Most of us have experienced a coaching relationship as we sought to improve our organizations — receiving instruction and advice and/or helping others expand their capabilities. The question is, given the number coaches and coaching styles out there, were those interactions effective and the relationship conducive to learning? Not all coaches are cut out for the work, not all learners are willing to, well, learn, and sometimes the fit between a capable coach and willing learner doesn’t match. If you’re looking to improve your coaching relationships as the recipient or giver, Karen Gaudet, LEI Senior Coach, who has been working with LEI co-partner organizations for more than a decade, offers some perspectives of what works and what doesn’t as she and LEI President Josh Howell explore her 30 years of coaching.
Karen was the regional director of operations with Starbucks in New England, and since then her understanding of lean, for many reasons, has reached “a whole different dimension” and her depth of knowledge continues to grow. The reason, she says, is “primarily the number of people that have poured into me, the different other coaches and leaders from Toyota and other organizations have mentored and coached me over time. This has really made the depth of my understanding paramount. [As] you get into the coaching role, coaching others, it drives you to go deeper in your own understanding, and you’re able to actually realize the different dimensions of what you do understand or don’t understand to the degree where people start to say back to you, ‘Wow, you really understand what you’re talking about.’”
She’s come to realize that it’s a natural progression of being able to adjust situationally in the moment based on what the learner needs at the time and not necessarily what she thinks they need. “I’m much more apt to converge those things today than I could in the beginning, where I was aware of what was happening, I was registering what I was doing, and I was practicing really diligently. It just didn’t have the same level of depth as 15 years, 20 years of experience now has given me with the number of people I’ve had the opportunity and gift to learn from.”
Open Eyes and Engage Everyone
One aspect of getting executives to trust the knowledge and advice of a lean coach is getting them to recognize problems “that have been hiding in plain sight” and not being dealt with, says Josh. “How oblivious we all tend to be to the problems around us, problems in our work, problems affecting our colleagues and the work we do with and for them, problems that are affecting our customers. You know, you just need somebody to prompt you to take a look and to see and to recognize these things as problems that … you can now act upon. It’s not just a problem to wallow in, but a problem to do something about.”
Karen says she experiences this frequently when coaching, and it goes back to having a “beginner’s mind. And it is really through that activity of having a coach or someone other than you help guide you into seeing things with a different lens that really opens up that part of your thinking that has been hidden in your day to day, every single day, all the time.”
As a coach, she’s also found that she needs to encourage broad engagement early in a company’s lean journey, extending it beyond a single leader or just the operations function. Her recent work at Viwinco, a high-volume manufacturer of custom windows and doors, involved getting all department heads, especially Human Resources, on board from the start with lean thinking.
“As I was introduced to Viwinco, I suggested to them that they fully engage their HR leader and anyone who was on that team to learn what was happening. They could be ahead of what was happening for those [on the team they support] from an administrative perspective, but even from a performance review perspective or helping to actually hire new team members that would join Viwinco into the future,” says Karen. “And thankfully, Mike Duncan, the CEO, took me up on that, and they’ve been fully engaged the entire time. So they have learned how to do process improvement, they’ve performed improvement activities on the line, they’re there every single time right next to me, developing the training material, coaching the leaders who are actually on the line. They provide active coaching.”
Since 2020, the year before LEI started co-learning with Viwinco, the value of the business has increased by 12X, grounded in operations improvements, such as on-time in-full delivery increasing from 80% to 95%; defects reduced by 34%; and safety issues (days away, restricted, or transferred) decreased by 68%. The company now makes more profit in a month than it did in a year, and revenues have nearly doubled.
Apply the Lean Transformation Framework
Every co-learning partner is different and their lean journeys are different. Nonetheless, Josh asks Karen if there is a model approach she tries to use when coaching, engaging, and supporting organizations: “What are some of the things you do on a good day?”
“I have to say that based on my own personal development with other coaches, and yourself included and John [Shook], I tend to think in the format of the Lean Transformation Framework [LTF],” responds Karen. “It’s running through my head, in the back of my mind, at all times. And so when I’m engaging with leaders — and it doesn’t matter whether they’re executives or a leader from the frontline or the operator — the questions that are rolling through my head are based on what this person is sharing with me. What is the problem that they’re trying to solve? And I go through each one of the dimensions of the framework in my head.”
All five dimensions of LTF must be pursued for a successful lean transformation and cannot be treated as à la carte elements from which to choose. Each of the dimensions is based on a question that leaders should ask of themselves and their organizations; the questions work at the macro enterprise level or the level of individual responsibility:
- What is the value-driven purpose? Or what is the problem to solve?
- What is the work to be done (to solve the problem)?
- What capabilities are required (to do the work to solve the problem?)
- What management system — operating system and leadership behaviors — is required?
- What basic thinking, including mindsets and assumptions, is required by the organization as a purpose-driven socio-technical system?
Her work at Viwinco eventually covered all the LTF dimensions:
- The problem was that the company needed more capacity and to improve quality. “They were under significant pressure for growth and just continually pushing as much inventory through their process as they could,” says Karen.
- Observing processes on one line pinpointed capacity issues and substantial waste, especially excessive inventory. “We identified significant problems within how the processes were actually acting and the waste that was in the process step and what the operator was doing, as well as the inventory that was hiding all of the quality issues and problems that were causing rework.” Improvements led to the development of a model line and insights from that work also were incorporated into a new glass-processing facility.
