Process strategy coaching starts in the executive suite and cascades throughout the entire organization.  This coaching approach focuses the organization on creating value for the customer at every single step from the supply chain through the delivery chain.

There are as many tools for process improvement, including Six Sigma, Toyota Production System, Total Quality Management (TQM), Theory of Constraint and lean manufacturing, as there are levels of implementation, commitment, and range of results.

Coaching using the lean concepts takes your process improvement to the next level to achieve a higher success rate than the 15% that is often reported when organizations implement lean on their own.  Simply put, coaching has a powerful potential to improve your lean success, and thereby improve your bottom line by helping you and your team identify the appropriate changes, maintain effective changes and continue the process over time.

As a researcher, professor, and Lean expert with 30 years of real-world success, Process Strategist and Coach Dr. Verna Fitzsimmons brings a unique combination of expertise and understanding to Kinetic Insights.  Her mission, like any Kinetic Insights coach, is to guide you in assessing your current processes and help you engage your team in a customer-focused journey to succeed in Lean process improvement and to exceed in the marketplace.

More information about lean coaching and Verna Fitzsimmons is available online.  We also welcome you to contact us and we’ll be happy to talk to you about just what you can expect from lean coaching.

A: The question above of course needs a little context to make sense, so let me give it to you in an abbreviated version:

My business is in the middle of a big, new project. It is very exciting and as part of the process, we put out a Request For Proposal (RFP). I had no shortage of businesses that wanted the work, received a lot of inquiries, and some great proposals.

Once we culled through the proposals, it was time for interviews. Some were in person, but this being the era of virtual work, others were over the phone as we spoke with firms in states far away who might offer what needed.

It was during one of those phone interviews where I received the question above. I had spoken with the VP development at this company a few times, was fairly impressed, so we set up a call with him, his team, his boss the owner, and me and my team.

I felt bad for these guys (sort of) as it was one of those cases where Mr. Murphy and his law came into play:

•They internally scheduled the wrong time for the call (we are on one coast, they were on the other coast)

•Once the call started, 15 minutes late, two of the folks on their end couldn’t find the website we had asked them to review with us on the call

•The boss was not on the call at the start and they scrambled to find him.

Finally, 10 minutes into a call that was already starting 15 minutes late, the boss jumped on the line. He didn’t really know the purpose of the call, or who I was, or what we were doing, and so asked “So just what is it you do again?”

This, after we had spent at least an hour over the previous month going over things with his VP and it was his VP who wanted him on the call.

Unbelievable.

Needless to say, without seeming too rude, we cut the interview short not long after that. If they weren’t ready for a callback interview, what sort of job would they likely do if they even did get the gig? Not a good one, that’s what.

All of which is to say that this incident reminded me of the need for professionalism and preparation in business.

The truth is, we are also living in a time of short attention spans, hyper activity, and, I think, quicker judgments. If you don’t impress a potential new client or customer right off the bat, they are very likely not going to give you much bandwidth, let alone a second chance.

Being professional takes all sorts of forms today:

•It means having a great website. I would suggest that these days, people will check out our website before they check you out in person. If they don’t like what they see, you may never know that they were even interested in your services in the first place.

•It means looking good online in other ways: They may also check out your LinkedIn profile or Facebook page. What will they find when they locate yours?

•Are there online complaints or compliments about your business in the blogosphere, or on Yelp, etc?

•Do you respond to emails promptly, professionally?

And of course this does not even include all of the traditional ways that people make judgments – what does your shop look like? With whom else do you work with? Are there typos in your communications? Does your receptionist make a good first impression? Does your sales team follow up? Do you know who it is you are talking to on the conference call?

Being professional seems like a given, but the fact is, it is not. There is more completion than ever out there now and no shortage of other companies willing to go the extra mile and do their best. If you are not, you are in trouble.

Today’s tip: “A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.” — Most often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi.
By Steve Strauss, for USA TODAY

Women are the backbone of our society.  We are both bread winners and bread bakers.  Managing the delicate balance of work and life, while focusing on growing your career to the next level seems like an insurmountable task.   We often experience burnout.

Stress turns into burnout when we suffer a loss of physical and emotional resources too great to replace. Typical burnout triggers include overwhelming workload, lack of support or reward at work and at home, interpersonal conflict, loss of control, and a sense that nothing you do makes a difference, With women it also, invariably, includes guilt.

This interactive session will engage you in a learning journey to prevent burnout.  You will walk away with valuable tools that will aide you in increasing your productivity while aligning to your personal values.  Strategic exercises will help you to build a practical plan to put first things firstand create laser focus on getting the right things done. You will learn how to let go of the need to be perfect at everything.  As Lao Tzu said, “He who is brave in daring will be killed. He who is brave in not daring will survive.” Opting out of esteem-based workaholism is the real home of the brave. Research shows it also improves productivity, which gets hammered by burnout.   Strategies to manage a career focused on growth while eliminating the ‘noise’ and distraction of the ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’ will lead to higher performance.  Learn stress management techniques targeted to help you function at a higher level.   The session will be segmented into the following:

Understand what life balance looks like for YOU

Understand what consumes your time and identify your personal energy leaks.

