Today's blog is going to focus on the issue of training within a lean organisation; from experience I find that companies tend to fall into two distinct groups when it comes to training:
- Sniper
- Shotgun
'Sniper' firms have a lean focus, usually as a result of the owner or Director(s) adopting a top down lean approach on behalf of the organisation, as such they concentrate 100% of their training efforts in educating its staff on lean tools, trying to 'batch process' as many staff as possible into one of their training courses (green belt/ black belt/ practitioner/ sensei certification).
In contrast 'Shotgun' firms often have not yet adopted a organisation-wide lean approach or if they have it is at grass roots level and has not yet had the full 'buy in' and acceptance from the management of the company. This approach tends to train members of staff on a wide range of disciplines from customer service, to complaints handling, marketing, management or specialist courses (i.e. accountancy or other specialist skills); these types of firms rarely have any dedicated resource to training in lean principles by the very nature of the organisation.
So which is the right approach? The answer (as I am sure many of you have guessed) is that there is no such thing as the right approach; this would depend entirely on the organisational culture and the industry context, however I will say while many lean consultants would err towards what I have termed the sniper approach there are a number of benefits for the alternative.
By training up members of staff in areas other than lean, employees can feel engaged in the organisation, in addition the company can adapt the training requirements to the needs of the individual and the company which provides a wider skills base than offering lean training in isolation. In addition this can greatly influence kaizen activities as those involved will be able to introduce ideas to the kaizen committee that would not have afforded themselves in a 'lean only' organisation; these ideas will be of particular importance where the member of staff has received specialist training for a 'specialist' product for example, if you were producing accounting software, it would make sense if you included members of staff who were qualified or trained in some other way in accountancy principles. Do not confuse this with obtaining true VOC (Voice of Customer) data.
Lean principles are not threatened in any way by the introduction of other management techniques or knowledge of other disciplines, as such it can be healthy for organisations to tailor their training programmes to go beyond the 'vanilla' lean training.
'Respect for people' is a core part of the Lean philosophy, and how much more respectful can you get than investing time and resource into your employees to develop them in a way that not only meets business objectives, but allows individuals to flourish and realise their true potential?
With a workforce like that, can you begin to imagine what miracles could take place in your organisation?
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