The role and responsibilities of a Lean Coordinator are various. We call them Lean Coordinators out of a principle which says “avoid everything what can indicate that daily business and continuous improvement are to separate actions”. Everyone in the organization should be a Lean Manager (long term vision) and the lean coordinator should be…coordinating the construction of the CI framework.

Related to the Lean Coordinator there is a long list of expectations and good-to-have’s as a skill set. The skillset you need depends on how you want to perform and position your “CI implementation”. For example if you build a “Lean Team”, which one of our locations was intending to do before our roll-out, you need to equip them with certain power to push forward when it comes to the people who are supposed to be working on the tasks. They need to have the competency to see and identify legitimate fields of improvement and need to have the organizational empowerment to advise activities. Well, that’s most often connected with various problems. Namely what if the team consists of people who are not from the industry? What about their project management competencies if they have to perform the projects themselves? They will need a long time to understand the processes (even longer if they are not technical experts in lean in order to use the tools to identify those fields, e.g.: bottleneck management) and on the other hand, they will even need much longer time to proof themselves to experts which have “built up” the company 😊 since long years. We are not yet talking about the conflicts when deciding about what to attack first, as the target alignment between the stakeholders are mostly not well performed and understood.

So a Lean Coordinator needs to be everything from a leadership perspective and a “nothing” from a coach perspective – what a dilemma. We have learned that our Lean Coordinators must be highly socially competent in the first line, before even being a Lean Coordinator. Out there, there are millions of people who can apply perfectly any Lean Tool in a workshop, which is ok. But if you are part of the organization and have to be driving the CI framework, firstly you need an extrovert character and must have high social competencies with understanding how to lead by influence.

Coming to our situation we are having some difficulties after certain stages of the program. We have given a direction for building up the fundaments of our tailor made CI framework and are centrally leading it. You may remember that we didn’t initially have any CI structure, any roles & functions, neither any definition nor any attempt to create it in the company. That structure had to be created first with a central coordination together with our various locations. Moreover, our NorthStar contains of having a self-sustaining and self-developing mechanism which makes a big central team or even local CI teams unnecessary, 1 Lean Coordinator together with some so called ambassadors should be enough, that’s the hypothesis.

Before drifting away, what is it concretely that is needed to make the mechanism running and the wheels turning, better said what is it not? What needs to be done in order to avoid that the program runs into a state which is numb, full of intuitive (structureless) workshops drowning in boredom and a parallel, top-down driven mechanism to the still existing system which is still done behind the curtains? I have seen many times that organizations have found some ways to “live in peace” with the Lean Team or Lean Manager and that the Lean Manager has adapted to the organizations culture where actually he/she should be driving the change in the organization to adopt to a CI culture. This is an omnipresent risk floating over any organization like a dark cloud and waiting for the smallest possibility to disrupt, because the sweetness of falling into this trap is too high and has always a strong camouflage. For me, if something is working too easily during those transformations, normally something is wrong, which is the best sign for it.

We have a problem which is significant. We have a weak sense of proactivity from some of our Lean Coordinators for taking action in order to deliver business value. Maybe it’s a long way to learn what a Lean Coordinator should be (coach, trainer, mentor, project manager, initiator, “impulse giver”, etc.) but we are learning rapidly what he/she should NOT be. She/He shouldn’t be sitting in his room and expecting anyone to tell him what to do. If your organization doesn’t have the mindset yet, the people will never have problems, will never be able to identify waste, will never be able to solve problems in a systematic way, etc.

A Lean Coordinator has to be proactively asking many questions, permanently coaching, connecting cross functional information and building up a big picture. She/He has to be vigilant, aware, argumentative as well as having an cross-functional understanding and overview, without necessarily being an expert on any functional area. She/He has to be brave to talk to senior management, discuss and argue with them, point out reasonings. Pushing people out of the comfort zone is not to be seen as a risk, only then you find yourself in the learning zone and if the Lean Coordinator is not doing it in a systematic and controlled way, fate or the market will for sure do it.

For all of this there are measures and tools which are helping but at the end it’s the attitude of the Lean Coordinator which makes the difference. She/He has to put the actions coming out from the common commitments into life locally.

Before being an expert in anything the Lean Coordinator has to avoid giving in to the sweetness of enjoying the comfort zone...