Determine your personal values

Become crystal clear on what is important to you in both work and life.  Begin the process of a personal values statement that will guide your decision making.

Set priorities based on what you value

Setting your top three priorities based on your values becomes a framework for focusing on the right things in both work and life.

Learn how to say no and how to let go of the guilt associated with saying it.  By following a clear set of priorities you can learn how to say no to time wasters and things that aren’t adding value to your work or your life.

Get more done in less time

Build attention and focus and learn to control information overload.  We are inundated with all forms of electronic stimulus.  Learn what that does to your brain and determine your own personal coping strategies on how to get out of information overload and to ‘Get Things Done’ more effectively.

Reframe stress so it doesn’t bite

A combination of real-time techniques and work-life balance strategies will help you to manage stress before it turns to burnout.  Create simple strategies that can be used in the work place that will allow you to manage stress in the moment.

1. Work harder and play better. Successful people know that nothing worthwhile comes easy. Hard work is important, but it is equally important to have fun. Go to any successful start-up company, and you’ll see employees blowing off steam on ping-pong tables, throwing darts, browsing books on a shelf, or playing trash-can basketball. Frolicking at work isn’t frivolous. Dispensed in small doses, it’s a powerful success medicine. Don’t be a workaholic; be a “workafrolic” instead.

2. Cultivate curiosity. Successful people are not just curious about their chosen field, they are curious about EVERYTHING. They continually think, explore new ideas, ask dozens of questions, and always try to figure out how things work and how they could be made to work better. Curiosity is the most powerful business-improvement and personal-success engine.

3. Expand your endurance. Push yourself mentally & physically. You can find more successful people in a gym than in a movie theater. Successful people know how to generate & maintain positive energy 24/7. They strive to be physically fit, and at the same time they work on their psychological fitness. 3 suggestions: 1)  Push past the negative self-talk that says, “I am not good enough, I am not smart enough, and I don’t think I am going to make it.” 2)  Push beyond your fears. Fear is an acronym for “false evidence appearing real.” Embrace the fear, and it will loosen its grip on you. 3) Push past your self-limitations. Think big. Life is too short to waste on small stuff.

4. Turn failure into fertilizer.Thomas Edison failed thousands of times before he found a filament that would glow in a vacuum tube, which lead to his invention of the lightbulb. Winston Churchill said, “Success is not final, and failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.” 

5. Focus. Successful people begin each day with written goals they want to achieve. They know that the onslaught of incoming emails, calls, and texts will distract them, but each time they get sidetracked, they go back to working on the next item on their list.  Invest your complete mental focus on two or three tasks per hour and create steady forward momentum.

6. Innovate and Implement. Successful people know that having innovative ideas is not enough. What counts is how many new ideas you can implement successfully. What holds people back is not the difficulty of implementing their ideas, but what people say when they start sharing their ideas with others.  Oracle founder, Larry Ellison said it best: “When you innovate, you’ve got to be prepared for everyone telling you that you’re nuts.” 

7. Manage disappointment. Successful people realize that reaching success often depends on how they manage the inevitable disappointments that can impact their lives. When people get disappointed, they often withdraw, and their anger turns inward. Successful people transform disappointment into a journey of self-discovery, where they reconnect with their inner strengths. Disappointment well managed will become the cradle of ambition.  

8. Improvise.  One key ingredient that authors of success books consistently ignore is the art of improvisation. Charles Darwin identified improvisation as most critical, saying, “In the long history of humankind, those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” George Gershwin echoed this idea by writing, “Life is a lot like jazz…it’s best when you improvise.”

 9. Dream.Successful people don’t ask for more resources to turn their dreams into reality. They are more resourceful about closing the gap between dreaming and doing. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe believed that dreams played a vital part in reaching success: “Dream no small dreams, for they have no power to move the hearts of men.”

10. Define success. Successful people know that how you define success will define your success potential. There are three basic ways to define success: Some people define success through a material scoreboard. It can be the size of their house, the size of their boat, the size of their bank account. Other people define success with a tuning fork. As they communicate with the world, they experience a special feeling. They may say, “I am successful when I feel happy.” A third group defines success as a continuous cycle of setting and reaching progressively more challenging goals. It doesn’t matter which definition of success you subscribe to, what matters is that you are aware of the fact that your success definition is your “guiding fiction.” 

To your Success in 2011!

Often women are cruel to each other when they see another woman accomplish a very difficult task such as getting a promotion.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
~  George Bernard Shaw

This is because the promoted woman has inadvertently broken the “power dead even rule”.  According to the book “In the Company of Women”, there is a phenomenon with women that demands balance in relationships, power and self-esteem.  If a woman is promoted over other women in her circle, she violates this rule and is punished with indirect forms of aggression such as gossip, sniping, snubbing and withholding friendship.

