Anniversary Edition: Jamie V. Parker’s Lean Leadership Journey | 056

Anniversary Edition: Jamie V. Parker’s Lean Leadership Journey | 056

Welcome to Lean Leadership for Ops Management, the podcast for leaders in ops management who want to spark improvement, foster engagement, and boost problem solving, and still get their day job done.

Here’s your host, leadership trainer, Lean enthusiast, and spy-thriller junkie, Jamie V. Parker.

Jamie V. Parker: Happy birthday to the Lean Leadership for Ops Managers Podcast. That’s right. One year ago, we launched this podcast with the first three episodes, and we published an episode every single Wednesday transcend wherein an occasional bonus episode dropped in as well. So I have a little something special today.

But first, I want to thank you. Thank you for listening, sharing, and engaging. My professional mission is to make the world of work more human. And a lot of the work I do is directly with organizations and leadership teams and executives, leaders to help them show better as leaders so that their organizations create more value, their organization delivers results, also creating an environment where people try.

Because it turns out, these are not confiding ideas. So a lot of the work I do is direct with the leadership team, training and mentoring, consulting. This podcast is another way that I fulfilled my professional mission and I get to serve individuals. Now, if you’re new to the podcast, you can so now for the next 15, 20 seconds while I talk to our regulars. If you happen to tune into the podcast and found value in this episode, let me ask for a little gift, a little birthday gift from you. Could you please leave us a rating and a review to help others find this podcast too? You can leave a rating and a review at the Apple podcast or at Podchaser.

If you head over to our show notes, processplusresults.com/podcast, and then find Episode 55 under the photo links for you to do that. Thank you for taking 5 minutes of your day to leave that rating and review.

Alright, and now for that housekeeping step, hey new folks, you can tune back in now. Recently, Chris Burnham interviewed me for the Lean Leadership Podcast. It was also

one of my favorite conversations over the last year. And so in this episode, the tables are turned and you’ll go to hear Chris put me on the spot and get my take on things in my perspective. And It truly is one of my favorite conversations, so keep this episode going. Keep your player on. Listen all the way to the end, and then reach out and let me know what your one key takeaway was.

Chris Burnham: Jamie, welcome to the podcast. We briefly touched on who you were in the intro, but can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, what you do and how lean and continuous improvement is a part of your life?

Jamie: Yeah, absolutely. I’m so excited to be here with you today, Chris, and you know, really my story is that I am a recovering command and control manager. So I grew up in operations management where you really like to hit your number, right? Your numbers hit, your numbers, hit your numbers, and it almost didn’t matter how. And so I would push and push and push because it was the only way I knew, right? I didn’t know any better.

And so I kind of just viewed, um, like leadership really as management. And I remember telling people like, gosh, you know, it’s not this hard, right? Like employment is a contract. You know, we agree to pay you this much money every two weeks, you agreed to basically do what we say, this isn’t that hard. And so that’s how I grew up and lean was part of my transition and transformation from a leadership when I really started getting into respect for people and continuous improvement along with some of my personal journey. And so, you know, kind of gone through this journey over the last 10 years to now today.

Chris: Okay. Good deal. Well, before we get started the interview, I always ask podcast guests to share with us a quote or a mantra from a favorite leader. Uh, can you tell us what your quote is and why you chose it?

Jamie: Yeah. So I actually want to share a quote from Matt Whiat who teaches at the Chapman and company leadership Institute. And I was years ago, I was attending leadership classes there and he said, um, he, this is what he said.
He said: Trust is a generative act. You have to give it to receive it.

And this was just really a big shift for me in my thinking, because if you go and Google quotes about trust, here’s what comes up. Trust is earned. Don’t lose it, right? Like all of this stuff about this trust thing, this thing you have to earn. And then you have to be really careful because it’s going to disappear at the first, the first decide of, you know, disagreement or, or issue or failure. And so this was just so different that, Hey, as a leader, we give trust first, we don’t wait for someone to earn it from us.

