asking leaders here to do something different. Lean is really rooted in theory y, the belief that people want to contribute and grow. And that when we create the right environment, the right conditions, people at all levels can and should solve problems. [00:14:00] And that’s what Toyota figured out.

They are fundamentally a theory y culture, it’s why they get results and continue to do so over decades. They’re based on this condition of people-centered learning. As I share in my book, “Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn”. The power of lean is the belief in people. It’s the attitude towards learning.

It’s the people-centered learning culture, not just the tools that make the difference. And Toyota demonstrated that it is possible to make this shift from a theory X management culture to a theory Y one as exemplified by their joint venture with General Motors and the NUMMI transformation back in the 1980s, which Isao Yoshino And I explore in episode 50 of this podcast.

Where the command and control culture of GM was transformed to the people focused learning theory y culture of Toyota in less than one year with incredible business results. This shift in management mindset, this [00:15:00] change from theory X to theory Y, is why I believe lean so often fails. As I talked about with Jim Womack in episodes 37 and 38, where leaders outsource lean and opex to internal or external consultants without fundamentally shifting away from a classical management approach.

I believe it’s the driver of our number one frustration about getting buy-in and ownership of lean management with senior leaders when we try to insert the problem solving tools and processes that Toyota leverage for its success. Because it was founded in an empowered problem solving culture into a command and control culture without the underlying belief in empowering people to use the tools and solve problems at the local level, it doesn’t work.

And this is perhaps the biggest root cause of our failure of seeing so many genuine lean transformations in the West. This is really significant change that we’re trying to lead. We’re trying to influence a pervasive and deeply ingrained mindset about management and leadership. [00:16:00] Here’s the paradox.

Sometimes we become the very thing we’re trying to change. We’re representing those very conditions that we’re trying to shift in our organizations. We come in as the expert problem solvers, the continuous improvement team taxed with OPEX projects and cost cutting. We fall into the doer trap. We try improve value by solving problems ourselves, project by project, not by actually empowering, equipping that capability in the people who own the work, the employees, the team leads, the managers, the leaders.

We don’t always know how to shift others out of that command and control mindset because we haven’t fully shifted out of it ourselves. We have to first start with ourselves by learning how to break the telling habit and get out of the doer trap ourselves. You can learn more about both the doer trap and the telling habit in episodes 13 and 14.

This shift from being the fixer to enabler [00:17:00] is powerful. That’s where real transformation happens. It starts with us. So what can we do? We’re frustrated and we’re passionate. Here are three practical things that you can start to do to shift the story and the system. First, it’s about acknowledging the size of the challenge.

This is significant change that we’re taking on. It’s not just about implementing tools or solving process problems. We’re confronting an opposing management mindset. We’re going against the grain of established organizational cultures that most of us work in. It’s about shifting decades and maybe centuries of management mindsets.

It’s hard. It’s okay to be frustrated. We need compassion for ourselves and the systems we’re working in and the leaders we’re trying to influence to change as well. Again, it’s not that they’re resistors, they too are ingrained in a system that reinforces theory X and classical [00:18:00] management approaches our mission.

We have to figure out how to influence them to change and lead in a different way. One of the best ways to do this is my second recommendation. So number two is speak the language of business. Stop trying to get leaders to love lean because you love lean. We have to stop talking in lean and continuous improvement jargon of leading with the tools and saying we need to do an A3 or a Kamii BA board or level load the system or practice Toyota Kata.

Start with showing leaders how this work helps them achieve what they care about. Results. ROI, customer satisfaction growth. Help them frame up the business problems that they need to solve, and then show how empowered problem solving and leading with a people first attitude will get them there. This challenge in positioning and framing lean is something I explored in depth recently with Betsy Jordan in a bonus episode for both of our podcasts.

You [00:19:00] can check the link in the show notes if you wanna hear more about our thoughts about how you can reposition yourself and lean in your organization. And one of the best recent examples of how a leader did this effectively comes from a recent participant and lean leader who joined me on my Japan leadership experience.

Gustavo helped his executive team and senior leaders see that business results were directly influenced by their approach to people. But he didn’t lead with suggesting implementing a lean tool or process redesign. He helped them see that business problems they were experiencing, low employee engagement, productivity, quality, and cost issues could be a result of their leadership mindset and behaviors.

