E123: Driving Lean Leadership into Government with Andrew Rowe
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In this episode, I share an interview I had with Andrew Rowe, former CEO and Executive Chairman of AllMed Healthcare Management in Portland, Oregon. After 20 years of leading AllMed through a Lean transformation, he is now focusing his time on bringing Lean and quality principes into the Portland metro area as a community service leader and advocate into government and nonprofits to tackle difficult challenges like homelessness.
He reflects back on his early career in international business, where he adopted lean principles from demanding customers in various global industries while living outside the US. He details his successful turnaround of a Portland ship repair operation by using strategy, process, and people-focused improvements. He transitioned to AllMed, where he applied similar methods to a healthcare services company, incorporating technology for digital workflow optimization. He emphasizes the importance of leadership engagement, employee empowerment, and integrating lean into the operational playbook to achieve lasting transformation. We also cover practical strategies for implementing lean in government and creating a culture of continuous improvement that can sustain itself over time.
Listen to the podcast on this page, or watch the entire interview at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc6VM13Gs4k
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Transcript
Brion Hurley: Hi, everyone. We’ve got Andrew Rowe here. Andrew, would you like to explain your background getting into business and then learning about lean and process improvement methods.
Andrew Rowe: You bet.
There’s a lot to unpack there, Brian. Thanks for having me today. I appreciate the opportunity to share with people. So quickly, I am a retired business executive and I’ve had a 40 plus year career as an entrepreneur, investor, and business builder went through several. Different phases of that journey and throughout my professional career building cultures of continuous improvement and engaging and empowering frontline employees was very much a part of how I learned to lead and manage.
Brion Hurley: And that goes way back to my early days and some of the mentors that I had and some of the cultures that I participated in. It also relates to the industries that I was in and how Lean management total quality management, six segment, other methods for continuous improvement were coming online and being used not only by our customers, but by the companies that I was involved in building and leading.
Brion Hurley: you go to college after high school?
Andrew Rowe: Yeah, I have a degree in international economics and Latin American studies. The first phase of my career was in international business.
In addition to having that business economic and political science background, I worked around engineers, doctors, and other people. With professional technical credentials all my life. And I was always attracted to working with people in the engineering and science disciplines.
that background set me up well for adopting and learning from some of the best in the industry. For the first 15 years of my career, I lived and worked in Europe, Asia and Latin America.
I’ve traveled to over a hundred countries and I actually was in the early phases setting up and running overseas operations for American companies. And that’s how I got into general management and ultimately cleared the pathway for investing in my own businesses and and going from there. But all along through that journey, I was working in smaller to medium sized companies that were building technical products and services for large multinational corporations across a spectrum of different industries from automotive to semiconductor to computers appliance, food processing, et cetera.
So I was involved in highly technical disciplines providing systems, processes, and services into large companies where they were very focused on quality and improvement. I got schooled through that as we learned the language of the customer as to how we needed to build our business in order to align with their needs.
And we worked with some of those large corporations, many of the largest corporations. You would all know those were the customers and they were very focused on lean Six Sigma total quality management, ISO 9, 000. And there are other types of standards and best practices for framing up and managing quality.
Brion Hurley: Do any of those customers stand out to you that were. Pushing it the most or driving it the most because I know that, there are some really good companies that have it built in that are culture for decades.
Andrew Rowe: I was in the robotics industry for over 10 years and had the opportunity to set up.
And build operations in Japan, selling into large Japanese companies. And one of the ones that stands out of course was Toyota and the whole Toyota lean management playbook that ultimately evolved into standards that have been adopted by many companies around the world that decided to mimic Toyota, another company that is not around anymore in its current form, but used to be a multinational manufacturing giant.
was Motorola Corporation which had plants all over the world and which we provided robotic assembly systems to back when they were still a company and growing and dominating in the segments that they were in. They also were big focuses, they had a huge focus on Six Sigma.
Brion Hurley: Yeah. I think that’s about the time they both were really ramping up and people were learning about their success.
And what are they doing? What’s happening over there? And then those companies have to start getting into their supply chains and vendors to really get to the next level of improvements. So you start reaching out and training and driving. Their partners.
Andrew Rowe: That’s very true.
And since we were a vendor of automated manufacturing technology in highly precision applications, small parts, assembly, and material handling we were part of that total quality system of management of building quality in at the source and making sure that there was good design for manufacturing.
