Coaching and Co-Learning - Coach as Mirror

From the Lean Enterprise Institute in Boston, this is the WLEI podcast, where we share stories of people making the world better through lean thinking and practice. For more information about LEI, including how we can help you apply lean thinking, please visit lean.org. Welcome to the Management Brief.

I'm Mark Reich. Today I'm joined by two amazing leaders, Desh from Fisher & Paykel. He is the GM of manufacturing and business excellence in New Zealand, all the way from around the world, probably our furthest participant at the summit, I would say, in distance. And also Jim Luckman, who has been a faculty member for the Lean Enterprise Institute for quite a long time and also has a very long career before that, that he'll share with you.

So I'm going to start by asking you a few questions, Desh. If you could give me a little bit of background of just introduce yourself and overview of your work history and what your current role is. Thank you, Mark, for having me. Yeah, I started at Fisher & Paykel Healthcare over 25 years ago.

I started as a graduate engineer, did some work in the design space, went into manufacturing. I did a bit of work there, then got into setting up the improvement function or the business excellence function at Fisher & Paykel Healthcare and then came back into manufacturing. And now I'm sort of doing a bit of work on both sides. Yeah, So that's been my career.

Jerry, you could share with us, what were some key experiences in the course of that time that impacted you? Yeah. So we're a company driven by improving care and outcomes for patients. And personally, you know, when you get into a role, you start to get focused on what you're doing.

And at Fisher & Paykel, we always try to get people just focused on improving care and outcomes. So one of the key learnings for me over the years has been just always stepping back and just asking the question, how does this help improve care and outcomes? So that's been a really important lesson for me. And it was my then boss, current CEO, who actually got me out of that mode of being a silo leader.

I had a moment where I was complaining to him about a bunch of stuff and he listened to me for a very long time and then took a moment and said, yeah, but we're not trying to be the best manufacturing company. I went back and thought about it is right. We're trying to be the best medical device company, which is different from being a pure manufacturer. So that was quite an interesting lesson for me.

So that was one of my key lessons. Great. Well, let's talk a little bit about your experience, and I think it's long, with lean thinking and practice. Maybe you could tell us what was your first exposure and how was that?

What are your reflections about that? Yeah. So it started with the problem. We were going through this growth spree.

We grew at about 10 to 15 percent a year. We've done that for 50 years as a company. But we were going through a really extraordinarily growth phase at one point. And I had just come into manufacturing from design.

So in my head, I was the smartest guy in the plant. Learned very quickly, that was the dumbest thing to think about, very humbling. So one of the key lessons there for me at the end of that journey, we've done a lot of work. We've implemented a lot of tools and got a lot of results.

But that was my very first exposure. Solved the problem of scaling up by implementing tools and processes in a plant. Okay. Well, what do you see, you're an executive now, what do you see that's critical to your learning and practicing as an executive?

Yeah, for me, I think it's understanding the role that I play in this journey. And it's been an amazing learning experience for me working with Jim on that because I've grown up with the company. I have perhaps too much of the depth of knowledge in the business, in some cases, for me to be objective about and be humble about asking questions. So the biggest learning for me has been that my role is different.

What I need to focus on is different. And I think that's been a really good lesson for me. And that been awesome to learn Great So you mentioned Jim Let talk a little bit about Jim your coach and that relationship What do you see as the role of a coach in helping you? Be sort of a mirror, just a real good mirror so that I can get good feedback, reflect, and also help me see my role, my gaps, and then help me through developing a way to bridge those gaps.

I think that's quite key. Jim's been awesome at that. Can you maybe give us an example of something you tried, maybe Jim coached you on, and then you changed your behavior as a result? Yes, good question.

Most of the time, I don't know he's coaching me, but I do change my behavior as a result of whatever he's doing. But we did have some sessions where we got together and talk about with my team around if we treat the management team having a customer and who's that customer and at the end of that value stream what does that customer expect and we went through an exercise to go okay what do they what do you what do you give them as a leadership team or a leader and then what do you think they expect from you and it was completely different so that was a great aha moment where we listed a bunch of things and then actually what are we doing and that was awesome.

That was really good for me. Yeah. Well, you know, we have a fairly, we get a fairly broad audience that listens to our podcasts. Some have experience, some are fairly new in their journey.

What would be your advice to, you know, now that you're down the road in the lean journey for a little while, what would you say to someone who's starting out? Yeah, good question. It's hard. It's a hard road.

Sometimes it can be a lonely road and it's like a hike. You get to one point and you look up and you go, oh, there's another mountain to climb. More I learned, less I know. So I think for anyone who's starting the journey, be open about learning, be humble about the fact that you know very little at any point in that journey.

And it's a long journey and sometimes it can be quite lonely. But when you get to a point where your team switches on and deliver, it's an awesome experience. Okay. So I think I'm going to turn to Jim for a moment here and give us, let's hear a little bit from you.

So start a little bit by just sharing your experience, you know, in the industry, but also your experience and background as a coach as well. Okay. I spent a long career, I think it was 30 years in General Motors. And specifically, it was inside the component division that ultimately was called Delphi.

And that's the point at which I retired from that. And during that time frame, I started off as an engineer responsible for putting computers on engines. And I ended up as a chief engineer and a director of the site of 600 people in Rochester, New York. And it was during the last two times that I got introduced to lean, started thinking about how to use lean as a mechanism for engaging people differently in the R&D space is probably the biggest change in my mindset.

