Lean management: lean thinking, leadership and daily practice

What is lean management?

Lean management is a way of running an organization based on lean principles. It focuses on customer value, flow, visible problems and continuous improvement by the people who do the work.

Lean tools such as 5S or kanban can work for a while without it. Without daily management habits, though, gains tend to slip back.

Respect for people sits at the center. Jeffrey Liker's book The Toyota Way describes Toyota's approach as principles of philosophy, process, people and problem solving.

Lean thinking: the mindset behind lean management

Lean thinking is the way of seeing work that lean management is built on. James Womack and Daniel Jones named it in their 1996 book Lean Thinking, with five principles: value, value stream, flow, pull and perfection.

For a manager, lean thinking changes the questions. Instead of asking who made a mistake, ask which part of the process allowed it. Instead of asking how to make each department busier, ask how to make the whole value stream flow.

It also treats plans as hypotheses. Every change is a test, run with PDCA, checked against what actually happened, then adopted or adjusted.

The lean methodology guide explains the principles and where they came from.

Principles of lean management

Start from the customer. Every process exists to deliver value to someone, and that value sets priorities.

Go and see. Leaders understand problems by visiting the gemba, the place where the work happens, rather than by reading reports.

Make problems visible. Boards, andon signals and simple metrics show when something is off, so it can be fixed quickly.

Solve problems at the root, using a scientific method such as PDCA.

Develop people. The leader's job is to build the problem-solving ability of the team, not to solve every problem personally.

The daily management system

A daily management system is the routine that keeps a team focused on performance and problems every day. It has three parts.

A tier 1 board and huddle: an example

Here is an illustrative tier 1 board for a production team. Many boards use the SQCDP layout: one column each for safety, quality, cost, delivery and people.

Each column shows the target, yesterday's result and a simple mark for each day of the month, green for met and red for missed. Under the columns sits an action list with four headings: problem, owner, due date and status. A last strip holds problems sent up to tier 2 and the answer that came back.

A 10-minute huddle at that board might run like this. The team lead opens on safety: "No injuries yesterday. One near miss at the forklift crossing. Sam, you raised it, what did you see?" Then quality: "Two parts failed the leak test on the late shift. Priya, can you check the seal batch by 9 and report back at tomorrow's huddle?"

Delivery and cost come next: "We made 410 against 420, short because of 25 minutes waiting for material. That goes to tier 2, as we can't fix supply from here." Last, people: "Ali is on training this afternoon, so Jo covers station 3." The lead closes by reading back the new actions and owners.

Notice what the huddle leaves out. It doesn't solve problems on the spot or hunt for blame. Problems get an owner and a time, and the ones the team cannot fix go up a tier the same day.

Leader standard work

Leader standard work is a defined routine for supervisors and managers. David Mann's Creating a Lean Culture names it one of the four main elements of a lean management system, with visual controls, a daily accountability process and leadership discipline.

It typically includes gemba walks, reflection meetings, responding to andon calls, following up on accountability and mentoring people.

The routine shifts managers from being the main problem solvers to building that capability in their teams. It also makes the management system itself easy to check and improve.

Here is an illustrative leader standard work sheet for a team lead on a day shift. Times and checks will differ in your area, but the shape is typical.

6:45. Walk the area before the shift starts: are people, materials and machines ready? Note anything missing on the board.

7:00. Run the tier 1 huddle at the team board, 10 minutes at most.

7:30. Check the first-hour result against the plan and confirm the first parts passed inspection.

Every 2 hours. Fill in the hour-by-hour chart with the team and write a reason next to any missed hour.

Daily, 10:00. Audit one standard work sheet or one 5S area, and spend 15 minutes on one open action with its owner.

Daily, 13:30. Take the team's unsolved problems to the tier 2 huddle.

End of shift. Hand over open actions and anything abnormal to the next team lead, then tick off this sheet. The supervisor reviews the ticked sheets once a week and asks about the gaps.

Lean leadership

Lean leaders build people who can find answers, instead of supplying the answers themselves. The leader sets the direction, makes problems safe to raise and coaches the team through solving them.

Lean leaders spend time at the gemba. They ask what the standard is, what is happening now and what the team has tried, then help remove what blocks the team.

They coach with structure. An A3 gives leader and problem solver a shared page to discuss. Mike Rother's book Toyota Kata describes a coaching routine of short, regular questions about the target, the current condition and the next experiment.

They respond well to bad news. If raising a problem leads to blame, people stop raising problems, and the management system goes blind.

Continuous improvement as a habit

Lean management expects improvement every day, not only in big projects. Small ideas from the front line add up.

Kaizen covers both daily small changes and focused kaizen events. Kaizen software helps collect ideas, track them and share results.

Larger problems use A3 thinking. The A3 report gives leaders a structured way to coach rather than dictate.

The continuous improvement in lean guide covers how to keep improvement going after the first wave.

Linking strategy to the floor

Hoshin kanri, or strategy deployment, picks a few breakthrough objectives and links them to the work of each team.

Leaders and teams agree goals through catchball, a back-and-forth discussion, so targets are both ambitious and realistic.

An X-matrix shows on one page how long-term goals, yearly objectives, projects and metrics connect. The X-matrix guide shows how to build one.

Hoshin kanri software and OKR software can track this across a large organization.

Lean management examples

The routines look much the same in very different settings. These short examples show what lean management can look like day to day.

In a factory, a production manager starts each shift with a walk along the line, stopping at each team board. One board shows a repeat jam at a press, so the manager asks the team lead what they have tried and agrees who will run a five whys that afternoon. The lean manufacturing guide covers the shop-floor side.

In a hospital ward, nurses hold a short huddle at a board that shows patient flow and safety issues. A recurring delay in discharge paperwork goes to the next tier, where pharmacy and the ward agree a fix. Virginia Mason in Seattle is a well-known case of a hospital that built its management system on the Toyota Production System.

In an office, a claims team tracks work on a kanban board with limits on work in progress. Their manager reviews the oldest items each morning and removes blockers, rather than chasing individual output.

In a software company, leaders use hoshin kanri to pick a few company goals for the year and review progress with each team every month.

Common pitfalls

Treating lean as a cost-cutting program. If improvements lead to job cuts, people stop suggesting them.

Copying tools without the management system. Boards that nobody reviews, or 5S that nobody audits, decay quickly.

Leaders who stay in the office. Without regular gemba walks, leaders lose touch with real problems.

Too many priorities. Hoshin kanri works because it says no to most things.

How to start

Pick one team and set up a simple board with a few measures that matter to the customer. Hold a short huddle at it every day.

Write a basic leader standard work routine for the team lead, including a daily gemba walk. Review the routine after a month and adjust it.

Escalate problems the team cannot solve, and close the loop when they are fixed. Then repeat with the next team.

For the shop-floor side of lean, read the lean manufacturing guide. For the underlying principles, see lean methodology.

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