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The Top Blogs Every Manager Should Be Reading

As a leader in your organization, we know you’re unbelievably busy. Between juggling projects, managing deadlines and maintaining the productivity of your team, it just seems as though there’s never enough time in a day (or in a week, for that matter). And part of the task of every lean leader and organized manager is […]

How To Know If You’re Practicing Lean Faithfully

As lean practices have evolved over the decades, more and more business across a smattering of industries have adopted these principles in an attempt to streamline their operations. While the list of lean practitioners continues to grow as years pass, not everyone who stakes a lean claim is seeing consistent benefits. Slagging productivity, high employee […]

Why Good Managers Are Also Good Coaches

In today’s workplace, managers are required to take on more responsibilities than their predecessors in previous decades. And many of those duties centre on motivating employees and maintaining (or boosting) productivity. And while many qualities mark a good manager, one distinction that stands out is coaching. Despite the word’s sporting connotations, coaching is an art […]

How the Theory of Constraints Can Help Streamline Your Workflow

Lean leaders spend an exorbitant amount of time focused on decreasing waste and increasing throughput. Why? What’s the ultimate goal here? While the primary goal is to amp up customer value and streamline the production cycle as much as possible, what is this objective driving toward? The answer is a better bottom line. And that […]

Why Improvement Plans Often Fail

As Lean managers, part of your responsibility to your organization is to observe the value each step in the production process and look for ways it can be improved. Many Lean leaders create lofty continuous improvement plans attached to equally towering sets of goals. Unfortunately, studies over the past couple of decades show that upwards […]

How Buffering Can Help Those Workflow Bottlenecks

Lean leaders spend a fair chunk of time trying to make their company’s processes more efficient. This harkens back to the tenet of lean management of continuous improvement, i.e. constantly evaluating each step in the process to ensure it adds to the value chain. Finding bottlenecks in a particular workflow and appropriately managing them can […]

How Slack Can Improve Your Business

Companies and managers who subscribe to the lean philosophy spend a significant portion of their time and effort trying to boost productivity of their teams. Whether it’s through limiting work in progress, incentivizing performance or other methods, lean leaders are continuously attempting to keep employees constantly productive. But forcing everyone’s nose to the grindstone every […]

How to Redesign Processes to Cut End-to-End Time

By this point, most of our blog readers are familiar with the primary tenets of lean management. And one of the core lean principles is continuous improvement, which dictates that a lean organization should be driven to constantly innovate in an effort to improve its processes end to end. That primary lean principle feeds into […]

Five Things Managers Should Stop Doing Right Now

Many things weigh on business leaders. From choosing the right direction on projects to hiring employees, managers have to make many crucial decisions during day-to-day operations. But just because managers are running a team doesn’t mean they should wield their power any way they want. Those leaders who subscribe to the tenets of lean management […]