The real reason why we should train our people…. is perhaps not what you think! It certainly is different from what a lot of organisations do. In this article we explore the thinking of C.R.Dooley, the Director of the Training within Industry (TWI) Service during WWII. His guidance, though 75 years old, provides powerful pointers for leaders seeking a competitive edge in 21st century organisations…
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Most lean initiatives involve a lot of talk about the need for standardised work. Without standardisation improvements won’t stick and processes and results remain variable. Basic stability is the foundation for rapid improvement: without it, advanced Lean and Six Sigma tools are likely to disappoint. So how do we get to basic stability?
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Dynamic capability, consistently improving faster than our competitors, creates competitive advantage. In times of great uncertainty and change, such as the Covid crisis, the ability to develop & deploy changes fast, could be even more critical.
Improving people skills - the ability to work with and get results through others - is central to developing dynamic capability. How can TWI Job Relations help with this?
Read MoreTWI Job Methods was created to accelerate improvement in times of crisis. All hands on deck - but also people’s hearts and minds!
When front-line teams develop improvement skills, and supervisors and improvement experts become effective improvement coaches, we unleash creativity and dramatically accelerate process improvement.
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Exceptional operating results are driven by great skills - the ability to do something well. Online learning appears very appealing. But before making the switch, let's carefully consider what may get lost in automation. Employees need not just knowledge. Five lessons on training design learnt by the creators of TWI Job Instruction point the way for designing high-impact training.
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Great supervisors get great results. Supervisors with weak leadership skills don’t. Senior managers must take charge of the leadership skills of their supervisors. Leaders that focus on growing their supervisors see their business grow faster. Training within Industry develops five competencies of highly effective supervisors.
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Leaders can accelerate the speed and impact of excellence initiatives by actively managing people transitions required to make our process improvements stick. Failure to get the balance of people & process right is one of the major reasons why over two thirds of Lean programs fail in their initial implementation. To ido better, operations and OpEx leaders must learn how to rebalance the see-saw of process and people changes.
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Great supervisors get great results. Supervisors with weak leadership skills don’t. When that happens managers are forced to intervene frequently and get distracted from doing their jobs. This is stressful and hurts operations progress, innovation and company performance. The way out of this harmful pattern is for senior managers to take charge of the leadership skills and management habit development of their first-line leaders. The TWI (Training within Industry) skill-set is a great starting point for this.
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High Performance Supervisors know how to build and keep the trust and collaboration of their people. They make the TWI JR Foundations for Good Relations part of their daily work. They catch and solve people problems early, using the TWI-JR 4 Step Problem solving method. In short, they make people a key priority of their daily work. This creates happier and more productive employees and implementing changes becomes much easier and faster.
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Many organisations struggle with standardisation. Resources are poured into documentation updates, but there are few real changes in how work gets done on the shop-floor. There is a lot of effort, but little in the way of tangible payback. Standardisation is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s hard to keep yourself and others motivated to maintain the pace without showing results. To a better ‘bang out of the standardisation buck’ leaders should rethink how they communicate and structure their teams’ standardisation efforts.
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