Moving all of that into our own thinking to work with our engineering and systems integration partners to deploy systems that worked and produce the highest levels of quality and precision. So it was very much part and parcel of the language of the customer that we spoke and which we needed to adopt to be qualified as a manufacturing robotics partner to these large corporations.
Brion Hurley: Did you have to go through some formal training, or is this just working with them, looking at their requirements, documents, quality system requirements, trying to learn it as you go? How do you feel like you were able to really get a handle on some of these methods and techniques?
Andrew Rowe: All of the above.
Went through training classes, got some certifications and then, of course spent a lot of time working. With our field operations teams that were working with the customers and learning and adopting those methods within our own company. So it was all went hand in hand, but when you work in a highly disciplined area, such as industrial assembly robotics, you can imagine that there’s just a huge amount of.
Discipline that goes into how you’re managing the business, how you’re managing processes in order to scale up your company and provide high quality products and services to the world’s most demanding customers.
Brion Hurley: And then you started to move into more of a leadership role what was that journey like from individual contributor to leading teams and maybe even running a business.
Andrew Rowe: Yeah, I had leadership roles through college. I moved overseas and immediately was thrust into leadership roles in my early 20s and never looked back.
Almost without fail, I was always in leadership roles and punching above my weight in terms of my actual experience. I had some great mentors and opportunities to learn by doing. And got a lot of on the job training as a leader and manager, and I worked with some really talented ones who I was able to learn from and model their behavior and methods.
My journey into leadership was very short lived to the extent that I was almost always a leader and a manager of teams of processes, etc.
Brion Hurley: So when you started off and you were learning as you go and getting mentored and how you think about leadership today was there a big difference or did it align nicely to what you were doing naturally or was there a shift that had to happen at some point when you realize, okay I’m leading and not the way that I would lead today knowing these Key approaches like the respect for people part and not telling people what to do, like those are counterintuitive to a lot of maybe traditional leadership models or the way people are taught or coached.
And how did that differ, from what you would recommend today?
Andrew Rowe: I was fortunate that even though we worked for large companies that sometimes treated their vendors adversarially within the companies that I was involved in, I was lucky enough to work with in cultures that were very healthy, where leading with humility and respecting the individual and engaging and empowering the community.
front line employees and and building a culture of continuous improvement I was lucky enough to fall into within the companies that I was involved in in helping to grow and lead. But certainly I saw a lot of examples of how not to lead from some of the customers that we dealt with who Would take a more adversarial approach with their own employees as well as with their vendors.
And ultimately part of my journey was to figure out, okay, how can we pick customers where we’re not just a vendor, but really a partner and can collaborate together to create a win situation. That sort of training and evolution for me personally was important. Along.
The way, I made a lot of mistakes, just like everybody does in their leadership journey. And I learned how people want to be treated. I also learned to temper my ego and not want to be right, but to make sure as a team, we got it right. And listening and learning is always the best option as it relates to how we lead and how we manage.
And for those people who are on that journey, it requires a lot of grit and sometimes eating humble pie, but I believe that ultimately I was very lucky to have environments in which I was able to overcome some of those difficulties and grow. And ultimately, that’s what it’s all about.
Our individual journeys as professionals is all about, how do we grow? How do we evolve? How do we become the best version of ourselves over time?
Brion Hurley: And so as you move up and even start to run companies, and now you’re developing the leaders, what are some of those things that you feel were made more difficult for others to change or move into in terms of their leadership style?
Maybe you mentioned the being humble not saying I got all the answers and I’m going to tell people what to do and they work for me, that type of attitude. What are some of the things that you came across a lot that was challenging or difficult for people to think differently in this positive and process improvement way?
Andrew Rowe: Yeah. Do it my way. doesn’t work. The word boss doesn’t work. A good leader and a good manager is somebody who facilitates the empowerment of others and the collaboration of a team to, get to the best outcome where everybody feels like they’re part of the solution. And of course, we’ve all run across managers who are more autocratic.
They bring too much ego to the table. They may be. Impatient with people. They don’t meet people where they are in terms of understanding what drives and motivates them. So I think we’ve all seen those kinds of folks. And ultimately, those kinds of methods just don’t work in a continuous improvement environment.
And so for those who are called to lead in continuous improvement it’s all about leading with humility that is part of the culture and enablers for continuous improvement and lean management and respecting each individual creating a safe environment in which people can point out errors, obstacles, waste, et cetera, and not feel like they’re going to be potentially reprimanded for it, but actually being celebrated for identifying improvement opportunities and given the tools to be a part of those solutions as opposed to just handing it off to a manager and then the manager has to deal with it.