And I started practicing that in Rochester and had some really remarkable things that they, the people did as a result of just taking on personal responsibility, taking waste out. So tell us a little bit about your experience as a coach, since you've been doing that for a little while, too. And also, what do you see as effective in being a coach? Yeah, so I never really had any direct coach training except for fairly recently.

In fact, I got involved in one company. It was an insurance company that brought me in to help them define their coaching model. And it turns out that they do statistics inside insurance companies. and they had measured, they had like 35 different coaching models, and it was from about five fundamental sources of coaching all different processes They were trying to figure out which one of those to use And they asked me what do I do And I said well you know I start with problem solving and think about how the coachee is attached to solving fundamental problems inside their business.

So my thought about being a coach has more to do with, let's get on the same page with regard to effective problem solving and go from there. Great. Interesting. Well, maybe we could have you have a little conversation here about some of the, what have been some key points of coaching you've seen as you've worked with Desh?

And Desh, what do you see as some of the key things that you've learned or maybe even some advice for Jim on how you might coach better? So with regard to this, working with Desh, this has been very, first of all, it's a co-learning experience. It's not one way. I don't feel like a coach as much as a co-learner.

You're learning something about yourself and your organization, and I'm learning something about organizations and the world in which we live at the same time. And I'm also learning about what I can do more effectively as a coach along the way. So the mindset I have is that in a leadership role, in coaching leaders, we have a paradigm problem that everybody lives inside a paradigm and there is a definite paradigm shift required from a leadership in a non-Toyota company versus a Toyota company.

Toyota has a different paradigm they live in, although we don't want you to become Toyota. But what we want you to do is become a a company that has effective problem-solving capability from top to bottom, with the right person solving the right problem at the right time. And what I see going on inside Fisher & PayCal is Desch has chosen to run some experiments with me and with his people and try to implant this kind of problem-solving thinking and development inside the operations piece.

And it's got three plants and He's also working with supportive functions to help serve the operations piece at the same time. It's just getting started, but it's a good start. Very good start. Yeah, I'd add that I'm running some experiments about myself and my own sort of assumptions and boundaries and things I've taken for granted and challenging those to think about what I need to change to get that paradigm shift.

because that paradigm shift, I completely believe in and understand. I think without that, I think you can't build an organization that everyone can solve problems and in part solve problems. So that journey with my leadership team has been quite interesting to go through. And Jim's been getting us to think, reflect, and run some experiments, learn from them, reflect, and do it again.

And yeah, so far we've run quite a few experiments, whether it's with my direct reports, myself, or the shop floor teams. And it's been fun. Tell us a little bit about one of those experiments. Yeah, so one of the things we started doing was learn how to build that social connection and how to create respectful dialogue between different groups.

And it was tough. It was really tough. It's really tough. When you're unaware of something, your questions are closed and you're asking and, you know, get answers, but you're not really listening.

And then to recognize that to a point where you ask a question and then you stop yourself and say, OK, let me ask that question again to get to that awareness. And then at some point to recognize, actually, we asked some good questions and we didn't have to think about it. And it happened as a result of just habit. So we had one of those or two of those little moments but most of the time we do struggle with it And then I would say I consciously incompetent at it at the moment and learning how to do that But that an experiment that going to continue to run.

And that's with my direct reports. That's with my next layer down after that. And we get together and we go to the Gemba and talk about problem solving and then reflect on it to understand whether we ask good questions or not. And we've had a lot of learnings through that.

Well, you've mentioned a couple of times just now what you said about asking good questions. So a question for you, Jim, what's a good question? It's based on the context of the conversation. But in general, what I look for is questions, and we all make mistakes at this, including me, where we're doing the thinking and we're not listening to the person doing the thinking and asking good open-ended questions about how they're thinking about the problem situation.

It's a very difficult habit to break. So a good question is one that gets the person listening to the question, trying to answer it, to think differently about what's going on. And you can actually see it take place when the person will stop, look up to the right, and say, I never thought of that. Okay, so you mentioned this is a co-learning.

So I'm curious if you could share a question for both of you, you can both answer, is how has the experience helped you work better with others and what are some of your reflections about it? So for me, learning with the bigger experiment that we had is doing two layers at one time. There's a leadership component that talks about what does it mean to be a lean leader and working on things like how to ask questions and how to engage in people and so on. And the lower level was using managing to learn problem solving at the plant level with the plant manager.

And the learning for me in this experiment is the connection between those two is extremely critical that you don't get off track and you stay in track on the leadership component of it and the problem-solving component at the plant level. And it's eye-opening to see that take place and how valuable that can be because there are good things happening inside the problem-solving teams in the plant that we chose. We chose one value stream and one plant to build, and that's a real big learning for me.

Yeah, my biggest learning is the right problem, right layer, perhaps right person. It's been a real eye-opening exercise for me. And being able to then use that thinking to get others out of where they are, that's been the biggest learning. Because before that, I was probably trying to be an engineer.

And Jim would testify to that one. I'm an engineer, so I can recognize one when I see you. That's a problem. All right.

Are there any final thoughts you have that you want to share about the conversation today? Yeah, I don't know where we're going to end up going, but I'm really, really having a lot of fun doing this and learning. So I just want to say thank you, Jim, for helping us. Well, thank you.

And I want to say that we have a phase two happening here, starting right now and going for the next six months, where taking the experience of learning that we had in one plant, one value stream, and we're beefing that up and making it more effective in that plant and transferring it to another value stream, along with taking two projects to the second plant, and we're doing some additional leadership development all at one time. So I really thank you for giving me the opportunity to mess with you and try that out as an experiment.

Well, thanks to both of you today for joining us and wish you the best of luck.