Chris: That is absolutely true. And everything that I’ve learned in my own experiences is it’s like, um, I’ve also found that went along the lines with that when you’re feeling mentally frustrated or your concern or whatnot, that’s you focusing on yourself. And if you take that focus off yourself and put it on the people that you’re leading it that’s, that’s when things get better for everybody right. Mentally and physically, emotionally. So that’s absolutely true about trust is something that you’ve got to give it to get it. All right. Good deal. Well, one of my goals of this podcast is to help other lean leaders resonate with your experiences. So can you kind of tell us how you took the profession on with lean and continuous improvement, kind of your transformation story?

Jamie: Absolutely. So I told you how I started. And so what happened is I actually got a promotion. So while I was in this command and control manager role, I was still getting promoted quite a bit. So I got a promotion to a new division in the organization and they were just starting to dabble in lean. Right. I said, Hey, here’s the book, the Goldmine, go read it. This is what we’re doing. Yeah. And so this is where it started and it really like, it made sense to me in my head, like this makes sense this, okay, I can understand the, how this can help us deliver more value, how we can get more work, done this, all of this makes sense. And so we were, I was getting some of these results, these initial results with improving quality and improving output and things like that.

But what I noticed several years in is that we were really kind of stuck because while we had some of these results, it really felt like we were dragging people along. I don’t get this. This makes snacking so much better. Why don’t people want to do this? And what I learned is that what we were saying, didn’t match what we were doing, because we
spent all of this time changing the way we worked on the floor, changing the way our processes were changing the workflow, changing our layouts, changing our systems.

Right. And putting in Kanban pull systems and all of that. But what we didn’t change was the way that we lead. Right. Well, yeah, we might do Gemba walks. I’m going to put air quotes. If you’re listening, I’m putting air quotes. We might do Gemba walks or tiered meetings or Kaizen events.

But we would say things like, oh, blame the process, not the person. And then we’d have a high-profile failure. And what did we do? Who ran the job? Yeah. We would say, oh yeah, we want daily improvements. And you run, you, you run the work. You’re closest to the work. We want your ideas. And someone would have shared an idea and we would explain why it wouldn’t work. And we would say, you know, gosh, we want to really focus on process improvement and being proactive. But then as leaders, we were in firefighting, reactive mode. And so what we were saying, didn’t match what we were doing. And this disconnect really created a gap for us where we kind of just hit this wall. And so the only way for us to go further, the only way for us to make a difference, to create a cultural change, to change. So that lean, wasn’t just this thing we were doing on top of everything else. But it was a way of thinking, like a way of thinking who we were is that we had to change our leadership. We had to change how we were showing up day in and day out with our people.

Chris: Yeah. I think that people, the gap that they hit or the wall they hit is when you can, you can put a lot of physical tools and hardware in place from that standpoint. But until you understand that continuous improvement as a people operating system, right. Where it’s, it’s like the software piece of that. And you’re only as good as a tool. We’ll get you with the thinking that you have. So, absolutely. Um, so you’ve had a lot of success. Can you share with us what you consider your biggest setback with lean or what your biggest struggle was and kind of what you learned from that and any pitfalls or mistakes that you want to share with the listeners?

Jamie: Yeah. So I have like story after story, after story is really a slow learner with this idea of doing lean to people. And you know, I mean, it started out with the very obvious,

right? Like things like 5s and we would go and decide where do things need to be? And it wasn’t, we weren’t doing 5s. We were just saying, here, go do this. Right. Um, and so, I mean, so starting there, but even it’s like, oh, I learned that lesson. I’m not going to do that again. But then, you know, I can remember saying, oh, we’re gonna practice leader standard work. So we were as a leadership team across all, uh, 18 plants, all of our leaders were reading David Mann’s book, right. Creating a Lean Culture. And so like, you know, we think we’re ready for leader standard work. We think that’s what we need next.

But then what we do, we got, you know, somebody from five or six plants, right. A plant manager from five or six plants to come together. And now we have this project team and I was leading it as leader. So now we, as a project team, we built these leader standard work checklists, and we decided what leaders needed to do at three or four different levels. And so we have these tier checklists and then we implemented it and it was like a complete flop. Right. I mean, never took off. Never, never really, um, went into practice anywhere. And it was, I mean, it wasn’t, you know, until a couple years later I really realized like, gosh, you know, I keep doing this because leader standard work is not about the output of the checklist or the activity. It’s about the process that the leader goes through in figuring out what are their challenges, what are the activities they should be doing? What are the obstacles that are standing in their way? Um, and so it’s the problem solving process processes, the iterative process that the individual leader or that a group of leaders is going through in their own work. That’s the value of leader standard work, not the frigging checklist. Right. And so, I mean, it was just one of those things where I just, gosh, man, that was a hard lesson. I feel like I just had to keep learning it over and over.