So those are some of the things that I’ve learned from seeing the negative side along the way.
Brion Hurley: But what brought you to Portland? And you’re living here and you’ve been here. Decades now,
Andrew Rowe: moved to Portland in 1995 from Silicon Valley, where the robotics company I was involved in was on the verge of going public.
I had spent 10 years living in Silicon Valley and Europe with a company. We moved here in 1995 in order to acquire A large ship repair operation on Swan Island in Portland, Oregon. It’s one of the largest ship repair operations in North America built around the Alaska super tanker and cruise ship fleet with large dry docks, 96 acres.
Very complex ship repair and fabrication and barge billing operations. I moved here with a college buddy. We bought the company when it was on the verge of bankruptcy and engaged in a massive turnaround effort starting in 1995.
Brion Hurley: And what do you think was like the lean principles that you use to help with that turnaround?
Because that’s I think that’s unfortunately, a lot of times that’s when businesses are open to a new way of doing things is when things are really bad. How did you leverage that to really turn things around or what was the plan that you had going into it.
Andrew Rowe: First of all, the framework through which I was thinking at the time was strategy process and people. Okay. And not necessarily in that order because we came into a situation with lots of employees who’d been inside the company for decades, and some of them were multi generational shipyard workers.
There was a lot of history and a lot of institutional knowledge already in the employees. Winning the hearts and minds of the people really caused us to put people first and lead them to a better outcome. They were pretty frustrated at the time with how things were going.
They were worried about losing their job. To your point, Brian people were pretty open to change because they saw that the operation needed a turnaround and needed to be fixed. So we focused on building a strategy working with the people to bring them along and understanding exactly how we wanted to change the company.
And then over time worked on reorganizing the business and really taking a process improvement approach to everything that we did from estimating and project management through to resource planning through to upgrading the IT systems through to overhauling the safety program which was in really bad shape.
And other elements of project management and estimating that would bring us out of the dark ages and organize the company. That was a deep dive into process improvement across a complex operation with as many as 2000 employees, 13 unions, and lots of craft disciplines from electricians to carpenters to painters to steel workers, pipe fitters, et cetera.
So it was all very much driven at the end by working with them to improve processes. And to do that, we actually set up a advanced shipyard university training program where we put over 200 frontline supervisors through a series of training modules in order to bring them along in understanding how the business needed to run everything from financials to how to lead how to manage, how to work on focus on hard on process, soft, easy on people kind of philosophy.
And through that, we built stakeholdership across a large company that allowed us to move in the same direction.
Brion Hurley: And so that must’ve given you a lot of confidence was this your first time running a company. Or you’re in charge
or co ownership.
Andrew Rowe: I had been a shareholder and executive team member in the robotics company for 10 years plus, and had been involved in running a large chunk of the company, but I was not the owner I was one of the.
Top shareholders amongst the employees and executive team, but I was not the owner of the ownership situation I got into was with one other partner in the shipyard operation. What I learned, was it doesn’t matter who the owner is the question is, how can we create stakeholdership across all of our employee base so that everybody.
It acts like an owner, thinks like an owner, and takes ownership for the part of the business that they’re responsible for whether it be one discrete function or a department or a division, et cetera.
Yeah. And that takes time to build that culture so that they feel that they’re trusted, that their opinions are valued and they get the ownership to make those decisions and not be scrutinized and nitpicked.
They’re not really allowed to make those choices without oversight. Yeah, it takes time to build that. I’m
sure it’s true. And in a large complex operation like that, where the owners have no background in this kind of industry, the starting premises, hey you folks know how this.
Is supposed to work. We want to rely on your knowledge and skill and ability to orchestrate the change we want to make together, as opposed to, leading from the top down. There was a lot that we did to build that culture and create that safe place for people to, to speak out and identify operative improvement opportunities, but ultimately a lot of the work because of the level of complexity of the business required delegating and trusting and building respect for people who had the expertise.
And then of course, allowing them to fail or. Try things and experiment so that they could ultimately figure it out and not create a punitive environment in which people were reprimanded for not getting it right the first time. A lot of experimentation.
Brion Hurley: And that’s takes the special ownership leadership to be able to allow that knowing that it’s not going to go well all the time and they’re going to make mistakes and. Things that don’t work out, but knowing that long term that’s going to pay off in many ways. Yeah, I think that’s a really important part of that.
