In the last couple of years, we’ve talked a lot about the Lean Six Sigma program. Recently you did a session at the Raving NEXT: Indian Gaming Strategic Operations & Leadership Conference where you talked about the importance of leadership and Lean together.
Why is it important that leadership goes hand in hand with Lean?
Jeff Gray: A lot of times we think that leadership as one thing and Lean Six Sigma as another. Leadership is supposed to guide the ship, tell us where we’re going, and Lean is supposed to follow along and do what they’re asking them to do. They are two things that need to come together like a Venn diagram.
There are certain skills that everybody needs to execute strategic projects throughout the enterprise. The leadership component needs to be an understanding that everybody has the basic skills to execute successful projects. If you have somebody who has never led a team before and you throw them in there with five people and you say, “here’s the project, now lead the team,” well they’re not set up for success. They have to have some components, some of the primary, secondary, tertiary level of skills to execute that leadership role as they’re executing a project with a team that they’ve never even worked with. You have to take those two things that are needed at those levels, the leadership piece, and the Lean component all the way through as you’re executing a project through the enterprise. You have to put them together as one instead of one program or the other.
