The Role of an Operational Excellence Director or Lean Director

This breakdown helps in understanding the Director of Lean's role and the crucial skills and steps for effective leadership in implementing OpEx/Lean.

Director of Lean Role:

• Leadership Engagement: Emphasize the importance of leadership's active involvement in Lean principles.
• Coaching Approach: Rather than doing Lean work for the team, the Director of Lean enables and coaches the leadership team.
  • Coaches the leadership team, establishing strategy deployment efforts, understanding available resources, and ensuring a clear understanding of how the company delivers value to customers.
• Building a Lean Culture: Focus on shaping beliefs, actions, and habits to infuse Lean principles into the organizational culture.

Typical Responsibilities:

• Sets the vision and priorities for departmental goals, partnering with leadership for long-term planning.
• Acts in an advisory role, overseeing master program schedules, and developing annual reports.
• Recruits and onboards resources, leads quality and compliance programs, and manages budgets.
• Focuses on streamlining communication, supporting professional growth, and coaching direct reports.
• Implements improvement efforts for the organization, aiming for flow efficiency and maximum customer value.
• Aims to create flow efficiency across departments rather than optimizing them in silos.

Key Steps for Effective OpEx Leadership

• Comprehensive Training: Provide in-depth training to understand Lean principles thoroughly.  For this, they need to be fully trained and experienced themselves first.  And they don't have to train everyone, but instead establish the systems that enable training and development.
• Ongoing Coaching: Offer continuous guidance and support as teams experiment with Lean methodologies.
• Cultural Building: Act as a culture builder, influencing beliefs, actions, and habits in alignment with Lean principles.  (Respect for People and Resources, Process Efficiency, Total Employee Engagement, Focus on Quality).

Recommendations for a Director of Operational Excellence:

• Encourage studying resources like "This is Lean" by Niklas Modig and recommends specific business-oriented authors (Jim Collins, Gino Wickman, Patrick Lencioni, Dan Sullivan).
• Urge understanding the business, its systems, and operations to create flow efficiency.
• Highlight the importance of grasping the product, customer value, and building connections with people within the organization.
• Ensure they have the entire body of knowledge, skills and experience to coach a transformation.  For this, a skills assessment would be valuable to evaluate their strengths and opportunities, so that they can work on developing those skill gaps (it takes a long time to learn it all).   Here is the most comprehensive yet simple OpEx Skills Assessment to perform this activity.   It's free and takes 20 minutes.  Click here to access it:  https://www.beltcourse.com/coach-assessment-1 

Sources:  (best YouTube videos on the Operational Excellence Director Role or Lean Director Role).  

Learn some career advice career advice from an OpEx Director.