And I think it’s almost to your advantage that you didn’t have the background in that industry and you had to rely on. The people that were there with experience
Andrew Rowe: yeah, for sure. It’s all about building trust and respect and ultimately you can say that you want to do that.
But if you’re not doing it as a leader, if you’re not walking, the talk and not demonstrating through how you interact with people that you do trust them and respect their knowledge and wisdom and experience, then. Those are just empty platitudes, and those don’t work. People key in on what leaders are doing, not just what they’re saying.
It’s really important for any of us who are on the leadership journey, particularly in lean management or continuous improvement, to make sure that we are always leading by example.
Brion Hurley: And then how did you transition to all med?
Andrew Rowe: After being involved in the shipyard for several years and ultimately the exit from the company, I got involved in a small national healthcare services company based here in Portland called Almond Healthcare Management. That company was approximately eight employees when I joined it.
I was asked to come in to lead the architecting and design of a growth strategy for the company, which I did and ultimately the company grew to be a national leader in health care services and a niche area of health care services serving large national and regional hospital groups, hospital chains, as well as many major.
Managed care organizations and health insurance companies. The transition I made into that was an entrepreneurial opportunity to come into another industry that I knew nothing about and work with my partner at the time who was the owner and medical director of the company and the employees to architect the growth strategy and build out the business over time.
It was the next step in my entrepreneurial journey I ended up being one of the co owners of the company, not the sole owner, but that when the company was sold 18 to 20 months ago, I had a 50 percent share in the company and was the CEO for many years and ended up exiting as the chairman of the board.
Brion Hurley: So lots of great success going into different industries and bringing a similar approach. I’m sure there’s. Different approaches you took, but those kind of fundamentals seem to be helpful and applicable. I think that’s the ultimate question does this stuff work? Do these methods work?
I think you’ve got some good examples there that things worked really well applying that and trying to drive that leadership approach, but also the technical approach with maybe some of the tools or methods or ways in which to improve processes.
Andrew Rowe: I had come from technology in Silicon Valley.
We applied technology in the ship repair yard to modernize everything from estimating and project management software to accounting systems and materials management and human resource management, but when I got to this small healthcare services company, everything was being done by fax and courier with our customers and physician advisors,
so there was an opportunity to take it out of the status quo and move it onto the internet. We applied technology to build a. Digital workflow application and portal that would allow us to connect with our customers and vendors, to build an online digital community for high speed clinical decision making at scale.
And ultimately at the end, we were applying AI tools to that when the company was sold and the company has gone on to continue to implement AI. It was all about automating and streamlining processes for different constituents to get involved in pushing cases through a clinical decision making pipeline.
And all of that was collapsed into software over time. Or a big portion of it where we had constituent doctors, nurses, case editors, case managers and other quality assurance people working in a digital workflow with doctors and nurses and case managers on the customer side in either a hospital setting or in an insurance setting.
But that’s just to explain a little bit more of the details around it. So this was a services environment. In which process improvement, lean management would work perfectly in order to optimize workflows ensure quality at the source and scale up the business by automating a lot of the functions and software and elevating the skill sets of our constituent.
Employees in the workflows in order to allow them to work at the top of their skill set, if you will, as opposed to doing routine and mundane repetitive tasks that were really non value added. That’s a long way of answering your question. Yes. Lean works beautifully in clinical services or any software associated digital workflow just as well as in manufacturing automation or heavy industry.
These principles of process improvement of continuous quality improvement are easily applied in every industry. And there’s great opportunities to apply those if you’ve come from one industry to another. Anybody who’s got the lean mindset and a continuous improvement tool set and cultural enablers deeply entrenched.
Could easily move from one industry to another and still have relevancy because of how ubiquitous and important those tools and frameworks are for being successful in just about any job.
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Brion Hurley: I think that’s a good transition to, looking at government agencies social problems, which I think has been a lot of your most recent work.
What made you feel that there was opportunity to bring that exact kind of skill set and approach into these other endeavors? Last couple of years.
Andrew Rowe: Yeah. So to that just backing up really quickly. I’ll say that at 43 years into my business career, I decided it was time to pivot and really focus on community service leadership and other interests related to philanthropy and advocacy for change.
At the time Portland was going through. A lot of challenges as a community with homelessness. We had some real upheaval here as many people who follow Portland know a lot of problems with homelessness, addiction, mental health and other things causing consternation amongst the population here.