- Assessing and improving the frontline work led leaders to recognize “the capability that was needed for the team members, which then informed that they didn’t necessarily have a team leader position or the right kind of management structure to help support the problem solving that was needed within the work process.” Karen says they established “development programs for team leaders, supervisors, plant managers, and executives. They’ve all learned problem solving at different levels.”
- The clear need for a “management structure” led to the development of the Viwinco Performance System to align and support the various roles and connect day-to-day actions with strategic goals.
- As leadership began to understand the business as a whole, it became possible to strategically plan for the business as a whole: hoshin kanri was established and helped leadership set key operations and cultural goals going forward. The initial work to engage all functions in the lean transformation helped align management around annual targets.
Exploring the five LTF dimensions with those she’s coaching requires a “really authentic, straightforward discussion,” and she will occasionally need to stop a conversation to make that happen. “If a leader is trying to tell me, convey something to me, and I am feeling as if they are trying to tell me what they think I want to hear, I will tend to break the conversation down at that point, slow it down: ‘[Can we] just talk really real with each other?’ Sometimes it can be a real raw conversation.”
Karen says it’s not unusual early in an engagement to find leaders who are hesitant to discuss issues because they fear exposing a problem that exists in work for which they are responsible. “There’s a kind of a filter that gets placed on what they’re saying or what they feel is maybe safe to say, and they don’t know me yet enough. Usually in the beginning, we don’t have enough rapport built up yet.” Getting leaders to overcome their apprehension eventually helps her to establish lasting relationships based on trust, which then allows effective improvement activities to take place.
Move Beyond the Traditional Approach and Learn with the Learner
It’s common to approach a problem as we always have, believing a fix that worked in the past will work again. Leaders will admit to a problem, but then mistakenly think they fully understand what’s occurring and then apply a traditional approach to a newly designed method of work, says Karen. “I did the exact same thing myself back in the day and realized that it didn’t work. And so then you’re faced with your first personal failure at that point.” In such instances, they’ve been part of an improvement activity and come to realize it cannot be sustained. “They’re realizing it’s them, and there’s something they need to maybe do differently. That’s the first failure point.”
Addressing that first failure point with a learner and getting them to think differently can be challenging, but it’s absolutely necessary for a coaching relationship and improvement to continue. Karen discussed current work with a manufacturer, which also illustrates her earlier point about providing what the learner needs: she and group leaders had developed a week of improvement activities and engaged and educated frontline teams. Yet despite a well-planned scope and preparation, not everyone was pleased: the leader of one of the focus areas felt his team was “under the microscope” and being picked on.
Karen says she listened carefully and gave him time to argue his point and, in a flash, realized he was facing his own moment of truth as she had once done. “I remember so clearly myself from many, many years ago when I was first introduced to my own kind of traditional management approaches and realizing that I had many problems to work through that I had responsibility for, and I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to solve for them. And here was a group of people from outside coming in thinking they had all the answers to solve all these problems that I didn’t even realize I had.”
The leader and Karen then went off to the side and started to talk about how to potentially adjust the activities. Through listening to him, engaging him more deeply on the experiments that were planned, and factually presenting the problems that he and his area were experiencing, they “were able to actually work together to understand what to do differently,” says Karen. “And we adjusted the approach at that point. He became the leader and the designer of the improvement activities that we were doing … and also proceeded to actually help design the system-level improvement that came after the individual process improvements. So it all ended up very successful.”
It’s situations like this that can make Karen or any coach ask, “Do I really know what I’m talking about?” She says she was able to “learn from this leader. I gave him an opportunity to really express his frustration and fear. You can never be too confident in what you think you know. You’ve got to stay open to getting the cold water in the face.”
Is there a way for a coach and learner to avoid such conflicts? Josh asks if there are questions asked of coaches that could or should be asked sooner during co-learning to accelerate improvement. Left unsaid: should coaches be pulling those questions from those with whom they’re working? Karen’s immediate answer is sort of a “No” because she believes things happen for a reason, “and the questions get asked when they’re ready to be asked.” What could be helpful, however, is leaders asking, “What am I learning?” and seeking advice on how to reflect on what they’re learning. “That’s one approach. It can help to have a coach or someone else actually ask you those questions and the tough questions to help you go deeper,” she says. “I think it increases the velocity of the uptake of the learning.”
“It certainly is always a welcome change when that hiring leader or that upper-level leader starts engaging in questions that relate to themselves and their own behavior and their own role in both creating the problems that people are struggling with and then solving those problems, fixing those problems,” says Josh. “[It was a] really good point that it will happen when they’re ready for it to happen.”
Ask More of Coaches
As Karen works with leaders, she sees them challenging their teams and organizations to improve. But she doesn’t think they necessarily challenge her enough. They respect her as an “expert that’s brought in” who will guide them and reveal the path to getting desired results, and, as such, may be hesitant to push back.
“I really appreciate a leader that will challenge me as the coach, who won’t just take what I’m saying because I’m saying it. That they will really push against it and bat it up against the wall and wrestle with it to try to make it their own. I really appreciate that.” She wants leaders to be as hard on her as they are on their own teams, and that’s usually not the case.
Content revisions and additions to an early draft suggested by AI.
Bring a Co-Learning Partner Into Your Lean Journey
Karen coached Viwinco through its own problems rather than prescribing answers, and the company grew its value 12X.
That is the premise of a co-learning partnership with LEI: coaches who work shoulder-to-shoulder with your team on a real business objective and leave your people able to keep improving on their own. See how a partnership could work for your organization.
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