Management Café #23: Applying Lean Thinking to your Leadership Practice

A first for this podcast, Pilar has a conversation with a guest! It was recorded a while ago, but like all the Management Café episodes, the content is evergreen, so we hope you’ll enjoy it.

Anish Hindocha is, in his words, a “lean consultant, with a slight bent towards culture transformation”.

Lean thinking takes the lean principles developed by Toyota, outside of the production industry, from how you orientate a strategy to how teams problem-solve.

Lean turns the traditional hierarchical organisation on its head, asking who knows most about where the organisations problems are. (It’s the people doing the work!) and has trust and team work at its core.

Is it about adopting a certain mindset? Lean organisations are usually learning organisations.

What are some of the principles we can adapt as managers? We can look at the principles, eg. define value from the point of view of the customer. Then we begin to challenge what we’re doing, looking for “waste” and making tiny improvements to our process.

At a time when many teams and organisations are designing a new way of working, adopting some of these principles can save us time and energy in the future.

Lean is not just about processes and techniques, but it’s more fundamentally about people.

Anish Hindocha

Embracing lean needs a growth mindset, not hiding from problems and mistakes, and noticing them to spot opportunities for opportunities. It needs to be ok to spot and flag mistakes, and addressing mistakes become a way of embracing the learning journey.

Anish tells the story of a department who’d never had half an hour with the business director (four layers up) before he organised a meeting with them. It was an eye opener for him, hearing some of the problems and solutions they were raising directly from them, which he’d never heard before.

The push for sustainability and purpose-led organisations could be the future of where lean thinking goes. After all, lean is about connecting people, process and purpose.

For more on lean thinking read The Machine that Changed the World by Womack, Jones and Roos and Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed, which is not about lean, but about learning from mistakes. Also, Rebel Ideas.

You can connect with Anish on LinkedIn and check out his website, www.jigsawconsulting.co.uk/ .