So I decided. That it was time for me to set aside my business career and focus on public policy, change management, advocacy, and really lobbying are elected and agency officials to bring continuous quality improvement to their operations. What I discovered as I went deeper into this over the last four years, my initial focus was on homelessness but even in the homelessness area, it’s a set of interlocking problems related to poverty trauma mental health, addiction, public safety, there’s so many things, so many systems that interact. Or don’t work well together that have caused homelessness.
This is a microcosm of fragmented and disjointed systems that don’t work well together to be able to create successful outcomes for those people who are most in need. So I decided to dive into that and got involved in. Local political advocacy through a number of coalitions and then I realized that a lot of the people who were involved in this kind of work, leaders and government officials were being held captive by the way systems did not perform.
And so they were beating their head against the wall, trying to figure out, okay, how can we produce more output with the tax dollars that we have? In particular here in Portland, we’ve been very blessed. The voters have approved some very generous tax measures to fund the fixing of our housing crisis and our homelessness crisis and whatnot, but a lot of the systems that have been in place to handle those problems were not capable of responding to those additional tax dollars with faster output.
So I decided to focus on advocating around continuous quality improvement implementation as a fundamental overarching strategy for change here in the Portland metro area with city, county, and regional government, and I’ve been working on that for the last couple of years now.
Brion Hurley: Yeah, I think I had heard you on another podcast and I think you were explaining what is lean to someone who doesn’t understand that.
What are these methods? This is something different or new. It’s not well established, like in other industries so for someone in a government agency or a nonprofit and they’re hearing about this how do you explain it in a way that.
Makes sense or doesn’t come off as scary or something completely different than what they’re already doing.
Andrew Rowe: The starting point is to make sure that people understand that when you’re pointing out the need for change and improvement, there not be language that.
puts people on the defensive by making it sound like they’re the cause of the problem. It’s really easy to blast government and say government doesn’t work. A lot of people have very cynical attitudes about government and by association government workers. But through my own journey and getting to know people who are leading and working in government, they have their hearts and minds in the right places.
And making sure not to weaponize the use of any language that would blame people for why things aren’t working is really important. That’s one thing that comes to mind. The second thing is that even though the majority of people have not done continuous improvement themselves or been trained in it.
Many of them have heard of it and they want it but they don’t have the skills or the tools or the training necessarily. Actually, probably they can develop the skills and the tools through training and coaching to get there. In my encounters with many elected officials, they said, Oh yeah.
I’ve never been involved in it directly. It is a little bit intimidating. How would I go about doing this? say the most important thing on my journey has been never assuming that people, just because they don’t know something don’t want to know about something.
As I’ve seen people get interested in it, I’ve pointed them in the direction of tools and materials that they could easily access if they want to go on a learning journey on their own. In the presentations that I’ve made to them and briefings I’ve made to them, I’ve tried to be very practical by identifying some of the streamlining and integration opportunities.
That we all see in our city and county use those examples and then show them how tools could be used to reorganize a particular work stream, a value stream using Kaizen and value stream mapping and training frontline employees on eliminating the types of waste and doing visual management and all those tools.
And then also helping them to see what the cultural enablers are for bringing people together to do that kind of work and creating an environment in which you can tap into the skills of all employees and not just managed from the top down. And I’ve found a lot of receptiveness and through this journey we’ve been able to uncover many cities, counties, state, and federal jurisdictions across the United States in government that have applied continuous improvement, to their operations which serve as good examples and proof points for those in government that, this stuff is not just for private sector.
It’s for government as well. And it works very well there if it’s applied in the right way.
Brion Hurley: Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s way more than I realized, just researching over the years and finding that whether it’s a long journey or a short journey there is some evidence of lean or six sigma or process improvement in a lot of cities, counties, and different states in the U S and internationally as well, as that there’s a lot of work going on and in different countries as well.
And so the, in terms of homelessness, this is a multiple angle, very challenging problem because it goes across so many different departments causes and solutions. What are some of the things you feel can be done to tackle this massive issue?
When it’s complicated, it’s not like we just got to fix this one process and it’s all
Andrew Rowe: better.
Personal experience. As the CEO of my company in the healthcare industry, I’ve been applying these things for many years, but not in such a formal way. In 2016, I took our whole company through a lean journey, a lean transformation.