Chris: Yeah. My dad professor of surgery and one of the things that his students would always say, and I heard it too, growing up was you need to learn a new mistake because you’ve perfected this one, you’ve got it down, pat, you need, you need to learn a new mistake of it because you know, you’ve got this one, I think, uh, my own experience with teaching and leading and trying to help people form leader standard work is we understand our work is not about standardizing. The leaders work for them.
It’s about teaching them to standardize their own work, right. It’s like, it’s your checklist, not mine. I need, I need you to tell me what you need to have on it. Um, and all I’m here
to do is help you spot the blind spots or the corners where you may not be thinking about things.

Jamie: Yep, absolutely.

Chris: Good deal. On the flip side of that, there’s gotta be a Nirvana moment. There’s gotta be like an aha. I’ve got this, uh, with continuous improvement. What’s your aha moment with your continuous improvement journey?

Jamie: Yeah, so I remember, so we were kind of putting together training and things and having videos and testimonials and things, um, that were being done and different plants across these 18 plants. And Jen was a team member out in California and she did this video. She had been doing some improvements and she made this little video where she showed some improvements she made at work and, you know, she took out
three steps here and she did this work. And then she told the story that she said, you know, and I took 5s home just that, you know, my dad was taking care of my dad. Right. He’s sick and he’s bedridden. And I noticed that us and the caregivers were putting stuff all over the place. And so we 5s, we figured out where things should go? Where would it make it easier?

So that we always have things we never run out of things. It took us less time to care for him, which meant when I was there with him or when my mom was there with them, that they had more quality time with my dad. Right. And so that was that moment where I’m like, gosh, this stuff, man, this is a big deal. And it really helped me to understand, you know, continuous improvement, lean, like we love process, right? Like man process mapping and the eight process waste and process improvement and we process process process. And the thing is that while work is made up a process, organizations are made up of people. And so that’s what it’s about. It’s really about the people.

Chris: That is such a great story. I mean, you think about, you know, how do you create more value or how do you deliver more value value to her was quality time with that. Right. And it was like now, because of this, I got better. I get better and more quality time. That’s all right. So that’s probably the, one of the best stories that I’ve heard in this podcast ever. Right. That was, that was awesome. So virtual high five, that was, that
touched my heart. I appreciate that. Jamie, um, kind of shifting gears here to more of a hot seat type segment, I’m going to ask a couple of questions and I just want you to give that first answer that comes to your mind.

Jamie: Okay. All right.

Chris: Here we go. So the first one is, do you have a lean or continuous improvement pet peeve that you frequently see being applied or being done wrong?

Jamie: Yeah. So I think it’s all of this focus on the technical aspects. So whatever it is, give him walks, tier one meetings, Kaizen, anything, but it’s like we said, if somebody says, Hey, let’s talk about Gemba walks like, well, how often should I do them? And what should my route be and who should be there? And what’s the agenda and what does the board look like? Right. Same thing for anything. And I think we’re asking the
wrong questions. I think the question should be, how should I interact with people? How do I engage people? How do I ask better questions? How do I give encouragement? Right. How do I support, how do I interact with people in that activity? And I never get asked those questions. And so I think we’re asking the wrong questions.

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. Right. So what, who do you want to, it’s almost like you need to write out a list before you go on your walks. Who am I going to engage with today and what am I going to learn? Right. What are my goals there? Yeah. That’s a pet peeve for me too. All right. Good deal. What do you consider the most important thing that you’ve learned in your career journey so far?

Jamie: Okay, so this is a career in life. I have learned that I get to choose my thoughts. So it’s fascinating, right? Like, oh my gosh, wait. So often I think I have reacted from a place of anger, frustration and realizing I don’t have to choose that. Like, it’s, I’m having a thought, right? I’m thinking something, I’m telling myself a story, it might be
subconscious. And I get to choose a different thought, which can then create a different feeling, which leads to different action and results.

