I Just Never Get Around To It . . .

Why It's Important
It’s a fact that being busy is just a part of life. But I’ll bet that your day is also just full of annoying trivialities that don’t add value, when seen through your customers’ eyes.

Things like . . .

• Creating reports that no-one understands or reads.
• Staffing issues - dealing with people who don’t arrive,
• Vague meetings - without a clear purpose or agenda.
• Interdepartmental ‘stuff’ - having to play the political game within your organisation
• Walking - would a ‘shoe leather allowance’ make a big difference to your pay?!

The problem is that we’re all so good at getting busy. So much so, that we’ll cheerfully fill our time with activity that adds little value. But in doing this, are you avoiding something else?

Too often, high-value activities end up sidelined. This is especially true when those activities are things we’re not comfortable with. The result is that we tend to feel guilty (because after all, you know what you should be doing), AND our performance as an individual / manager / leader is less than it could be.

So to perform to your potential you need to stop being so [darned] busy with trivialities, and focus on the things that matter.

Do this, and you’ll be astonished at the difference in what you, your team, and your organisation can achieve. And that’s got to be worth considering!

Seven Tips
1. Just Where Does All The Time Go?

Draw a 2x2 grid on a piece of flipchart paper. Label the vertical axis “Lo/Hi Value”, and the horizontal “Short/Long Time”. Stick it up, and over a couple of weeks, record your activities on it using Post-It™ notes. Get the rest of your team involved by posting their activities too.

2. Analyse

Get together and discuss the activities that you’ve all posted. Remember ‘Value’ is a subjective term, so you may have some interesting differences in opinion.

3. Act: Low Value

For Long Activities, find ways to just stop doing these things! They take up lots of time, but for no real value. Short Activities are probably simple tasks that are below your ‘level’. How can you delegate or outsource these?

4. Act: High Value

Where you want to be is creating high value in small time packets. The more of your activities you have here, the better you’re performing. For Long Activities, systemise the work, to achieve the same result in less time.

5. BUT . . . What's Missing?

Analysing what you DO is great, but what AREN’T you doing? Brainstorm the high-value activities that always seem to get put off.

6. What Get's Scheduled Is What Gets Done

Put those missing activities into your diary. Treat them as FIRM appointments, not to be deleted or re-scheduled

7. Stand Up And Be Counted

Involve others in those missing activities. Make promises, go public, and do everything you can to be held to account for them. This way, you’re far more likely to stick to your intentions to do them.

What Next
This edition of TeamTips is concerned with the performance-management side of Team Leadership. There are three things you can do if you’re interested in finding out more about this:

1. Read A Book

We recommend “Eat That Frog”, by Brian Tracy - all about how to find the time for those activities you avoid.

2. Find Out More About The 'Time Grid'

I’m indebted to Vicky at Accelerate for this great technique. It’s just one of the tools from the Lean Practice programme that we run jointly with her company. You can find out more about this by visiting www.leanpractice.co.uk.

3. Call Sevenrings

We’ve helped dozens of individuals and organisations improve their teams’ performance, and we’d be happy to talk to you about your particular situation at no initial charge.

We specialise in helping people to get better results by changing the way they work. We can provide training from 1/2 day taster sessions focusing on just one aspect of the Team leader’s role, up to comprehensive programmes over several months.

So for an initial no-fee conversation about what you're trying to achieve, call us now. Our phone number is 0191 2522 335.

Finally . . . You can also download this personal & team effectiveness article in PDF format, and a podcast to accompany it will be available next Tuesday, 8th August.

Mr Awkward Podcast

There seems to be a bit of trouble with Feedburner & iTunes talking to eachother at the moment, so this post is a second attempt to get the Mr Awkward podcast into the system. To listen to the podcast, just click on this post's title.
Karl.

Dealing with Mr Awkward

Why Its Important

For many, Team Leadership is the first step on the management ladder. Having people who work for you is a big responsibility. You need to get them performing to show your boss that you can deliver results. And at the same time, your team’ll expect you to take care of them, not to work them too hard, and to deal with all the ‘baggage’ they bring to work from whatever’s going on at home.

This is a tough job - you’re ‘piggy in the middle’ all the time you’re at work. And sooner or later you’ll get a team member who seems to do everything they can to make it harder. We all have bad days at work, where we just want to kick against the system, but this is something more.

You’ve got a team member, who’s a self-appointed member of the Awkward Squad! Examples of the kind of behaviour you might see include:

• Frequent arguments with other members of your team, other teams, or managers
• Inconsistent work - big variations in work rate and quality, with no apparent reason.
• Lack of cooperation, when you need something extra - things like overtime, travelling to fix a problem with a customer, or working with other people.
• Aggressively defensive when confronted about problems. They’ll come out fighting, blaming others, making unreasonable accusations that you’re just out to get them. Basically, whatever has happened will never be their fault!

