Por: Lando T. Nishida     3213 visualizações     Tempo leitura: 6 min

Most organizations fail in their practices for troubleshooting, since they don't have a good quality analysis of the root cause and in their Kaizen activities and not emphasize small Kaizen as a natural process during daily activities.

We suggest some changes in the attitudes of leaders to encourage continuous improvement.

1. Listen to people appropriately. For this you should forget your position / title and listen as if you were on the same level with the other person who is talking to you. Try to listen with full attention to the other making this discourse far more important than yours. Control your ego and do not put yourself as the center of conversation, minimize your own ideas, do not demonstrate that you have the solution and your ideas are how things should be. We tend to be attached to our views and try to convince others, rather than give undivided attention to the other person and understand from their point of view. We must free ourselves from our judgments and allow others to express their opinion freely. But even if we do hear properly, it would not be enough if we don't behave adequately.

2. Ask the right questions (simple questions). It will be even better if each question has a clear purpose. Some examples:

• To get information: Can you tell me more about it? Can you tell me what really happened? What else can you remember about it? Encourage the person to define the problem clearly.
• To understand the other person point of view is or what are her values: What do you think? Where do you think we need to focus? Instead of telling her where to focus. Encourage the person to have a perception of objectives, goals connected to KPIs. In this case, it means that these goals and objectives must be clear to them at their level.
• To make connections on two or more questions: How does this relate to what you said earlier about xyz? Here, encourage them to think and establish a relationship of cause and effect between each fact and practice their ability to root cause analysis.
• To promote ideas: What options do we have? What options are available for this? What could you do? What ideas do you have? Here, encourage them to establish a connection between each idea or countermeasure with each root cause. Make sure she is not jumping to the solution.
• To influence decisions: So what did you decide to do? Which option would you want to check first? Here, again, encourage the person to understand or explain what the reason for each decision is. It could be, for example, based on stratification using Pareto.
• To influence a person to act: What could you do about it now? (Here, encourage the people to develop an implementation plan).
• To prepare people to overcome barriers to take action: So what could stop us in this task? How do you overcome that? How can we do this and still keep it working? What kind of support do you need for it?
• To help the person to come to a conclusion: What are your thoughts about it now? What conclusions are you getting at now? What are your feelings about that? What have you learned from this? This could be applied to test their learning as the verification of the actual root cause or effective countermeasure, etc.

For all these questions, we can finalize with:

Think about it and tell me what your opinion is, I'll come back later. Set a regular time. For example, if you usually go to the factory floor every morning, tell everyone to talk about their thoughts the next morning, or if you often find them during the production meeting, ask them to talk about their thoughts after the meeting etc. This perception of periodicity to receive opinions will create a sense of routine or habit for them. And you must go back again to listen to their opinions.

You don't need to do all these questions at once. It could be in parts, in different shifts, in different days. What we're doing here is to train people to think systematically through the PDCA. Forms can be used to support your thought process. But the frequent dialogue is essential (instead of using only forms and correcting them later).

The principle is: the role of the leader makes employees successful in their work, providing the skills and resources required to achieve success. The above dialogue is already a way to develop your skills and creativity of PDCA during a normal work. At the same time, it is a way to practice coaching skills and learning from them, better understanding of the process and their details, which will help us to have better quality on daily issues.

In a practical way:

1. When managers go to the factory floor and pass through areas considered a priority (instead of spending time in an area where there are no emergencies).

2. Start thinking:

• Ideally ... (in other words, should this be so?).
• However, the problem is ... (and go for those items talking with the local team).
• So, we have this (s) countermeasure (s) ...
• But ... we still have to solve those problems (it will take us to the next troubleshooting or issues to do Kaizen).

Sometimes, in the beginning, you may not know which question to ask. Usually this is an indicator that we are confused in our own thinking PDCA or did not understand the real problem, so the PDCA is not structured in our mind yet. So that means we need to listen more, gather more facts and go see (Gemba).

I propose that during an activity go to Gemba or audit Standard Work, 5S or simply when you find some abnormal situation in Gemba, practice the itens above. It is recommended to practice these questions before between managers and colleagues. Doing them improperly can cause frustration in your team, making it difficult to put the questions into practice again. People might think "Oh, there they come again with those questions..."

This coaching process should be something natural during a natural conversation. So, that the answers also come naturally and creativity, as well as motivation, appears naturally. We are trying to model the thought process to follow the PDCA. In the end, managers will have time to do their jobs, instead of extinguishing fires or be connected with daily problems. They will have a team that can solve problems and do Kaizen systematically.

Portuguese source: Lean Institute Brasil

Data da publicação: 11/28/2011

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