Chris: Yeah. And words matter. But the seed for the word is what starts in your head. Right. And whatever it starts in the head makes its way to the heart. So that absolutely we can’t control. We can’t control everything in our environment, but we can completely control how we react to it.

Jamie: And when we’re thinking about leadership and when I think about leadership, it might be, you know, a direct leader management type role, but it could be indirect leadership. Right. I’m an influencer. And I’m a leader that way is that, you know, think

about your, the thoughts in your head that then frame your words, your nonverbal cues, all of that. And then the influence that it’s going to have for others. Right. Because yes, they can choose their thoughts, but it just takes me more awareness. It takes more action to choose your thoughts. So it’s just this, the, you know, influence that we’re having and we get to choose. So yes, I know it can be frustrating and it can feel
negative and it can be like, oh my gosh, here we go again. But you can choose a different thought and it’s just going to trickle so far away. Right. Those, those waves, right. The ripples that we get to have.

Chris: Yeah. And one of the things, one of the things I’ve learned, my wife is a human resources manager. And so you can imagine the situations and the comments and the discussions that she has right now. And one of the best responses that I’ve learned from my wife and watching her in her professional life that, you know, to take on from my professional life is you don’t have to answer, right? You when something comes up, it’s okay to say, you know what? I want to reflect on that before I, and think about that before I get back to you. And I’m like, that’s so awesome because it puts in this pause that allows you to take emotion out of it and reflect on it and really deliver back something that’s meaningful. Right. It is an answer, right. It’s, you know, I need to reflect on that. And well, the first time I heard her do that, we were riding in the car and she said that on the phone, I was like, wow, I’ve totally, I need to do that more. Right. I need to do that more in my own life with the people that I work with.

Jamie: Oh, what a great takeaway.

Chris: Yeah. Absolutely. So, what advice would you give to someone who’s just starting out with continuous improvement? Maybe they’ve had a little bit of success, you know, but, if you were, had the opportunity to sit across from them, what would you tell them?

Jamie: I think I would say, it’s okay to go slower than you want to. Um, I think sometimes we get started and there’s all the stuff I got to do. We just, we’re so excited. Oh my goodness. And we want to do this and we want to do this, and I want to learn this, and we start to go really broad, but we don’t really go deep with anything. And I find that a lot of that learning happens through the iterative process of going deeper and deeper and deeper. And so I would just try, I guess, challenge or offer that as something
to reflect on is, well, do I want to go broad? Do I want to go deep? And is it okay if I go a little bit slower than I want to?

Chris: Yeah. Well, it’s a deliberative process. It’s like, it’s iterative. What are you learning? Right. How are you building on it? I think the onlines with, without, I see a lot
of people that they try to do way too much all at once, and there’s nothing that’s it’s like, Hey, look at all this. We’re doing said, okay, what’s the one thing that you’re best at? And just stick with that. Let’s move through that first.

Jamie: Yeah. Well, and I’ll give you a story about this. So I have a client that, I wasn’t involved with them, you know, seven years ago, or whenever they, they kind of first started their practice, but, you know, seven years ago, whenever it was, they, one of the things they put into place where some tiered daily meetings, and at some point over the years, they just kind of fell off, right. They either, you know, different lines were either not doing them or they just became rote and were just kind of standing up and repeating numbers, but they’re not helping us make better decisions. They’re not helping us raise problems. They’re not helping us improve. And so they said, Hey, you know what? We want to revisit this a little bit, but we’re going to take a whole different approach. And so they’re working instead of going all of the lines as a program, they’ve identified a few areas that they want to start with, but before they did that, they started with those mid-level managers and said, okay, well, let’s build our skills and let’s practice facilitating these types of meetings.

And so a couple of times a week they’d get into a room and they would practice with real numbers, but the leader would stand up and practice and then get feedback about how they’re engaging. And are they asking those open-ended questions? Are they giving answers? Are they doing too much directing and telling what is that like? And so it’s a much more deliberative process about what their goals are, which are to create awareness and engagement. And so they’re really focused. And yes, he takes longer. It’s going a lot slower, but it’s more meaningful and impactful.

