Operational Excellence Mixtape: August 17, 2018

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Healthcare – Creating Value for Patient

Canadian healthcare is still mired in a system of outdated technology (including reliance on faxing and pagers) in a world where consumers expect total transparency and availability of data.  Canadian doctors agree that patients should have access to their records online and that young Canadians expectations of technological support are creating a generation gap.  

Is it time for healthcare to seek out different types of CEOs in an era of disruption and innovation? 

Operational Excellence

Many organizational efforts to improve alignment involve balanced scorecards and cascading metrics.  However, engaging front-line staff and managers in figuring out how to achieve strategic breakthrough results is the holy grail of strategy deployment.  Jim Womack describes the Cascade of Hoshin witnessed on a visit to Toyota's Miyata plant in Kyushu.

“What's the job of a leader?” –   To produce more leaders, according to Pascal Dennis.

What's more important?  Customer-centricity or employee-centricity?  A CX professional shares her lessons learnt about employee-centric cultures.

Leading & Enabling Excellence

“You either run the day or the day runs you”.  Managers furiously strive to get ‘caught up on the work' and continually feel stressed out when they're behind (which is most of the time).  Art Markman advises us to be more self-compassionate and to stop feeling guilty about not being ‘caught up' on work.  

Busy leaders need to delegate.  In order to free up your calendar and develop your team, you need to delegate.  When shouldn't we delegate?  Here are 3 times you should never delegate.

Coaching – Developing Self & Others

Managers think they're great at coaching, but they are likely confusing coaching with telling people what to do.

What makes some teachers more effective than others?  Seeking feedback for improvement.  This research shows that the most effective teachers seek feedback from others, while also noting that the most effective teachers are not sought out by others for feedback.Weaker teachers assume they are effective and don't seek out feedback.  I wonder what a similar study for managers would reveal?

When it comes to soft skills, “soft is hard”.  Soft skills may become increasingly important as automation replaces analysis and algorithmic (technical) work – the classical “hard” skills.  Here are some of the challenges in scaling up soft skills in organizations. 

Books, Videos, Podcasts

Karen Martin has an excellent collection of webinars here. Check out her recent installment Clarity First: Problem Solving.

Mark Graban introduces his book Measures of Success on the Lean Post.  I just finished it and it is excellent.  Look for a review in my next mixtape.

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Ryan McCormack
Ryan is an operational excellence professional with over 18 years experience practicing continuous improvement in healthcare, insurance, food manufacturing, and aerospace. He is an avid student of the application of Lean principles in work and life to create measurably better value.

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