Training, what training?

Howdy folks I'm back again with another posting about Lean from the front line.  Grab a cup of coffee    and take a seat around the campfire while we discuss training and the illusion of training programs.  Yes that's right, the cowboy stated illusion of training and a lack of a true training doctrine my team is experiencing.

One may be reading this and asking, "If you are a Lean guy, what on earth are you doing allowing holes in the most basic of process controls, training your people?"  I'll have to answer this upfront and personal and declare that we are not totally absent of training, our training process needs improvement.  Yes the PDCA cycle once again rears its arms like a saguaro cactus on the way to the White Tank mountain range.  Let's look at how my team and I discovered our training is lacking.

We have expanded our operations into a second shift to increase our capacity.  Nothing wrong with that right?  We had trained individuals train and sharpen the skill sets of semi-trained individuals bringing them up to speed.  Nothing wrong with that right?  Then it hit me like a mule kick to the chest.  I brought in an individual who had no idea of our processes nor our product to work within a cell.  Yes we have VWI's etc... yet there was something glaringly obvious that took two days for me to really pick up on.  We threw this new individual into the mix to observe, things appeared on the surface to be going great then Yoda's voice in my mind kicked in and told me to engage this new member of our team and start asking questions to gain insight from an outsiders perspective as to what he saw.

The question posed was this, "What have you learned the past few days about your role in the team?" His answer blew me away, "I just follow these guys around and try to pick up things the best I can."  Talk about wanting to go hide out in the Lost Dutchman mine.  I failed to train my guys and give them the proper tools to train someone.  Yes, boys and girls this was a failure moment in time.  What do we get with failure, that's right a true chance to make improvement and learn from our mistakes.  Better yet we get to improve our processes, then teach others in our organization where we were making the error so they do not fall into the same pitfall.  Collective learning and effective communication of our efforts.  Why you may ask?  A Lean culture is a learning culture, plain and simple.

With this gap in our process, the team and I whipped out the A3 and went to town to help define and narrow a solution.  Yes we even fishboned this problem to keep the teams skills up on that tool as well.  Within about 2 hours of looking and asking questions to the trainers and the trainee we had came up with a starting point to bridge this gap.  Within the week we had something documented and established as to protocol when we training individuals who are completely new to our organization.   This protocol is now being tested in our fabrication area to prove it out and streamline it to the point where we will deploy this organization wide.  Yes this is still a future state, and it is important that we recognized this gap in our processes that was causing undue hardship for a new individual.

Driving out waste and making change is a full time job as it is, when I as a leader failed to recognize I was inducing the trifecta of Muda, Mura, and Muri all at once due to a rudimentary oversight it was humbling.  As an individual who has had careers where life and death happened based upon situational awareness and interpretation of data within seconds, I felt as if I let my team down.  You'll notice the excessive use of "I" in this paragraph.  The reason, I am the leader hence it is my fault.  The good news is that we had the situational awareness to apply countermeasures and corrective action.

This was a real learning experience for me as well as the team.  My guys are VERY good at what they do, some of the best in the industry.  Yet as in a previous blog, the devil is truly in the details.  Fortunately we recognized the problem and that is a win which will pay dividends at the bottom line and truly add value to our product.  I'd personally like to thank my guys for the help with this issue the past week.  Without you, we wouldn't have came as far as we have.

Well there you have it cowpokes, another post from the front line of implementation.  Though we fancy ourselves as academics who read the books and listen to the podcasts, we are the ones who make the vision happen.  If you don't believe me... go to Gemba.  Thank you for stopping by my campfire and remember, just when you think you know it all, something simple comes along to inform you that you don't

Cowboy