Blogs and Articles

In today’s workplace, managers are required to take on more responsibilities than their predecessors in previous decades. And many of those duties centre on motivating employees and maintaining (or boosting) productivity. And while many qualities mark a good manager, one distinction that stands out is coaching. Despite the word’s sporting connotations, coaching is an art […]

Lean leaders spend an exorbitant amount of time focused on decreasing waste and increasing throughput. Why? What’s the ultimate goal here? While the primary goal is to amp up customer value and streamline the production cycle as much as possible, what is this objective driving toward? The answer is a better bottom line. And that […]

As Lean managers, part of your responsibility to your organization is to observe the value each step in the production process and look for ways it can be improved. Many Lean leaders create lofty continuous improvement plans attached to equally towering sets of goals. Unfortunately, studies over the past couple of decades show that upwards […]

Lean leaders spend a fair chunk of time trying to make their company’s processes more efficient. This harkens back to the tenet of lean management of continuous improvement, i.e. constantly evaluating each step in the process to ensure it adds to the value chain. Finding bottlenecks in a particular workflow and appropriately managing them can […]

Companies and managers who subscribe to the lean philosophy spend a significant portion of their time and effort trying to boost productivity of their teams. Whether it’s through limiting work in progress, incentivizing performance or other methods, lean leaders are continuously attempting to keep employees constantly productive. But forcing everyone’s nose to the grindstone every […]

By this point, most of our blog readers are familiar with the primary tenets of lean management. And one of the core lean principles is continuous improvement, which dictates that a lean organization should be driven to constantly innovate in an effort to improve its processes end to end. That primary lean principle feeds into […]

Many things weigh on business leaders. From choosing the right direction on projects to hiring employees, managers have to make many crucial decisions during day-to-day operations. But just because managers are running a team doesn’t mean they should wield their power any way they want. Those leaders who subscribe to the tenets of lean management […]

As we know, one of the basic principles of lean management is to optimize the production flow from beginning to end. Essentially, creating a product or initiating a service and delivering it to your customers should take as little time and use as few resources as possible without compromising on quality. This is all done […]

Thinking outside the box can help team members solve problems, collaborate more effectively and nurture fresh new ideas. In general, creativity can boost overall business performance. But creativity is generally something that happens organically — it can’t be forced. So how can business leaders cultivate this quality in their employees? We’ve all heard the research […]