Chris: Yeah. And it’s encouraged to teach them. I love the idea of practicing before performing, right. I mean, I think that’s that cycle of reflection. It’s like, it’s almost like a miniature PDCA or PDSA cycle before you actually run the experiment. So that’s awesome.

Jamie: One of these benefits that’s so funny to watch is how much they’re improving at receiving feedback and acting on it. Right. So it’s like, gosh, this is going to have such
an effect in other areas because they’re getting used to standing up and having people give correcting feedback and having to make adjustments on it. That was really uncomfortable. Three weeks, like three weeks ago, they were super defensive on it every time. And they’d explain it away. And now they’re really listening to it and taking it and acting on it.

Chris: Yeah. And kind of choosing our own thoughts and choosing our words and how our nonverbal cues show up. Someone I worked with whenever they got feedback that they didn’t like, they would, they would say, thank you for your feedback. And it kind of came off as you know, and, and so afterwards talking to them say, Hey, can I share some, you know, share some observations when you say it that way, this, I hear your words, but here’s what your actions say. And there, I didn’t even think about that, but yes, I was feeling that’s, what that emotion was. And so just giving them that, that outside perspective as a third party observer to the conversation allowed them to, oh, I need to think differently. I need to, I need to react differently. So even though you say, thank you for the feedback, it really comes off as I’m not interested in what you say. So for someone that’s further along in their journey, what piece of advice would you give to them?

Jamie: Seek out others perspectives. So invite people into your sandbox. Um, because I think sometimes we get further along and we feel like we start to know it and we feel like we’re becoming more expert at it. And that’s where sometimes it does become more difficult to take that feedback. And so I think that would be a good time to invite people into your sandbox, invite them to come in and give their perspectives.

Chris: That’s great advice. Powerful. Do you have a favorite book or author mentor that you would recommend to our listeners?

Jamie: So I would say I have a favorite video, and that is Simon Sinek and yes, there’s a book, but I just think the video is more, more powerful. So it’s on YouTube there’s it’s 99 U and it’s “Why Leaders Eat Last.” And that was part of me, when I was going through my transformation, there were a lot of things happening at the same time. And that was one of those was it just really resonated with me like, oh, I’m getting it. Especially for someone like me, who’s a very kind of black and white systems and
process thinker. I’m not necessarily that creative thinker and naturally, to start to understand more of those human elements in a way that just made sense for my brain.

Chris: I love Simon Sinek. Every time I listen to him, whether it’s in a Ted talk or something else, even though I’ve seen it before, I still pick up something new every time. All right. So we all know that magic wands don’t exist. Right. But if you did have a magic wand and you could fix anything with a group that you’re working with, what would be the first thing that you would wave the wand at?

Jamie: So the first thing I would wave the wand that would be to develop the competency and habit of leaders to give what I call reinforcing feedback. So, reinforcing feedback is when we recognize the helpful behaviors and particularly helpful behaviors that we’d like to see more of. But it really accomplishes a few things. First it helps us connect to the vision and the values and those big strategic things to everyday behaviors. Um, because you know, too often, these are posters on walls. And so people like, oh, we need to get those off the walls and into our culture, like, well, yeah, this is how you do it. The second thing it does is it creates an environment where people feel valued. They understand how the work they do matters and what their contribution is. And then the third thing it does is it really helps people adapt more easily.
So you’re going to have all of this change that we’re changing, the way we’re thinking, we’re changing the way we’re working. And so being able to do this helps people adapt to those changes and make adjustments in their behaviors more easily. And it’s, it’s one of those things that I think has the biggest impact with the least amount of effort. And yet we don’t do it. And I know we don’t do it for two reasons. Number one, because studies show that when we asked people, us employees, particularly you know, if they’re about recognition 82% say I’m not recognized enough for my contributions. So if you ask managers, they, oh yeah. I say, thank you all the time. Well, 82% say I’m not recognized enough. And they say specifically for my contributions. So they don’t just want attaboys. They want to know that they’re making a contribution. And the second thing is when I say this to a group, every single person nods their head. And I say, have you ever personally, or ever heard someone say something like this? You know, I do 10 things, right? Never hear a word. I do one thing wrong and never hear the end of it. Yep.
Hands raise, not everybody has that experience or knows someone that has that experience or has heard this. And that’s how I know we don’t do this enough. And so if I had a magic wand, that would be.