Gustavo told me that before joining the Japan Leadership Experience, his company talked about a people first attitude, but really prioritize output and cost in their daily management metric boards and gemba walks. When he returned, having been inspired by seeing some of the incredible people focused learning organizations and talking with their leaders that are [00:20:00] part of the Japan leadership experience, he had a new mindset shift for himself and he challenged his leaders to flip the order of their priorities of how they talked about quality, delivery, service and more.

And the last metric had been people and they moved it from last to first and within three months. Employee engagement jumped 20 points and it’s continued to grow. And they saw that productivity increased, cost dropped, and quality improved as well. Why? Because when people feel cared by their leaders, they deliver the results.

And Gustavo said this simple shift by truly leading with people first is what was able to drive the operational metrics that his leaders cared about most, and it got them engaged in this different way of leading. You can hear Gustavo share his story in one of the links in the show notes, so be sure to check that out.

And the third thing that you can do to start making inroads with this is pairing your technical [00:21:00] process improvement skills with these influence and human focus skills. To lead this change, we have to balance technical problem solving, which we are already very strong at, and love with the influence and social skills to actually lead this big change.

It’s not just about delivering the process improvement results. Which of course is part of what you need to do, but it’s about how you bring people along at all levels. It’s how you’ll actually be able to influence leaders and get buy-in, and this is why I created the Katalyst Change Leader Model Katalyst with a K, because transformation doesn’t happen from the tools alone.

It’s about knowing how to effectively speak the language of business, build coalitions and influence without authority, navigate organizational politics and coach leaders to shift mindsets and develop new habits. If you haven’t already, you can download the Katalyst Change Leader Self-assessment at k bj anderson.com/Katalyst, spelled with a K to learn more about all of these eight competencies and [00:22:00] skills that you need to master to lead the change.

And be sure to go check out episode nine where I dive into them in greater detail. So let’s bring it back to where we started. We love this work, the work of lean and continuous improvement. We love solving meaningful problems. We love empowering people. We love seeing impact, meaningful and tangible impact, but we’re also frustrated because we know it’s possible, and yet we run into resistance, misunderstanding, or indifference.

We often feel like we’re pushing a boulder up a hill. I started this podcast in part to explore these tensions and to help us all become more effective, more connected, and more intentional change leaders. It’s really about building and growing our chain of learning. I wanna say thank you to the over a hundred change practitioners who took the time to share their reflections in the survey, as well as the global leaders who have joined me on the Japan leadership experience and provided input into similar questions.

The themes are consistent, and I bet your answers to my questions at the beginning of the show reflect this too. We love this work. [00:23:00] We’re passionate about solving problems, empowering people to solve problems, and making meaningful impact. Now we need to influence the change more broadly. We need to move from transactions to transformation.

We have to move from doers to enablers, and we have to be able to articulate the importance of shifting from theory X of command and control and classical management to theory y. Empowered problem solving at all levels. We have a vision for what people-centered learning culture can create, and we need to help others come on board and lead this change too.

We need to lead with greater influence. As you reflect on this episode, consider how you can grow as a change Katalyst to influence and accelerate the rate of change in your organization and to overcome these challenges and frustrations. Again, I invite you to take the change Katalyst self-assessment and choose one influence skill that you need to grow to be more effective.

Practice this coming week on how you frame position and lead in your organization and with your clients, and then reflect and learn. [00:24:00] The best way to lead change is to start with the changes you need to make in yourself. And if you need outside support for yourself or your leaders or team to help as you grow and expand your influence skills, and lead this important change, I’d be happy to help.

One of the many ways I help organizations is by growing and supporting their internal change teams, by developing the coaching, facilitation, and influence skills needed to pair with technical process improvement skills to really create these thriving people-centered learning cultures. You can learn more about my trusted advisor coaching and learning experiences on my website, k bj anderson.com, and the link is on the show notes.

And I’m also excited to share that one of the projects that this Change Leader Survey helped provide input to is further building out resources to help you develop these change Katalyst skills. Stay tuned for updates here on the podcast and be sure to download the Change Katalyst self-assessment or sign up for my [email protected] slash newsletter.

Together we can influence this change that we all envision and create the [00:25:00] positive impact we wanna see in the world. Thanks for being a link in my Chain of learning. If this episode resonated with you, please share it with the Fellow Improvement leader and take a moment to rate and review the podcast so that we can all grow our chain of learning together.

I’ll see you next time. Have a great day.