Andrew Rowe: What I learned through that was that if the leader and a group of leaders is not fully engaged in learning and going on the same journey as employees, then it’s not gonna work. This is not something you can delegate.
So one of the things that I’ve been advising government officials is if you really want to do this and you really want to take this on, you need to own it yourself and you need to go on this journey of learning and discovery with your employees. A good example of that would be, here in Multnomah County in Portland, Oregon, we have a large homeless services agency that contracts with a myriad of nonprofits and runs a whole bunch of processes related to budgeting, contracting rolling out programs measuring and managing data related to outcomes and all those kinds of business functions.
And my advocacy has been let’s not focus on one, we can certainly focus on some low hanging fruit projects, but what we really need to do is we need to create a process improvement, continuous improvement system within this organization so that all of our employees will learn how to use and apply these tools better.
To the individual functions that they’re performing and the different processes that are being run by this agency, which, is responsible for 300 million a year right now of investment into homeless services. That spans everything from standing up housing shelters to getting people into.
wraparound services so that they can get the supports they need, mental health, addiction, life skills, job training, etc. So there’s a lot of different processes that organization needs to run. In my advocacy work, I’ve shown them, here’s some of the low hanging fruit processes that you could improve using these tools.
But ultimately, the way you get to The real big win to system transformation is by adopting and integrating lean management into your operational playbook and making it fundamental to the way the organization learns, grows, teaches, specifies job descriptions, roles and responsibilities, manages, measures and monitors performance, etc.
So that’s where the big win is, of course, where you can make it. A ubiquitous part of an integrated operational playbook for the organization. And then, of course, what you’re really doing is you’re rebuilding the organization from the inside out by engaging and empowering frontline employees to understand how to apply the tools, methods and cultural enablers.
It’s possible for them to help transform every single one of the different processes that are being run by the organization and ultimately get to system transformation so that the stakeholders, i. e. homeless people, as well as the high net worth voters who are paying the taxes, are all feeling like there’s good value for money and that the system is working, or the systems are working.
Did that answer your question? Yeah,
Brion Hurley: absolutely. You touched on something important, it’s one thing to do an event and improve a process, but when you’re trying to really transform the whole organization for ongoing and long term results, it’s, it requires a whole change and building it into that playbook or DNA of the organization, because it’s those little decisions that happen all the time that also are impacted.
And if we’re thinking about. The input from employees and the staff and the respect for people. And is this a good long term decision for us or just short term lowers the budget, but we pay more next year. Then those little decisions add up and make it harder to implement. Real change. So it’s a long journey to do that, but it’s going to be the most effective five, 10 years down the line.
Sometimes that can be hard to sell people on the long term plan that this is going to feel like a lot of work here, but it will pay off in the future.
Andrew Rowe: Yeah, I would say that the most important experience I had was we actually developed our own lean management training curriculum in house and we got people certified in lean.
I think it was with ASQ that we did a certification program but we put over 50 employees. through lean training. And so we actually developed our own internal training program. And then we deployed the tools not as a thing that you just did every once in a while, but the continuous improvement tools were deployed as a part of everybody’s day to day job functions.
There’s working in the business and there’s working on the business. We made it everybody’s business to work on the business. And so we had daily stand ups. We’re working on PDCA and doing projects, in teams those of us leading these processes, we’re doing walkarounds participating in daily huddles and watching some of the kata with employees to try to.
Fix, identify waste and reduce waste and improve a process. And so it became part and parcel of the job functions of every employee to work on the business using these tools. There was no escaping it. When it’s just delegated or a Kaizen event everybody goes away and things go back to normal.
It doesn’t work when you actually deploy these tools broadly within your organization and make them part of the management system and operational playbook. That’s where the real magic can happen. Transformation. Comes a lot faster than one would believe if, in fact, people really are given those tools and empowered to use them and then held accountable and given the support by management to do that, that takes managers who own, this stuff themselves and are leading with humility and willing to be on that learning journey with their employees.
Brion Hurley: Yeah, that’s a big challenge people finding the time to work on the business cause it’s always too much stuff , to work on in the business. And so I think your point of if the leaders aren’t involved, they’re going to always feel like they want to see the business results, and on the business stuff , we can push it out.
We can push it out and it just never happens. I struggle helping people when they’re. never given the time or feel like they have the time to work on the process improvement. It’s always today’s fire and last second decision and changes and reaction. So is that the key really the leadership’s role to make sure it’s okay to work on the business and expect that?