Chris: Great point. From other conversations I’ve been with in leadership, people talk about it, put RNR rewards and recognition and they put the reward part first. And it’s almost like you need to flip those words because you can’t have the latter without the first. And if you don’t do the first, right. Then the latter is meaningless. Right. I mean, it’s like, if you don’t recognize first and then reward, then it’s kind of, it’s empty. It’s hollow. Right. I think a lot of organizations struggle with that.

Jamie: Well, the other thing is that everyone, when people, like organizations or CEOs come to me and they say, Hey, we want help. They want help teaching our managers how to give, and correcting feedback. We need to, they need to learn how to give feedback. And, you know, I say like, gosh, you know what? I’m not going to teach them that until they first learn how to give reinforcing feedback. And really for two reasons, one is that if you learn it by reinforcing feedback first, it makes it a lot easier to learn how to give correcting feedback. Right. Because it’s the same basic idea. So let’s start with the easy part. But the second is that when you actually create an environment where, where leaders are consistently giving reinforcing feedback, then everybody is

more open to correcting feedback. They know that it’s not coming from this place of, you know, 10 things. Right. Never hear a word, one thing wrong, never hear the end of it. They know that feedback is just feedback. It’s not as big, massive problem.

Chris: Yeah. It’s a statement, right. So have you read Kim Scott’s Radical Candor if…

Jamie: No, but it’s on my bookshelf.

Chris: That book is awesome. Right? So, but it talks about the same thing as that. So on the book, it’s got the cross on it and the, the arrow up is care personally, and the arrow out is challenged directly. And the whole premise of it is, is that the more people believe that you care about them personally, the greater ability you have to challenge them directly. And it’s, it seems intuitive, but everybody misses it. Right. And it’s like, and it’s that. So that’s the difference between Radical Candor and like obnoxious
aggression, right. Where it’s just coaching with leaders and working through it with them. It’s how much time do you spend for coaching for personal development versus coaching for improvement, right? Because if you don’t have both of those, then it doesn’t work. Right?

Jamie: Absolutely. Yeah.

Chris: So Jamie, thank you for your time on our podcast. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts and experiences with our leaders, and the people that are listening to my podcast audience and thank you for your time and your contributions.

Jamie: Thank you for having me. This was a lovely conversation.

Chris: Awesome. Thank you.

>>>>

Jamie: What did you think? My goal in sharing this conversation is that you get to know me just a little bit better, and hopefully leave you with one key takeaway.

Here are two things that Chris said that stood out to me:

So one is he said, “When you’re feeling frustrated or concerned, that’s you focusing on yourself. And when you shift your focus to the people you’re leading, that’s when things get better – mentally, physically, emotionally.”

I love this reminder to focus on serving others. Because a lot of what we are doing is self awareness and self management. And that’s important. But we want to remember that the purpose of looking at ourselves is to better serve.

Now the other thing Chris is talking about, he said his Dad said, “You know, it’s time for you to learn a mistake. You’ve mastered this one.” And I love this because it is funny but is also true. Because some lessons take time to learn. You hear me say that I may be a recovering Command and Control Manager. Note that I don’t say “recovered” in the past tense. This is ongoing and still in recovery. Which means that there are times that I slip back into the old habit. And so I have to say present every day. And when I do slip back, when I do go back to some of those old behaviors, I have to be able to recognize it, apologize for it like pour myself out of it so that those behavioral habits don’t gain momentum.

But the main thing is this; we have to learn from our mistakes. But that doesn’t mean that once we make a mistake, we never ever, ever repeat it for the rest of our lives. So those were two things that Chris shared that stopped me.

So here’s your one next step: Find out what your key takeaways are like things through it, and then let me know. You can comment on LinkedIn or at our show notes, or you can shoot me an email. And, to kick off our second year of the podcast, we have a special executive series starting next week. I’m super excited about this one because you are going to hear directly from operations executives. The folks who are in the thick

of it who were trying to lead their organization, and you are going to get to hear directly from them.

So follow or subscribe, get on my email list, tell other people about it. This executive series is going to be great. Until next time.

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