Breaking the power dead even rule can also create the “queen bee” effect.  This is where the woman who was promoted has to put on self-protective armor to be as tough as the men that are around her. As a result, she changes her behavior toward everyone including the women who considered her their friend. They perceive that she is trying to prove that she is not “one of the girls”.

Be aware that this rule exists. Can you identify times that you or someone around you has broken “the power dead even rule”? Simply being aware of this rule is the first step in learning to manage this situation more effectively.

Create strategies to balance the power. Scan the women in your circle and understand their power and self-esteem needs.  If you see that you have a higher level of power and self-esteem than your peers, step up and do the work to reset the power level in the relationship:

1. Do not flaunt your power in the eyes of the other woman.  Allow her to see for herself the fact that you received the promotion honestly, with time she will reset her perception of power in the situation.
2. Increase her self-esteem.  Show her that you believe in her work and help her to see how her contributions are highly valued in the organization.
3. Increase her power. Give her a special assignment that provides her with the ability to demonstrate her skills in a highly visible way in the organization.

Understanding the power dead even rule is critical in communicating and developing powerful alliances with other women.  Managing the situation in advance can often avert situations that lead to damaged interaction.

“Here are my principles, and if you don’t like them…well, I have others.”
~  Groucho Marx

Values are the deepest beliefs and sentiments that you personally subscribe to. They influence how you want to live your life and they are key indicators in establishing your priorities

1.  In order to establish priorities you need to be really clear on your values. There are numerous value assessments online.  The most valuable process that we have found is a tool that takes you to the point of having one primary value.  Contact us and we would be happy to send you this free tool to help you establish your values.

2.  Spend time with your values and a journal. Think about the 3 things that are most important in your life and that without those 3 things your life would be significantly different. Those 3 things become the basis of your 3 life priorities.

3.  Write down your priorities and keep them in a place where you can refer to them often. They become the basis for decision making.  When you can see that the areas where you are spending you time does not line up with your priorities, it becomes much easier to decide to stop doing meaningless activity and to focus on the important things.

“You cannot be anything if you want to be everything.”
~  Solomon Schechter

As our culture grows more frenzied with people trying to do it all, have it all, and be it all, so much activity leaves us exhausted and drained.

One key reason that we get to the point of exhaustion is because we are trying to do everything, yet we are not focused on anything.  As a result we may accomplish many things, but not actually produce the results around the things that we truly value. This happens when our energy and time are spent on what is simply most urgent and not on what is the most important.

To avoid this exhaustion and achieve focus, we need to establish a clear set of life priorities based on our values followed with a set of annual priorities. Life priorities don’t change very often, although as we mature and change we may need to reassess our priorities to ensure they still reflect our core.

“Look and you will find it – what is unsought will go undetected.”
~  Sophocles

If you have spent time developing your strengths, you know the power this brings to your Leadership Core. However, there are also times when we need to adjust our process or approach to be more focused in the strength’s productive outcomes.

Ask yourself these 3 questions about each of your strengths to find out if you are using them as a strength or a weakness:

• Are you using your strength toward meeting a purposeful goal?
• Do you feel good when you are using your strength?
• Do others feel good when you are using your strength?

If you answered no to any of these questions, take a few moments to rethink how you use your strength and adjust so you can say yes.

“I am passionate about helping people” just isn’t specific enough.   How do I go the next step?

Stay tuned for our next article which will talk about the Passion Component of the OPTO Leadership Core Model.

“Don’t complain about what you don’t have.  Use what you’ve got.  To do less than your best is a sin.”
~  Oprah Winfrey

The Gallup Organization conducted 2 million interviews around excellence. From this wealth of knowledge they extracted the 34 most prevalent themes of human talent, defined by them as “special natural abilities or aptitudes”. These patterns of human talent are created by connections in our brains known as synapses that develop before and shortly after we are born. So when we are born, our talents are already waiting for us to develop them into strengths.

Marcus Buckingham, author, and Donald Clifton, Chair of the Gallup International Research and Education Center, say that to excel in your chosen field you need to find lasting satisfaction by understanding your unique patterns. You need to become an expert in finding, describing, applying, practicing and refining your talent themes into true strengths. To help us define our talents, they developed a tool, StrengthFinders, that allows us to articulate our top 5 talent themes.

Strengths are not to be confused with behaviors. Our strengths are things like our ingrained thought process in solving a problem, our strategy for communicating with others, or our approach to how we see our day. Understanding our talent themes helps us to develop these talents more fully into true strengths.  Our strengths can then become something we do near perfectly every time. When applied to our life situations, strengths allow us to be more productive and excel in our journey.

*from Jeffery Gitomer’s website