A Few Tips To Help You Master Lean Principles

It’s a fairly simple task to read through and understand all the basic principles of lean management.

However, mastering and implementing this set of philosophies is another task entirely. But there are some effective methods for successfully learning and implementing lean management into your organization. We’ve scoured the research, and here are some of the top tips for mastering lean principles and making them work in your organization.

Create a Continuous Improvement Culture

One of the most integral principles of lean management is to constantly improve upon processes via eliminating any kind of waste. And what’s the best way to do so? Get everyone in your company involved in this important step.

Yes, that means taking the time to train your workers on the principle of lean improvement and how to isolate opportunities to do so in their day-to-day tasks. But training others on this tenet of lean can obviously help lean leaders master it themselves. And teaching workers on every level in an organization to look at their daily workflows through the lens of continuous improvement means more waste can be identified and reduced.

For more information on how to engage your employees in continuous improvement, read our post on the subject.

Document Your Processes

Another major tenet of lean management is to take a hard look at your workflows and processes to determine if each step adds to the value stream. Sometimes it’s difficult to  know where to start when it comes to closely examining those processes.

One way to systematically tackle this task is to document your processes. This can help you define every step in production and potentially help you find bottlenecks, redundancies or tasks that don’t add any value.

Engage Workers In Problem Solving

Part of mastering lean management is to keep you workers engaged and involved in improving the organization on multiple levels. So, as a lean leader, it only makes sense to engage your employees with addressing difficult issues within the organization.

Have a challenge you just can’t seem to figure out yourself? Pull in your team via a brainstorming session. There’s more power in getting a group of people to consider the same issue at once — and solving these kinds of problems can help get employees invested in the success of a project and the organization as a whole.

Did you find this lean management tip helpful? Leankor’s workflow management tools can help your team become even more efficient. Set up your one-on-one demo today!