Lean Management Tools to Help You Grow as a Leader

Each of these four Lean management tools have roots in Lean manufacturing, and were part of the Lean practice popularized by Toyota. They are just as applicable to modern-day knowledge work as they were to auto manufacturing in the early twentieth century.

Go to the gemba

As a Lean leader, it’s important to understand the challenges facing your organization, so that you can act as a coach and mentor and lead teams to success. This allows you to give more informed guidance and add more value as a leader. The Lean concept of going to the Gemba means that in order to better understand problems or opportunities in the organization, leaders go to the place where the work is being done.

In auto manufacturing, the Gemba is the shop floor; in knowledge work, it might be a corner of the open office where developers, marketers, or salespeople do their most focused work. As Lean leaders, it’s important to spend enough time at the Gemba that teams feel comfortable sharing, learning, and experimenting side-by-side with the leaders of their organization. Going to the Gemba should feel like a conversation, not a “drive-by.”

Going to the Gemba is a great Lean management tool that can help you practice both respect for people and continuous improvement. You show respect for people by listening, guiding, and working with employees to find solutions. You practice continuous improvement by implementing and measuring the impact of those solutions.

Encourage a student mentality

Going to the Gemba encourages a student mentality in leaders, and sets an example of continuous learning for employees. As a leader, the purpose of this practice is not to “check in” or “check up” on employees, but rather to get information directly from the source. So rather than relying solely on reports, executive summaries, and other edited, condensed forms of information, Lean leaders engage with employees across their organizations to learn and become more informed decision makers.

These Lean leaders ask questions, reflect, and ask more questions until they fully understand a problem. They approach leadership with a student mentality, seeking first to understand, then guiding teams toward sustainable solutions. This humble, curious mindset allows Lean leaders to learn, grow, and evolve with their teams, ensuring more informed decision making.

Stop the line to ensure quality

When a problem arises, Lean leaders set the example for immediately tackling the problem before it grows. This is called “stopping the line.”

It’s a practice taken from Lean manufacturing, in which an assembly line would halt production to resolve an issue, no matter how small. Stopping the line holds everyone on the assembly line (or in the case of knowledge work, value stream) accountable for delivering a consistently high-quality product.

Stopping the line allows everyone in the organization to address serious problems head-on, and holds them accountable for the work of the entire system. It’s the role of Lean leaders to ensure that everyone feels comfortable escalating an issue to a “stop the line.”

Lean leaders need to create an environment in which “stop the line” issues are treated seriously, immediately, and with respect, so that everyone feels safe to address issues as they arise.

Implement WIP limits

It’s no secret that a key element of Lean is eliminating waste. Waste in knowledge work is anything that doesn’t bring value to the customer. One of the most impactful ways Lean leaders can eliminate waste in their organizations is by focusing on limiting how much work is in process at any given time.

When every team, department, and the organization as a whole is managing dozens or hundreds of initiatives at once, it’s often difficult to get anything done efficiently. Handoffs between teams, miscommunications, and an unsustainable speed of delivery create mountains of waste and technical debt. It’s almost impossible to keep everyone involved in a given initiative on the same page, because they are balancing several others at the same time.

This is where WIP (work-in-process) limits come in. Understanding how much work is currently in process is one of the key Lean management tools, because it empowers Lean leaders with the ability to see where their guidance is needed most – for example, where work is piling up, where a process could be automated, or where more of a specific skillset is needed in order to keep work flowing through the system.

Instead of wasting time gathering and analyzing status updates, leaders can play that lightweight, mentoring role that allows teams to do their best work.

Limiting WIP is nearly impossible if that WIP isn’t visualized, which is why 83% of Lean organizations employ Kanban as a way to practice Lean. It’s up to Lean management to both limit WIP at the organizational level, and set the example of limiting WIP themselves.

Respect for people and continuous improvement: Easy to understand, difficult to apply in practice. Practicing these four Lean management tools effectively will allow you to evolve in your Lean leadership, empowering you with more meaningful methods of data collection, relationship building with employees, quality assurance, and workflow management.