All of this is very stressful - for you, and everyone who comes into contact with Mr Awkward. (Could also be Ms Awkward - this isn’t just a man thing.)

You probably don’t get paid enough to just put up with this, so your job as Team Leader is to try and fix the situation, so that everyone can get on with their jobs!

Seven Tips

1. Stick to The Facts

Mr Awkward probably isn’t behaving rationally, and it’s easy to get pulled into this yourself. So in conversations try to stay detached from any emotion. Stick to the facts, and to help with this, keep brief notes in your day book on what you say. You DO have a day book, don’t you?

2. Be Interested

Is there something behind Mr Awkward’s attitude and behaviour? Problems at home? Being bullied at work? Money problems? Take an interest - ask if there’s anything wrong / can you help / can the company help.

3. Confront 'Bad' Behaviour

‘Awkwardness’ sometimes stems from poor self-esteem. But you can’t be walking on eggshells around this. When Mr Awkward does something ‘bad’, speak to them immediately afterwards about their behaviour. You must criticise the behaviour, and not the person.

4. Get Them To Empathise

Tell Mr Awkward the consequences of his behaviour for the people around him. e.g. “When you argue like that, we feel . . . “; “When you won’t do overtime, we all have to work longer hours to make up for it”.

5. Take Time To Be Positive

Mr Awkward’s behaviour probably means that you don’t really want to talk to him, and only do so when you have to. So he only ever sees you when he’s done something wrong! You need to break this cycle, and go out of your way to find positive reasons to talk to him.

6. Be Constant and Consistent

Take time to talk to Mr Awkward several times a day. If he’s doing a good job, tell him, and if performance is sliding, ask if he needs help.

7. The FINAL Resort.

Sometimes, Mr Awkward just doesn’t want to change, or won’t face up to the need to change. Your absolute last resort is the official Disciplinary procedures. Before making any moves in this direction, discuss it with your manager and the company’s HR department.

What Next?
This edition of TeamTips is concerned with the people-management side of Team Leadership. There are three things you can do if you’re interested in finding out more about this:

1. Read a Book

We recommend “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff At Work”, by Richard Carlson. It’s a book of a hundred easy-reading mini chapters on how to create a positive outlook towards work. It’s available from the Sevenrings book shop at www.sevenrings.co.uk/bookstoreandlinks.asp.- just click on the Amazon.co.uk logo to order.

2. Read Our In-Depth Management Briefing Paper on team management.

We publish a series of more detailed papers - just visit www.sevenrings.co.uk and click on the ‘free stuff’ button. You can also find out more about the legal issues surrounding Disciplinary action by reading this free article by Hay & Kilner.

3. Call Sevenrings

We’ve helped dozens of individuals and organisations improve their teams’ performance, and we’d be happy to talk to you about your particular situation at no initial charge.

We specialise in helping people to get better results by changing the way they work. We can provide training from 1/2 day taster sessions focusing on just one aspect of the Team leader’s role, up to comprehensive programmes over several months.

Our phone number is 0191 2522 335, or you can email karlATsevenringsDOTcoDOTuk.

Finally . . . this article on awkward staff is available as a pdf, and you can download the podcast companion to it after 25th July.

Shadow Board in My Drawer . . .

At the end of last week's podcast, John set me the challenge of sorting out the mess in my desk drawer. Well, it certainly needed doing - like many people, it had become a bit of a dumping space for whenever I've had visitors to the office. Just look at all the rubbish I've accumulated!

The first thing was to get all of this out, and figure out what I actually needed to keep. What were the things that I actually use? These items were:

• Stapler & remover & spare staples
• Paper knife
• 12" Rule
• iPod accessories
• Phone case & belt clip
• Stamps
• External HDD for doing my weekly backups

Everything else should probably either go in the bin, or be taken off to where it should have been in the first place. I then put a clean sheet of paper in the bottom of the drawer as a liner, and laid everything out on it. Once I got a layout that made sense (putting similar items together, and the more frequenlty used items in the lower right quadrant), I drew round everything & labelled the shadows.

Finally, I put everything back in the drawer. The result's much tidier, but more importantly, it's likely to stay that way:

• The effort of doing this has reminded me how much inefficiency stemming from disorganisation we put up with.
• I now have a clear mental image of where everything goes. Even before I open the drawer, I can see what I want, and where it should be.
• If I put something extra in there, it'll stand out like a sore thumb.
• If someone borrows something, they'll know where to put it back.
• If the borrower 'forgets' to put it back, I'll see straight away.
  

Lean Blog: Is Shingo overrated?

