Dr. Liker is a nationally recognized authority on lean manufacturing methods and Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan. I asked him, “It’s amazing how intuitive a good coach can be in what you’re doing. I relate it a lot to sports, like you were talking about the golf head early, I mean that’s…”
Jeff: Right. It takes a certain type of person to be able to bring themselves back and relate to the beginner, and remember, here is what I had to learn five years ago. There are some people who just can’t do that. They can do it, and they don’t understand, or get frustrated when others can’t understand what they understand. That’s another kind of an important issue, is that teaching is different than doing. Very often, we just assume. For example, somebody is a Black Belt, and they do enough projects they become Master Black Belt. Now presumably they can teach. That’s not a good assumption.
You need to learn how to teach. That’s a whole separate process of learning how to teach others. The teaching, one thing that happens with teaching very commonly is we overwhelm the student.
We’ve got to break it down and say, “Right now here is what I want you to do. Here’s an exercise that I want you to do. For the next week, this is what you should do.”
Then next week he’ll look at what the student has done and then he’ll decide if the student is ready to move to another step. And based on what the student does, when he sees a weakness that will determine what he asks the student to do next. That’s the teaching process.
We don’t do that in many situations. I think good sports coaches or good sports teachers do it naturally. I think in most workplaces, whether it is a restaurant or whether it is a hotel or a manufacturing company very few people really have ever learned how to teach.
Very few people were taught themselves how to do the jobs they do in a systematic way. They can’t teach anybody else because they never really learned in the right way.
So if you go back to the book, the other book we did David Meyer and me, “Toyota Talent” that the whole book really is about how you teach. It focuses on the job instructions training methods, which was taught to Toyota by Americans that include instructional designers. And really, they’re teaching Toyota, here is how you teach.
Taiichi Ohno was smart enough and wise enough to realize that that was missing from the Toyota Production System. They had sales and one piece flow, and he had this concept of people being cross-trained and he had a concept to standardized work.
He could kind of figure out the standardized work, but he was missing the method of training people in following the standardized work. Standardized work was not at the level of detail that you could effectively train people.
Then over time as a learning organization has learned. They introduced more recently something that they call fundamental skills training. They went back, and they looked at jobs in each area, stamping, and painting, and assembly and even things like troubleshooting equipment as a maintenance person.
They said, “How can we break this down to the most fundamental skills that the beginner needs to learn, before they can even get started doing the job, before we’re even going to send them to the assembly line?” And that’s offline training.
I remember talking to a golfer who was watching me swing, and I just happened to be at the driving range. This guy had been trained by Sam Sneed. He just gave me a tip, he just gave me one tip and he said that when he was being trained by Sam Sneed, Sam Sneed would not allow him to go to a golf course for three months.
For three months he was just at the driving range, and he was working on very, very basic swings, and body motions and things like that. There was some period of time when Sam Sneed wouldn’t even let him even handle the ball.
So that’s sort of like this fundamental skills training which was in advance of them going to the workplace. When you go to the workplace and actually do a real job then, you use the Job Instruction Training Method. The Job Instruction Training Method breaks down the task into small steps, and then you repeatedly do those steps over and over again.
With each step there are key points that are the right way to hold the tool, the sound that you should hear when the nut is locked in place. Its various key points and you have to be able to hear those and understand them, repeat back to the instructor what the key point is. You master that step and practice it. Then you move to the next step, and then you move to the next step.
So in that book we then talk about how would you train a nurse to do rounds? How would you train a nurse to resuscitate a patient? If you follow that method, how would you train an engineer? How would you train a Lean coach? What are the skills required by a Lean coach? The definition of the coach is that you’re coaching and teaching, not that you’re going in and doing a project yourself.
So at first a Lean coach has to learn and become an expert and master of the methods themselves. Then they have to learn how to teach. I don’t know how long that takes, but it takes a lot longer than a two week Lean certification program.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Tips on Coaching Lean
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