Andrew Rowe: Absolutely. And where I would go with this is that lean and process continuous improvement is a human resource strategy at the end of the day. When you think about human resource systems, job descriptions, metrics and targets, performance standards. Reviews, all that kind of stuff.
That’s where it’s, in order to really institutionalize this of course, we all know about standard work, . If the standard work for a job includes, daily huddles, weekly cadas always having a process improvement project and carving out time for it every single day or whatever.
Twice a week then it becomes a part of the expectation. Leadership is going to provide that support with time to make sure that work is being done. In lean, there’s the old adage, you got to go slow to go fast. Taking people offline from their operational functions to work on the business so that the business will run better.
I can’t afford the time, but I can’t afford not to take the time to invest in, fixing this process or making it better. That takes a collective mindset over time that becomes part of the culture in an organization where leaders are leading by example and really.
Enabling that and giving people safe space and time to perform those duties because of how important it is to the business.
For those people who are on this journey as lean practitioners, I think there’s always things that we can learn from each other.
I am still learning even from my vantage point, which is I’m now retired and doing advocacy work and I don’t make a living off of doing this. This is purely to help. Our systems work better as a taxpayer. But I think there’s it’s a lifelong journey for each of us. And there’s lots of ways in which we can continue to learn and grow in this field one of the biggest obstacles that I see in any organization is discontinuity of mission and purpose in relationship to lean management.
I see a lot of organizations that start this process, make great strides and then management or leadership changes. The priority and focus changes and sustaining lean and sustaining continuous improvement is a real challenge to many organizations and certainly in the government sector. I’ve seen many examples of where government did a lot of work to really make itself better, but then the leaders changed and the hiring criteria for the new leaders did not include having.
Commitment, or the skill set, or the training, and this kind of thing. One of the things that I would say for leadership is in order to really institutionalize a culture of continuous improvement, it has to be fully baked into job descriptions, hiring criteria, expectations, et cetera, so that it can sustain itself over time.
Brion Hurley: Yeah, absolutely. I think that especially when there is turnover and election cycles that can change direction. If it’s aligned, then it’s hard to say that doesn’t belong anymore because they’ve already done the work to embed it.
And like you said, into the daily activities, weekly activities. Maybe the new administration doesn’t necessarily get into those details and they’re not going to go in and say, stop doing daily huddles. They’ll just say, Oh, that works and you guys like it. Okay, keep doing it.
We might change how we’re going to approach something, but hopefully the outcomes they’re wanting are still the same.
Andrew Rowe: It’s true. If I was a leader going into an organization, I would start by Observing and learning. What are the systems that are working? How are they working?
To the extent that I was not trained on and or schooled on lean management or continuous improvement, I would get trained and invest time and effort to come up to speed so I could lead in the context of what’s already working for the organization. There’s a great opportunity for government officials To come into this work, even if they don’t have the experience, they can train themselves quickly and be the leader the organization needs to continue forward with what’s working.
I just want to offer encouragement to all of those who are listening to this, stay true To where your heart is and where your mind is around moving forward with your learning and helping the organizations to be the best version of themselves. That’s my parting thought.
Brion Hurley: That’s awesome. Appreciate and commend you for that work. These are challenging issues in our societies but the skill set is very valuable the whole point of this podcast is it’s happening. It’s already happening. It does work. We just got to help people get that in there.
The mix of volunteers and people seeking out this knowledge practicing learning from each other and sharing that knowledge. Is The only way it can really happen. Thank you for your work so far and continued work. How could people reach you or connect with you if they wanted to stay in touch had some ideas or maybe have an inroad in their community that they’d like some.
Help on.
Andrew Rowe: They could reach me at a row at purposeful dash ventures. com. You can put that up on your chat or in your pod.
Brion Hurley: Awesome. Thank you so much. Do you have LinkedIn?
Andrew Rowe: Is that another way people could connect with you? Yeah, my LinkedIn profile as well is up and running and if anybody wants to connect with me, of course, I’m happy to help. Thank you very much for this opportunity, Brian.
I appreciate your interest in having this conversation today.
Brion Hurley: Appreciate it. Thank you for all your work. And hopefully we’ll get some more people doing some of the great work you’re doing. Thank you.
Andrew Rowe: Congratulations for all the work you’re doing in order to move this movement forward,
Let’s stay in touch, Brian.
Brion Hurley: Okay.
Thank you for your time.