Lean Blog: Is Shingo overrated?

So apparently there's some debate that Shingo was just a bloke who popped in to Toyota every now and then Ohno was busy inventing the Toyota Production System (which went on to become labeled as "Lean").

Does any of this matter? Um, no, not really. The fact is that Shingo's undeniable contribution was in the field of reducing set-up (changeover, makeready, etc) times from literally days to less than nine minutes. And without that, you just can't do the rest of Lean, because you'd have to carry stock, make proposterous economic batch sizes, and generally remain focused on yourself, rather than the customer.

It was this realisation that made us decide that one of the key areas to focus on is set-up time. Following this doggedly to Shingo's target of nine minutes or fewer provides huge paybacks, often out of all proportion with the effort expended.

I'm sure its important to get a historically accurate view of who did what at Toyota 50 years ago. But for most of us, just applying the tools is enough reward!

Is The Writing On The Wall For Signs?

When you’re trying to change the behaviour of people, you need to use every possible communication tool at your disposal. It’s not enough to tell people what you want them to do. Or even to tell them again . . . and again . . . and again.

Too often, your message is competing with too much other stuff. There are three categories for this:

• Noise from other sources, like things going on at home, or elsewhere at work
• Comfort in the way we’ve always done things
• Fear of new suggestions. The may look like laziness, but it's probably not!
  

So you need to overcome these barriers and create an environment in which people almost can’t help but go along with the changes you’re trying to make. Often people try putting up signs or notices. Like this one, which every organisation seems to have somewhere:

“Please leave this kitchen area in the same condition as you’d like to find it”

The problem is that this is just more WORDS, and so it’s just as easily filtered out as when you tell people what to do. Put it this way, most people didn’t actually like school, where they were TOLD what to do. So they got very good at filtering out the voice from the front of the class. Now, even if they want to listen and act, their brains simply aren’t tuned in to verbal messages.

To get through to people, you need to bypass their communication filters. That means plugging your message into other parts of their brains - the parts that deal with emotion, images, and imagination.

SEVEN TIPS

1. Get The Team Involved; You Need Their Imagination

You’re a Team Leader, but that doesn’t mean you do all the leadership work yourself. In fact it’s a whole lot easier if you can get the team to do most of the work! So select a small project that everyone can contribute to.

2. Grandpa’s Shed

Use shadow boards to show where each tool should go. Use clips to hold tools in place. Draw round the tools, and colour in the outline. You can easily se where everything should go, and when something’s missing.

3. Leave a Deposit

If you share equipment with other people, set up a token system. Whenever anyone takes a tool from the shadow board, they leave their colour-coded token in its place, so you can instantly see where it is.

4. Missing Manuals

Got a bookshelf that’s shared? No-one putting books back in the right place? Get them all into the right order, and then draw a diagonal line across the spines. That makes it easy to see where each should go, and when one’s missing or out of order.

5. Keep The Aisles Free

Paint the aisles and walkways a different colour to the ‘work’ areas. If you’re in an open-plan office, see if you can move the carpet tiles around to create the same effect. Nothing should ever be stored in the aisles!

6. No Waiting

Aisle ends are always a problem - especially in warehouses. Paint these as ‘box junctions’. No entry to the painted area, unless your exit is clear.

7. Finally . . . The Clean Kitchen!

And how do you get people to clean their coffee cups, rather than just dumping them in the sink? Put up a LARGE photo of how it should look. Label all the features that make this different from how things generally are now(”Cups cleaned & put away”; “Milk back in the fridge”; “Spilt sugar cleaned up”; etc).

WHAT NEXT?
This edition of TeamTips is concerned with the people-management side of Team Leadership. There are three things you can do if you’re interested in finding out more about this:

1. Read a Book
We recommend “Five-S For Operators: 5 Pillars Of The Visual Workplace”, by Hiroyoki Hirano. It’s one of Productivity Press’s great books, and is from the Sevenrings book shop at www.sevenrings.co.uk/bookstoreandlinks.asp.- just click on the Amazon.co.uk logo to order.

2. Read Our In-Depth Management Briefing Paper on team management.
We publish a series of more detailed papers - just visit www.sevenrings.co.uk and click on the ‘free stuff’ button.

3. Call Sevenrings
We’ve helped dozens of individuals and organisations improve their teams’ performance, and we’d be happy to talk to you about your particular situation at no initial charge.

We specialise in helping people to get better results by changing the way they work. We can provide training from 1/2 day taster sessions focusing on just one aspect of the Team leader’s role, up to comprehensive programmes over several months.

Our phone number is 0044 191 2522 335.

Finally . . . you can download this posting as a pdf article on visual management, or (after 11th July), download a podcast on visual management to accompany this article: